Old Testament as a Source of German and Croatian Proverbs

Abstract

Structural and semantic characteristics of a great number of Croatoserbian and German proverbs show that their origin is in the Old Testament which, therefore, might be considered as an anthology of the proverbial thought of the two languages. The aim of this article is to show some equivalent proverbs in the above-mentioned languages and their Biblical source (Vulgate). Among other things, the analysis shows that the words of the Old Testament are changed in 70% of proverbial expressions while in 30% of proverbs the Old Testament wording is identical with proverbs. Considering that, we can come to the conclusion that religious language differs in many aspects from the proverbial way of expression. Differences arc evident in the structure of the sentence and in the choice of the lexis. Statistics also shows that both languages are in the same relation to Biblical text and they also have a high percentage of identical proverbs (43,3%). which probably confirms their linguistic and cultural contact.