Dictons romans avec les douze mois : la caractérisation parémique et mensuelle de l'année

Abstract

There are various types of weather and calendar proverbs in the Romance languages. Not only concerning their motivation, but also concerning their length. Among the proverbs referring to the months, some are very short, just two or three words, the so-called 'minimal proverbs', while others are quite long, and curiously defy any kind of mnemonics. Our corpus will be made up of the latter type: thirteen proverbs mentioning all the twelve months of the year, which represent five different Romance varieties; from west to east: Portuguese (1 proverb), Spanish (2), Catalan (5), Italian (4) and the Laziale Italian variant (1). We classify these formulae, which lie on the thresholds of what strictly might be considered proverbs, in two groups: proverbs without meteorological implication and meteorological proverbs. On the other hand, we classify the examples of the second group in four sections according to the characteristics that are attributed to one or several months: proverbs with a characteristic for several months, proverbs with a characteristic for each pair of months, proverbs with a characteristic for some of the months, and sayings attributing a different feature for each month. This corpus offers a glimpse to the way Romance peoples view the months and it reveals affinities in the form of paremic types (or 'paremiotypes'), which tell us about the popular culture shared by the peoples that are heirs of Rome.