Death Omens in the Superstitions of the English, Russian, and Mari Languages (original) (raw)
Related papers
Adjectives in the Superstitions of the English, Russian, and Mari Languages
2019
Superstitions always played a very important role in the life of folks determining their behaviour, foreseeing future events, warning about something that can happen or prohibiting some actions which may bring damages and misfortunes. The article considers folk superstitions connected with the rites of passage in the English, Russian, and Mari languages. These rites include pregnancy and birth of a child, wedding, and funerals. All the rites of passage are studied from the point of view of three time periods. Authors analysed the superstitions, found adjectives, and grouped them according to their meaning. The analysis has revealed seven groups of adjectives: 1) adjectives naming colours, 2) adjectives describing appearance of people and things, 3) adjectives naming time, age, and distance, 4) adjectives naming condition, quality or features, 5) adjectives giving assessment, 6) adjectives naming material and origin, 7) adjectives talking about fate. The results of the studies had so...
Syntactical Analysis of the English and Russian Superstitions
Proceedings of INTCESS 2022- 9th International Conference on Education & Education of Social Sciences, 2022
Superstitions present a special group of paroemiae which is widespread in any language and any culture. They accumulate the experience of generations and present it in the original form. The article analyses superstitions of the English and Russian languages from the syntactical point of view. The authors consider folk superstitions connected with the rites of passage, such as pregnancy, birth, wedding, and death. The authors present two types of analysis: structural analysis and functional analysis. Structural analysis describes different types of sentences according to their structure and connections of words within a sentence. The authors distinguish clauses of conditions and consequence, etc. Functional analysis describes different types of sentences according to their functions. Authors distinguish prognostic superstitions, intention superstitions, taboo superstitions, and apotropaic superstitions. All of them have different structure depending on the function they perform. It is interesting to note that functional analysis is common for all three languages under study. Sentences have similar structure and may be presented as loan translation. At the same time, structural analysis underlines the difference between the languages in general and between sentence building of different languages in particular. In the research to select the material for the purpose of study the authors used a continuous sampling method, registration and processing of the data received, observation, analysis of each group of superstitions, a comparative analysis of the superstitions, statistical method. All these methods allow making a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the units under study. The presented examples prove the theoretical statements.
2017
The article is the first of two which considers the expression of the frame “pregnancy and birth” in the superstitions of the English, Russian, and Mari languages. Pregnancy is one of the most important periods in the life of every family and especially in the life of a woman. It is one of the rites of passage which gives a woman a new status of a mother and secures her status as a wife. The birth of a child is another rite of passage – the first for everybody in this life – when an immaterial soul becomes a real person. These two events are inextricably linked as the mother is connected with her child. That is why a lot of superstitions are related both to mothers and children. Authors distributed all the superstitions of three languages among three top-level groups: preliminary, ‘liminary’, and postliminary. The preliminary level includes the slots: 1) predictions ( predictions about being or not being pregnant, pieces of advice how to become or not become pregnant, as well as gue...
Issues and Trends in Interdisciplinary Behavior and Social Science, 2018
The article is the first of two which considers the expression of the frame "pregnancy and birth" in the superstitions of the English, Russian, and Mari languages. Pregnancy is one of the most important periods in the life of every family and especially in the life of a woman. It is one of the rites of passage which gives a woman a new status of a mother and secures her status as a wife. The birth of a child is another rite of passagethe first for everybody in this lifewhen an immaterial soul becomes a real person. These two events are inextricably linked as the mother is connected with her child. That is why a lot of superstitions are related both to mothers and children. Authors distributed all the superstitions of three languages among three top-level groups: preliminary, 'liminary', and postliminary. The preliminary level includes the slots: 1) predictions (predictions about being or not being pregnant, pieces of advice how to become or not become pregnant, as well as guesses about the gender of children); 2) prohibitions (what the pregnant woman shall do and must not do, and different ways how to protect her from evil spirits). The 'liminary' level gives the advice of what shall or shall not be done during the process of giving the birth to make it easy and successful. All this is presented in folk superstitions which reflect world view of peoples under study.
Russian And Chinese Superstitions: The Dialog Of Two Linguistic Cultures
European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences, 2021
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Comparative Analysis of the Concept of Death in Turkish and Japanese Proverbs
European Scientific Journal, ESJ , 2024
Death constitutes the last part of the life cycle. Although both being born and living are welcomed with joy by human beings, death brings pain and eternal unhappiness. This paper focuses on revealing how the concept of death, which contains deep sadness, is handled in Turkish and Japanese proverbs. Proverbs are stereotypes passed from one generation to another and are very important in reflecting the lifestyles and ways of thinking of the societies to which they belong. Proverbs are essential in transferring cultural knowledge because our ancestors created them with the accumulation and experience of many years. In this study, comparative analysis method is employed. Total of 127 proverbs, including 80 Turkish proverbs and 47 Japanese proverbs, are examined. They are grouped into death has causes, death as an unknown end, death has time to occur, grief for death, death is not welcomed, death occurs one time, death as a bad situation, understanding the value of things and people after death, death and animal, after death there is no meaning, comparing the wrong things with death, death relates to funerals and religious rituals, death is a relief and escape, and contradicting proverbs. As a conclusion, although Turkish and Japanese people have different cultural backgrounds, it is seen in proverbs that they have similar cultural values to death. All categories as mentioned above have similarities except the grief for death seen in Turkish proverbs but not in Japanese. The religious rituals that relate to death differ as both (Turks and Japanese) have different religions. Although there are expressions about Islam in Turkish proverbs, expressions about Buddhism are seen in Japanese proverbs
Household Items in the Folk Ritual Superstitions of the English, Russian, and Mari Languages
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Education Science and Social Development (ESSD 2019), 2019
The purpose of the article is to compare folk ritual superstitions of the English, Russian, and Mari languages containing the names of the household goods. All superstitions were chosen using a continuous sampling method. The analysis was prepared using methods of comparison and statistics. All superstitions were divided into four big groups depending on the included lexical unit. Group one is 'House, parts of the house'. Group two is 'Kitchen appliances'. Group three is 'Bed, bedroom accessories'. Group four is 'Household goods'. The analysis has shown that the biggest number of superstitions with the names of household items is in the Russian language, the biggest group is Group 4 'Household Goods', the most spread units are 'mirror' and 'broom', the universal units are 'window'
TURKS AND THE CONCEPT OF DEATH: AN ANALYTICAL SURVEY AMONG TURKISH PROVERBS
Journal of Ethnography and Folklore, 2016
It is possible to identify the viewpoints of a society using various aspects that are illustrated in its proverbs. Based on the proverbs commonly used in Turkey, this study is aimed at identifying, analyzing and somehow systematizing ideas on death in Turkish culture, and determining how they reflect customs, traditions, and rituals from past to present. With this in sight, information is presented about various perceptions of death in the Turkish culture and several expressions about death in the Turkish language. Some elements pertaining to the ancient, pre-Islamic religion of Kok Tengri, as well as to Islamic Sufism, Islamic doctrine as well as (perhaps) non-religious, folkish good sense, are identified. Turkish proverbs are listed and examined under thematic issues such as: what death is; what are the causes of death; who dies; who doesn't die; killing; ways to die; better and worse things than death; the deceased; the funeral culture.
Similarity in Superstitions in Anatolian and Chinese Cultures
This article aims at exploring similarity between Anatolian and Chinese prevalent superstitions, the reasons behind them and contributing to literature concerning superstitions. In this comparative study, marriage, birth, and death superstitions and their impacts on people’s life have been investigated individually in Anatolian and Chinese cultures. As a result, the study concluded that superstitions have been a tradition, which is transferred from one generation to another. In both Anatolia and China, superstitions are mostly towards expelling evil spirits, avoiding bad things, and bringing good luck. In China, the most widespread superstitions are related to homophonic numbers whereas in Anatolia, wearing an evil eye talisman against evil eye is the most popular one. However, visiting a fortuneteller is very common superstition in both cultures and the most similar superstitions appear on birth customs. Results indicated that many superstitions originated from Shamanism, which is pre Islamic Asian origin Turkic religion. It is assumed that innumerable Anatolian and Chinese superstitions come from same ancient Shamanism and have survived until nowadays.