Analysis of proverbs expressing a negative view of woman in the Russian and Portuguese languages

Abstract

The present work focuses on the analysis of the image of Woman in Portuguese and Russian paroemias. As a phenomenon of folk culture, paroemias express the ideals and values of a certain social group or individual consciousness. In addition, they are often instructive or evaluative. For this reason, they are used as directives, pieces of advice or warnings to the listener. In other words, paroemias and above all proverbs are a powerful means of projecting the national world view on the individual consciousness. The motive for this study stems from the authors' view that the comparative analysis of paroemias in two languages, historically isolated from each other, may reveal aspects of the image of Woman reflected by each linguistic culture, and to show similarities and differences in the language tools used for this purpose. For this propose, the authors analyzed Russian and Portuguese sources, including dictionaries and compilations of proverbs and sayings with reference to the related works in Russian and Portuguese. In order to carry out this work, a corpus was compiled of more than 1000 paroemias referring directly to women in the Russian and Portuguese languages (including European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese). From this corpus of paroemias, the authors selected those that reflect a negative assessment, resulting in 238 samples in Portuguese and 225 in Russian. Although most of these expressions are old-fashioned and no longer used in everyday speech, this does not mean that the echoes of such an attitude towards women have faded away in the national consciousness. Without a doubt, these stereotypes are part of history and world view, and are therefore worth noting. Moreover, in order to assess the extent to which negative interpretation of Woman persists in the contemporary traditional proverb culture, the authors used additional sources of information and analyzed some idioms and idiomatic expressions which function in modern colloquial speech and constitute part of the worldwide cultural linguistic fund. The comparative analysis reveals that the image of Woman in paroemias in the two linguistic cultures has many features in common. In both cultures Woman is represented as being of inferior gender compared to Man, and is considered as his possession.