Re: Common World Idioms

This was orignally blocked from the list :
---
---- "Douglas Koller, Latin & French"
> I've always found it fun that English and Chinese,
> two totally
> unrelated languages with very different histories,
> deal with "gall"
> the same way.
And indeed, there are so many co-called coincidences
to 'make one scratch one's chin' (=idiom!)

> Nenmo da danzi!. = What gall!
>
> Probably related to spleen, bile, the humours, and
> all that, but wow (or tee hee hee).
(Wow=Onomatopoeia related to idiom?)
This is an extremely good one, mostly because its
puzzling about what it actually means in *English to
begin with, let alone its connection to another.
I have no idea why "gall" is a colloquialism at all -
perhaps it's partly onomonopaeic, (what grunty words
arent).

One notion is that the names of internal organs
-archeologically speaking- are similar insomuch as
they serve the same human function. So acting ornery
is universal, and the notion that there's an organ in
the body which makes people act that way, is also a
very common old-world concept. That they would both
identify the same organ is amazing. :)

(but consider that with cross-feedback, the exact
organ may have simply changed with modern medicine -
the name being not so much attached to a medical
diagram, but to a human concept of the behaviour:
"with gall" -cultural back and forth, eh?)

> you'd get those "the dragon spirals while the
> phoenix foxtrots" for
> "he got up on the wrong side of the bed" sorts of
> things, and then
> there'd be some that were spot on with the English.
Yes, proverbs can be extremely useful to this
discussion -- we can try to steam out their essences.

Wikipedia has an excellnet "list of Chinese proverbs"
page.

-SC
BTW:Don't add legs when painting a snake.




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