In this book the lead role is played by everyday speech. We show how proverbs can carry ethnonyms and contradictory oppositions, which are often believed to be very national. However, research on proverbs is infertile if not impossible without international comparison. We bring together linguistic terms and typologies to enrich contrastive paremiology. Slavonic, Germanic, Romance, Finno-Ugric and even Somali proverbs with their English parallels published in profoundly edited collections and databases are studied and classified from different points of view. The thematic boundaries of the paremiological minima of languages, provided by the authors’ sociolinguistic paremiological experiments, and the functioning of proverbs in the modern languages are important questions opened in this work.weiterlesen