O przekazie uniwersalnym tekstów kultury na podstawie przysłów w języku hausa i polskim

The paper concerns single-sentence texts recorded in different languages according to similar structural schemes, known as proverbs. It focuses on comparing the semantic content of proverbs in Hausa and Polish, but also takes into account the way of illustrating the concepts expressed by means of these contents. The applied methodology draws attention to the words most frequently used in proverbs, which (referring to Wierzbicka 1997) are considered to be cultural keywords, that is: words with a special cultural status. They encode contents that are important to the way the particular community functions. Based on the collection of proverbs by Kirk-Greene (1966), Yunusa (1977), Kłosińska (2011) and Adalberg (1889-94), pairs of proverbs having the same meaning (message) and the way of imaging (the same key words) in Hausa and Polish, have been found. The occurrence of such pairs of proverbs (e.g. Matambayi ba ya ɓata – “Who asks, does not stray”, Rigakafi ta fi magani – “Prevention is better than cure”) in languages geographically and culturally distant evokes the question of universal values, independent of the natural and cultural environment. Examples will be presented along with translation and explanation of meaning.