“Widespread idioms in Europe and beyond”: Lesser-used languages and their contribution to a “Lexicon of Common Figurative Units”

Abstract

“Widespread idioms in Europe and beyond”: Lesser-used languages and their contribution to a “Lexicon of Common Figurative Units”

Contrary to earlier assumptions, there are far-reaching similarities between idioms of the European languages. This fact was confirmed not least by the results of the project “Widespread idioms in Europe and beyond”: It is not rare to find idiom equivalents with a quite consistent lexical and semantic structure in fifty or more languages. The seventyfour European languages represented in the project can be roughly divided into major languages (well-developed larger literary languages, often also national languages) and varieties that can be subsumed under the technical term lesser-used languages. This raises the question as to what extent the lesser-used languages share the features of a “common figurative lexicon”. Using four examples we point to differences and try to find explanations.