A Critique of Dehkhoda’s "Amsal va Hekam"

Abstract

This paper which is a review of Dehkhoda’s book in proverbs and mottos "Amsal va Hekam" tries to investigate and correct some shortcomings of that book. Although Dehkhoda’s "Amsal va Hekam" is one of the most important books in Persian proverbs and is one of the most referred books in Persian language and literature and comparative paremiology researches, it is not free of shortcomings, like all of the handwritten works, and needs investigation and rewriting in some cases. Some of the shortcomings of the book are: lack of introduction and comprehensive definition of proverb, not separating the proverb, assimilation, implication of the proverb, current channel of the proverb and the wisdom, not having thematic table of contents, disharmony of some subentries with respective entries, not separating informal proverbs from fluent literary ones, plenty of print and non – print mistakes, not having an identical method in citing verses and wisdom quotes and not including the reference or author’s name in most cases, disorder and lack of integrity in the book regarding system and structure, and quoting rhymed and prose phrases regardless of whether they are winged. In this regand, after studying the book and considering the texts and papers written on critique of this collection, authors attempt to gather and investigate these shortcomings by mentioning evidences and instances of Persian and Arabic.

Keywords

• Dehkhoda
• Amsal va Hekam
• Proverbs and Mottos
• Critique
• Modification