Multicultural Dictionary of Proverbs

Entries are arranged under 1,300 headings (e.g., accidents, divided loyalty, marriage, prosperity, shame).

Aptly titled, this work consists solely of 20,128 proverbs and their variations from cultures around the world. Fascinated with "the striking similarity of proverbs from dissimilar cultures in different times and different places," Cordry (A Pronouncing Guide to American English, Austin & Winfield, 1996) presents an interesting intellectual exercise. His dictionary-style organization, thesaurus-type cross references, and keyword, subject, and source indexes facilitate use. Most citations provide language of origin, though some offer national or ethnic derivation. A good example of the current tide of multicultural works, this is recommended as a complement to traditional works of American and English proverbs, such as A Dictionary of American Proverbs (LJ 12/91).?Lisa Powell Williams, Moline Southeast Lib., Ill.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Proverbs are used by different cultures for different reasons: to express commonalities of experience, to elucidate, to spice up plain language. This dictionary adds to our reference collections another work that enables us to compare ways in which various nationalities and ethnic groups have expressed similar ideas through their proverbial expressions. It is a window on earnest, often humorous efforts to deal with the trials and tribulations of various cultural norms. As Cordry states in his preface, the striking similarity of some of the proverbs helps illustrate the universality of human experience.

More than 20,000 entries represent adages from more than 120 languages, nationalities, and ethnic groups. Most, according to the author, are attributed by language, and some by nationality or ethnic group. Many proverbs come down to us from long ago. There are many references to such classics as the works of Sophocles, Horace, Aeschylus; to such famous authors as Shakespeare and Cervantes; and to religious works, such as the Koran, the Talmud, the Bible, and the Bhagavad Gita. African languages, such as Wolof and Zulu, are included as well as Arabic, Lebanese, Osmanli, Tunisian, Yiddish, and many other languages and cultures; however, the preponderance of entries are from British and other European cultures--Danish, Dutch, German, Irish, Italian. The heading "Accumulation" serves up 14 English or Scotch proverbs, 3 American, 5 Latin, 2 Italian and 1 Danish, Lebanese, German, French, and Arabic, respectively. For space considerations, Cordry has avoided the use of more or less identical proverbs, so there is only one entry for "Haste maketh waste" (British). He notes his indebtedness to Burton Stevenson and Wolfgang Mieder, authors of other well-known collections of proverbs. His work complements Mieder's The Prentice Hall Encyclopedia of World Proverbs (Prentice-Hall, 1986) by including the classics and biblical references. Mieder's work includes a helpful list of topics and a wonderful introduction to the world of proverbs, but Cordry offers plentiful see and see also references with his topical headings.

Entries are numbered within the alphabetically arranged topics and may be accessed through keyword, subject, and source indexes. The source index does not list titles but only personal names, such as Seneca, Plautus, and Shakespeare. The keyword index provides access by word occurrences. The subject index lists topics and cross-references as well as numbered entries for concepts. An index of the nationalities, languages, and ethnic cultures included would have been a helpful addition. Cordry provides a bibliography that includes author and title only and is shorter than Mieder's, but it is useful in helping the reader understand the sources from which he chose the proverbs. It lists works ranging from 1530 A.D. to 1990 A.D., but most predated 1920. Proverbs are all in English translation with the exception of the Scottish, which are presented in dialect.

The term "multicultural" in the title of this work is technically correct but misleading, since the word has current "hot topic" connotations for today's researchers. Proverbs, by definition, are often old, which accounts for Cordry's heavy emphasis on the classics and earlier collections and scholarship, and he emphasizes that wherever a proverb could be traced from a language to an earlier source, he chose to include the earlier source, major authors excepted. Undergraduate, graduate, and all other libraries that can afford an additional work on proverbs will benefit from this collection, which augments, but does not replace, other works on the subject.