Genres & Forms
Proverb
A proverb is a short, complete, rhythmically organized saying of folk wisdom with a didactic content, possessing both literal and figurative meaning and grammatical completeness (a sentence): 'All that glitters is not gold,' 'God gives to the one who rises early.' Unlike a saying (prykazka), a proverb expresses a finished judgment-thought. Proverbs are characterized by imagery, parallelism, antithesis, rhyme, and concision. It is the most ancient aphoristic genre, concentrating the ethical and practical experience of a people. The fullest collection of Ukrainian paremiography is Matvii Nomys's 'Ukrainian Sayings, Proverbs and the Like' (1864) and Ivan Franko's 'Galician-Ruthenian Folk Sayings' (1901–1910). Proverbs were actively used by Hryhorii Skovoroda, Taras Shevchenko, and Panas Myrny.
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Meaning, origins and distinction — side by side.
Distinction
Two paremias differing in grammatical completeness. The proverb is a COMPLETE sentence-judgment with didactic content, expressing a finished thought and having a literal and a figurative plane ("God gives to the one who rises early"). The saying is an INCOMPLETE figurative expression, only part of a sentence, aptly characterising a phenomenon without direct instruction ("like snow on the head," "neither fish nor fowl"). The proverb instructs and generalises; the saying only names figuratively.
