Most native speakers from childhood are familiar with proverbs and sayings - short and precise statements that sometimes allow you to beautifully and vividly express or confirm your idea. There are whole collections of such folk wisdoms, some of which remain in the hearing, while others are gradually fading into 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 creativity pass through the centuries. Sometimes they are instructive, and sometimes they are ironic and playful. The classic of the study of folk art, Vladimir Ivanovich Dal, called a statement without instructive meaning "jokes", that is, a kind of side genre. The classic work on the proverbs and sayings of Vladimir Dal was published in 1862. In part, the researcher relied on previously existing written collections (Knyazhevich, Yankov, etc.), most of the idioms were written down by him personally in conversations with villagers - the main carriers of the culture of oral folk art. All the diversity of the heritage of oral creativity of the people can be conditionally divided into several semantic categories (expressions associated with 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 meter). In general, the construction of folk aphorisms is distinguished by a strong conciseness of meaning into an exact metaphor. The closest form of oral folk art is a proverb. The difference between these genres is that a proverb is a complete thought, and a saying is a phrase that can become part of a sentence. For example: “You can't even take a fish out of a pond without difficulty” is a proverb, and “using someone else's hands to rake in the heat” is a proverb (the statement will be completed if the speaker adds “He loves …”). Proverbs (like other idioms) are very difficult for translation. At the same time, similar stable phrases are often found in the linguistic heritage of various peoples. When literally translating a text, it is customary not to literally translate proverbs, but to select an analogue from another language. Stable expressions that have no analogues in other linguistic environments are often a subtle expression of the national mentality and cultural identity of the people.
