Comparative Analysis of Amharic and Afaan Oromoo Proverbs: A meta-communication perspective

Abstract

： Proverbs are timeless human wisdom in the form of concise figurative speech. They reflect the conceptual experience of the speakers, particularly the elders in speech communities. This study aims at presenting a comparative study between Amharic and Afaan Oromoo proverbs from the standpoint of meta-communication perspective. Meta-communication is conceptualized as communicating about communication. Communication is believed to have many things in common with culture in that it shapes and dictates the communication behavior of a given society. In verbal communication, the use of proverbs is quite often, explicitly to comment on communication behavior. Despite the multifaceted functions of proverbs in several disciplines, the focuses of this study are proverbs as sources of communication that are relevant in linguistics and anthropology. In so doing, sample proverbs have been purposively selected based on semantic criteria and analyzed by using psycho-analysis method. In the analysis of the proverbs, we built a cognitive model for their semantic relationships. This is because the proverbs have relatively stable, conventionalized and contextual meaning of form as continuum, residing in their common conceptual base. Above of all, they are metaphor-dependent as a common on conceptual base. Hence, there are a number of proverbs in Amharic and Afaan Oromoo as well that comment on importance of communication, communication behavior or processes, among others. In both ethno-linguistic groups, thus, employing such proverbs to comment on communication is quite common which tend to show the communication behavior of each group.