French Proverbs from 1611
In 1611, Randle Cotgrave published A dictionarie of the French
and English tongues, a French/English dictionary with about
50,000 entries. In addition to word definitions, Cotgrave's
dictionary contains numerous proverbs, presumably to illustrate word
usage. These proverbs provide an interesting look into both French and
English proverbs in this era, and is one of the earliest printed
collections of proverbs.
Cotgrave's dictionary was digitized as part of the Early
Modern English Dictionaries Database project. Unfortunately the
EMEDD folks did not publish the dictionary itself; they only provide an
interface for searching the entries. I wrote a clever script to use
this interface to attempt to extract the proverbs. I found a total 2,671 proverbs,
which is probably most of them. There are many duplications, so about 1,552
of them look unique. Due to the formatting of the EMEDD database, the spacing
of the result is a bit suspect, and there are numerous extra square brackets: [ ].
All the proverbs are accessible on alphabetical lists:
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z
In addition, I have placed 911 of the proverbs into categories:
- Well-known proverbs
- Beer, wine, and drunkards
- The Church, Religion, God, and occasional profane and rude comments
- Clothes
- The Devil is in the details!
- Earthy proverbs that might turn your ears red
- Proverbs with English equivalents
- Farms, plants, and the weather
- Food, cooks, cooking, and eating
- Fools, foolishness, and wise men
- Friends
- The government, courts, law, and authority figures of all kinds
- Sickness, health, doctors, old age, and death
- Proverbs with Latin versions
- Love, lust, and lechery
- Luck, good and bad
- Marriage is bliss. Well, sometimes.
- Money, the lack thereof, and the business world
- Music and Dance
- Animals, pets, and lots of proverbs about the Wolf
- Theft and thieves
- War, conflict, and fighting
- The (oft lamentable) status of women in French proverbs
See also
- John Florio's Gardino di Ricreatione (1591), which includes 6,150 Italian provrbs
- Pieter Bruegel's Netherlandish Proverbs (1559) (painting)
- Proverbs, chiefly taken from the Adagia of Erasmus, with explanations, and further illustrated by corresponding examples from the Spanish, Italian, French & English languages (vol 1) by Bland, Robert, 1730-1816 and Erasmus, Desiderius, d. 1536
Gregory Blount of Isenfir (Greg Lindahl)
