Woman, girl and wife in Swedish and Russian comparative paremias

Abstract

The article deals with Swedish and Russian proverbs about girl, woman, and wife, which have a comparative structure. We propose a classification of the paremias of two languages from the structural perspective, identify categories and productive models of the proverbial languages, and show general and national-culturally determined attitudes verbalized by paremiological units. This leads us to conclude that proverbs with an explicit comparison, with the help of formal linguistic means, opposition and metaphors, prevail in both Swedish and Russian. Structural differences lie in the presence of a large-scale category of paremias expressing the position of the subjects of comparison with the common predicate in the Swedish language; in the Russian language there are units expressing comparison through negation. Most Swedish paremias characterize a woman as opposed to a man, and the wife is presented diffusely and is rarely formally separated from the general idea of a woman; Russian units separately single out the wife as the leading woman’s status in family life. A small number of paremias of both languages are dedicated to the unmarried girl. Both in Swedish and Russian proverbs the masculine view dominates, which is due to the time of origin of these linguistic units, in which a negative assessment of woman prevails. In both Swedish and Russian paremias, a woman is endowed with such qualities as talkativeness, quarrelsomeness, stupidity, and excessive emotionality. In the units of the two languages, an evil woman is marked. The differences lie in the attitude verbalized in the proverbs of the two languages, to the physical impact on a woman by a man, in a negative assessment of the beautiful appearance of the wife in Russian paremias, as well as in the thematic areas of the images used. If Swedish proverbs use images of natural phenomena, then Russian units use household realities. Swedish proverbs less categorically declare that women are less valuable than men, unlike Russian proverbs.