Most native speakers from childhood are familiar with proverbs and sayings - short and accurate statements that sometimes allow you to beautifully and vividly express or confirm your idea. There are entire collections of such folk wisdom, some of which remain by ear, while others are gradually becoming a thing of the past.
A proverb is a short and capacious saying that appeared in everyday speech and was fixed in the language as a stable expression. These works of small forms of folk oral art go through centuries. Sometimes they are edifying, and sometimes they are ironic and playful. Saying without instructive meaning, Vladimir Dal called the classics of the study of folk art “jokes, ” that is, a kind of side genre. A classic work on proverbs and sayings by Vladimir Dahl was published in 1862. The researcher partially relied on previously existing written collections (Knyazhevich, Yankov, etc.), most of the idioms were written by him personally in conversations with rural residents - the main carriers of the culture of oral folk art. The entire diversity of the heritage of the folk art of the people can be divided into several semantic categories (expressions related to specific areas of action, for example, agriculture). Vladimir Dal in his detailed classification identified 189 such categories. Some proverbs are statements in prose, others have signs of a poetic text (rhyme and size). In general, the construction of folk aphorisms is distinguished by a strong squeezing of meaning into an exact metaphor. The closest form of oral folk art is a saying. The difference between these genres is that the proverb is a complete thought, and the saying is a phrase that can become part of a sentence. For example: “You can’t take a fish out of a pond without labor” - this is a proverb, and “rake the heat with other hands” is a saying (the statement will be completed if the speaker adds “He loves
."). Spoken words (like other idioms) are very difficult to translate. Moreover, in the linguistic heritage of different peoples quite similar stable phrases are often found. When translating a text, it is customary not to literally translate proverbs, but to select an analog from another language. Persistent expressions that do not have analogues in other language environments are often a subtle expression of the national mentality and cultural identity of the people.
