What Meets the Eye and the Brain: Punctuality, Hospitality, Caretaker's Mentality and Other Proverbial Attributes
Abstract
The paper sums up the results of an analysis of English, German and Czech national characteristics labeled as proverbial (sprichwoertlich, příslovečný) in English, German and Czech texts. The Internet and representative corpora of the three languages have bee used as sources of data.
A general comparison was made among (a) the characteristics that the speakers of each of the three languages considered proverbial when speaking about themselves, (b) the proverbial characteristics they used about the speakers of the other two languages (foreigners), and (c) the characteristics the two groups of foreigners used about the third group. The paper provides partial data on the different degrees of criticism and selfcriticism in texts written in the three languages.