General

(ST) “Still waters run deep.”

(TT) «Үндемегеннен үйдей пәле шығады»

(TT) «Тихие воды имеют глубокое течение», «В тихом омуте черти водятся»

(ST) “Look before you leap”

(TT) «Әлін білмеген әлек»

(TT) «Не зная броду, не лезь в воду»

(ST) “A good beginning makes good ending”

(TT) «Бітер істің басына, жақсы келер қасыңа»

(TT) «Хорошее начало полдела откачало»

(ST) “A friend in need is a friend indeed”

(TT) «Ерді кебенек ішінде таны»

(TT) «Друзья познаются в беде»

(ST) “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”

(TT) «Ортақ өгізден оңаша бұзау артық»

(TT) «Лучше синица в руках, чем журавль в небе»

(ST) “A blind man would be glad to see”

(TT) «Соқыр көруді аңсайды»

(TT) «Слепой был бы рад видеть»

(ST) “A fault confessed if half redressed”

(TT) «Мойындаған күнә жартылай ақталады»

(TT) «Признанная вина наполовину искуплена»

(ST) “A storm in a tea cup”

(TT) «Түймедейді түйедей қылады»

(TT) «Буря в стакане воды»

(ST) “As you make your bed, so must you lie on it”

(TT) «Төсекті қалай салсаң, солай ұйықтайсың»

(TT) «Как постелешь, так и поспишь»

(ST) “As you sow, you shall mow”

(TT) «Не ексең, соны орасың»

(TT) «Как посеешь, так и пожнешь”

(ST) “Be slow to promise and quickly to perform”

(TT) «Уәде беруге емес, орындауға асық»

(TT) «Будь не скор на обещание, а скор на исполнение»

Every culture has its own store of proverbs and sayings. Proverbs are the mirror of a nation’s soul, a guide to a nation’s customs and traditions, character and temperament, beliefs and opinions.

The Kazakh people have a great wealth of proverbs and often use them in everyday life. The Kazakhs are longtime masters in the art of conversation and the art of the Kazakhs has always been their speech.

Among Kazakhs no conversation takes place without a proverb being mentioned. Both young and old employ them to give advice, to express their opinion, to warn, to cement arguments, to caress and curse, to say universal truth. The Kazakhs consider them as an authoritative opinion, and it is surprising to see the influence that proverbs make on a Kazakh. As soon as a proverb is said all arguments cease, a misfortune becomes bearable and even death becomes acceptable and natural.

Although many of proverbs current in Kazakhstan are translations from Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Arabic and other language of the former Soviet Union, it is estimated that about eight thousand proverbs are purely Kazakh in origin and exclusively the property of Kazakhstan. The works of the poets Asan Khaigly, Dospambet Zhyrau, Kaztugan Zhyrau, Makhambet, Dulat, Abai and other great men of letters, like those of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, are full of steppe life; love of the nomads for their homeland; illustrate their philosophy of life; condemn such human vices as laziness, cowardice, greediness, hypocrisy; express general truths; relate to the weather, husbandry, and cattle-breeding.

The lexical stock of any spoken language includes a fair number of so-called complex clichés, i.e. set word-combinations which are reproduced in a form fixed once and for all. These include various idiomatic phrases, e.g. at one’s finger-tips, complex terms, e.g. atomic weight, all kinds of proverbs, proverbial phrases, winged words, quotations and folk aphorisms, newspaper and literary clichés and the like. Unfortunately, the relevant statistics are lacking as their proportion in the national language and in human language general.

Paremiologists have long been intrigued by the remarkable capacity and internal structural complexity of proverbs. Indeed, for all their outward simplicity, proverbs and proverbial phrases are far from simple. On the one hand, they are language phenomena similar to ordinary phraseological units; on the other hand, they are logical units (propositions and conclusions); moreover, they are artistic miniatures, reflecting living reality in a graphic and finely-etched form. This accounts for the fact that proverbial expressions have attracted the attention of the linguist, the folklorist and the logical philosopher alike.

The triple nature of the proverbs calls for a three-pronged approach, in which they are treated as phenomena of language, phenomena of thought and phenomena of folklore, the more so since the said three aspects of the proverbial expressions are to a large extent autonomous. It is failure to take account of this circumstance that has, in my view, crippled many a paremiological study and is largely responsible for the inadequacy of existing classifications of proverbs.

The English expression of proverbs and proverbial phrases is usually treated as a single term. Indeed, proverbs and proverbial phrases have much in common not only in English but in other languages as well. Special paremiological studies, however, try to distinguish these two concepts. For the most part, the term proverbs is used to refer to allegoric sayings expressing “an incomplete statement”, whereas proverbial phrases refers to allegoric sentences formulating “ a complete statement”.