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Almost every language has its share of proverbs. “Too many

cooks spoil the broth”—so goes a proverb that is familiar to most

Americans. People in Iran expressed the same thought with different

words: “Two midwives will deliver a baby with a crooked head.” So do

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the Russians: “With seven nurses, the child goes blind.” The

Japanese: “Too many boatmen run the boat up the top of the

mountain.”

These lean, didactic, aphoristic statements, so varied in their

languages, seem to distill a universal wisdom. Is it possible that all

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human beings share certain feelings about life in common and thus

produce like-sounding proverbs? In the Samoan fishing culture,

which is dependent on the canoe, islanders would have no difficulty

in recognizing the kinship of the English proverb, “It never rains but it

pours”, to one of their own: “It leaks at the gunwale, it leaks in the

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keel.” An old saying of the Nandi tribe in Africa goes: “A goat’s hide

buys a goat’s hide and a gourd a gourd.” This is equivalent to the

Biblical injunction, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

They say that the best proverbs—no matter what the

language—have certain characteristics in common: they all are

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concerned about life in general and cover a vast range of human

endeavor—love and war, birth and death, sickness and health, and

work and play. But it remains a mystery why some civilizations are

rich in proverbs and others are not.