The Perception of Man in Societies Through Turkish and Russian Proverbs

Abstract

Cultural values and ideas that emerge in certain linguistic structures fixedly during certain periods of the social development stage help us understand how the societies approach the world, objects, people and events around them. Through these fixed linguistic structures, the linguistic worldview of societies can be examined within the framework of language studies. There are proverbs among the archaic structures which can best reflect the linguistic worldview of a society. Proverbs, which include the most distinct information about the ancient worldview of human history, reflect the richest and most well-founded sources of human culture from the past to the present. In most of the male-dominated societies, the research conducted on proverbs is mostly focused on the concept and place of women in society and how women are or should be. The number of studies conducted in this field in order to understand the perspective of societies towards men is less and “women and men” are mostly included in the analyses as a whole. In this study, the approaches of Turkish and Russian societies to men were examined through the proverbs in both languages and the roles attributed to men and the perspectives on men are determined. Thus, it was aimed to present the sociological evaluation of the attitudes of both societies to men. Proverbs in both languages were classified according to their semantic characteristics through data collection, analysis and comparison methods. Most of the proverbs in Russian were transferred by the direct translation method, and explanatory translations were used where the meaning became blurred. Some of the proverbs that were hard to understand in Turkish were also presented with explanations. As a result of the analyses, the similarities and differences in the male image in both societies are revealed.

Ethical committee approval is not required for this research.

Leyla Çiğdem Dalkılıç: Data Analysis, Writing up, Submission and Revision.
Doğa Aral: Conceiving the Study, Data Collection.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest in this study.

This research received no external funding.