Comparison of English, German and Czech Animal Idioms
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MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF EDUCATION Department of English Language and Literature COMPARISON OF ENGLISH, GERMAN AND CZECH ANIMAL IDIOMS Final Thesis Brno 2016 Supervisor: Written by: Mgr. Radek Vogel, Ph.D. Mgr. Jana Rožňáková 1 I would like to thank my supervisor Mgr. Radek Vogel Ph.D. for his kind attitude and guidance. 2 Prohlašuji, že jsem závěrečnou práci vypracovala samostatně, s využitím pouze citovaných literárních pramenů, dalších informací a zdrojů v souladu s Disciplinárním řádem pro studenty Pedagogické fakulty Masarykovy univerzity a se zákonem č. 121/2000 Sb., o právu autorském, o právech souvisejících s právem autorským a o změně některých zákonů (autorský zákon), ve znění pozdějších předpisů. …………………………….. V Brně dne Mgr. Jana Rožňáková 3 Contents 1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………….. 5 2. Theoretical part………………………………………………………………….. 7 2.1 English language and German language…………………………………....7 3. Study of idioms……………………………………………………………….. 11 3.1 Where idioms come from………………………………………….…........11 3.2 What are idioms……………………………………………………….….. 13 4. Classification of idioms…………………………………………………….… 13 4.1 Syntactic classification…………………………………………….……... 14 4.2 Degrees of fixity………………………………………………………….. 15 4.3 Degree of semantic transparency……………………………………….…16 5. Comparison of idioms………………………………………………………... 18 5.1 Analogous idioms…………………………………………………….…... 19 5.2 Slightly modified idioms ……………………………………………..….. 27 5.3 Functionally equivalent idioms……………………………………………32 5.4 Idioms without counterparts……………………………………………… 38 6. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..... 43 Bibliography………………………………………………………………......… 45 4 1. Introduction The aim of this work is to deal with idioms, especially with animal idioms, and to compare their structure and meaning in three different languages – in English, German and Czech. Idioms are a part of everyday communication in many languages in the whole word. We use them in our conversation, read them in books, newspapers and advertisements, we can hear them in many places, shortly, they are an essential part of our lives. For our perception of the outside world, the passive command of idioms is much more important than the active using of them. When speaking or writing, we can always make us understood using simple words and sentences without any idioms. However, according to Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English the accurate and appropriate use of English expressions which are in the broadest sense idiomatic is one distinguishing mark of a native command of the language and a reliable measure of the proficiency of foreign learners. … Shortly, idioms are not compulsory for our communication and understanding but they make our utterances more interesting and motivating. In fact, people’s acceptation and command of idioms differ. It may be said that the usage of particular idioms depends on people´s origin, age and education. E.g. the meaning of the idiom to have a Van Gogh´s ear for music that denotes a person who is tone deaf and sings out of tune, could be hardly understood by low educated people not only in less developed countries. On the other hand, those people undoubtedly use idioms unknown for average educated person. According to my experience, there is also a gap between the older and younger generation. Older average educated people, especially those who are interested in languages, have a higher command of idioms and proverbs, which originates in their reading and written communication. The young generation communicate very often using electronic devices. The symbiotic relationship between young people and the internet and mobile phones has brought a lot of speedy and short ways of communication. They include e.g. acronyms like 4ever, 4you, cya (see you again), cyal8r (see you all later) or TTYL (talk to you later). The above mentioned ”short words” share a common feature with idioms – they are opaque and their meaning can not be deduced from the meaning of their elements. Moreover, it has been often claimed that young people do not read very much and so, from the perspective of my theses, they miss an important source of idioms. 5 In my thesis I would like to show how amusing the idioms are and how close the connection between the English and the German language is in this area. I do not want to collect quotations from many dictionaries and scientific books but my aim is to introduce a collection of animal idioms, similes and proverbs in English, German and Czech, to analyze them. The range of idioms is quite wide and so I decided to choose idioms involving an animal in their structure to narrow the choice. Animal idioms seem to be quite illustrative. People and animals are in contact in different ways for ages and we can easily imagine their appearance, their typical features and basic characteristic and we are able to apply this knowledge to people’s appearance and behaviour and to express what the people are like. Interestingly, different people perceive the same animals in different ways. E.g. Czech and English people say - steal like a magpie / krást jako straka but Germans blame the raven for stealing and say – stehlen wie ein Rabe. The introduction of my thesis is followed by a theoretical part - by the basic comparison of English and German and by studies of idioms based on English and German dictionaries of idioms and books that deal with this area of language. The third part includes four tables. In the first table there are analogous idioms including the same animal name both in English and in German e.g. dog-tired – hundemüde or play cat and mouse – Katze und Maus mit j-m spielen and denoting the same or similar situation. In the second table there are slightly modified English and German idioms that have the same meaning expressed by using different animal names e.g. a guinea pig – Versuchskaninchen or have bats in the belfry – einen Vogel haben. The third table introduces functionally equivalent idioms that denote the same occurrences depicted by not only animal names e.g. like a bat out of hell – wie ein geölter Blitz. The fourth table includes isolated animal idioms found only in English. The conclusion of the thesis should outline the differences and similarities between the perception of the surrounding world in English and German expressed by idioms. 6 2. Theoretical part 2.1 English language and German language. The two languages, English and German, whose idioms I am going to focus on have a common ancestor, which is the reason of many similarities between the both languages maintained till present day despite many changes in both English and German during long millenniums. The following chapter draws information from a variety of books and internet texts and there are also some personal observations added. The main sources were books Historicý vývoj němčiny by Zdeněk Masařík, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by David Crystal, Die deutsche Sprache by Ursula Esser and internet texts “Three Things All Germanic Languages Have in Common” by Sarah-Claire Jordan, “A Brief History of the German Language” by Linda Andrea, “Seven Distinctive Features of Germanic” on http://pages.towson.edu/duncan/germanic and finally the text “Language Origin and Development” on pages www.phil-fak.uni duesseldorf.de Both English and German belong to the Indo-European language family that includes ten major branches. One of the branches is the Germanic branch. All Germanic languages descend from Proto-Germanic, also called Common Germanic or Ur-Germanic, which is a proto-language that was reconstructed from all Germanic languages using the comparative method. There are not any surviving texts attesting the Proto-Germanic language that was likely spoken after ca. 500 BC in Iron Age Northern Europe. Proto-Germanic is itself descended from Proto-Indo-European. The ,”first consonant shift” separated the Germanic languages from all other Indo-European languages. It may have been 500 BC.According to Sarah-Claire Jordan: . It can be broken down into three parts that all show changes that occurred when the Germanic languages broke away from Proto-Indo-European. Voiceless stops of Proto-Indo-European turned into voiceless fricatives in the Germanic languages. In English, voiceless stops would be the [p], [t], and [k] sounds, while voiceless fricatives include [f], [s], [h], [θ] (like the “th” in “bath”), and [ ʃ ] (“sh” of “should”), and [ʒ] (“s” in “pleasure”). The voiced stops of Proto-Indo- European ( [b], [d], and [g] sounds in English) became voiceless stops. Finally, the voiceless aspirated stops ( like the “p” sound in “punch”) found in Proto-Indo-European transformed into 7 either voiced stops ( [b], [d], and [g] sounds in English) or voiced fricatives, which in English are [v], [z], [ð] (“th” in “father”), and [ʒ] (“s” in “pleasure”). The changed accent, phonology and inflection were the most significant differences between Proto-Germanic and Proto- Indo-European. The original free dynamic accent was put on the first syllable and became stronger, which led to the reduction of end syllables or even to their loss. This way many grammatical endings vanished and the synthetic language changed into an analytic. Instead of endings articles, prepositions or pronouns were used and thanks to this, the grammatical construction of Proto-Germanic became less complicated. Although, there is not a pure synthetic or analytic language. Until the Middle English period (11th–16th century), the English language was heavily inflected and then it changed enormously both in grammar and in vocabulary. An overall reduction in grammatical endings occurred, e.g. many noun and adjective endings were levelled to –e and the plural noun marker –en gave way to –s. As the inflection vanished, many misunderstandings may have appeared and so the fixed word order was established. The subject was placed before the verb and the object after the verb, which is not an unchangeable rule in German, where the inflection of nouns has been expressed through the inflection of articles. The Germanic branch was divided into West Germanic, North Germanic and East Germanic languages.