How do proverbs come from?

Author: You (released by China Economic History Forum at 0: 53: 19, 2003)

First, the origin of agricultural proverbs

Agricultural proverbs have been circulating for quite a long time and are recorded in many ancient books. For example, the popular agricultural proverbs such as "planting rice for half a year", "watering malt and cauliflower", "In summer, the roots are white, and farmers eat for an hour" and "rice is as red as an oriole, only water is needed" were included in Shen Shi's agricultural books in the late Ming Dynasty: "An inch of wheat is not afraid of water, and an inch of wheat is afraid of water". "Don't plant wheat without ash" and "Harvest wheat like putting out a fire" can be found in1Convenient Drawing at the beginning of the 6th century. "It's not hot in June, and the grains don't bear fruit", "Cover the quilt in June, and there is no rice in the field" and so on. , all found in Tianjia Wuxing1at the beginning of the 4th century; "If you want wheat, you can see three whites" and "The first month is three whites, and God smiles brilliantly", which was found in the book The Prince of the Tang Dynasty in the early 8th century. "If you want to know the five grains, you can see five trees" and "It is better to plow without pains than to be violent". See Qi Yaomin's Book in the 6th century. Agricultural proverbs quoted in ancient books are often referred to as "proverbs cloud" or "ancients cloud", indicating that the agricultural proverbs cited originated earlier and when they existed may not always be found in the literature. At least as far as we know, some agricultural proverbs can be traced back thousands of years, such as the Zhejiang agricultural proverb: "There is no abundant grass under the big tree, and there is no beautiful seedling between the big blocks", which was also seen in the Western Han Dynasty (Huan Kuan's salt and iron theory in BC 1 century): "There is no abundant grass under the Maolin, and there is no beautiful seedling between the big blocks." "The shower doesn't stop all day, and the hurricane doesn't stop" is similar to "The wind doesn't stop all day, and the shower doesn't stop all day" in Chapter 23 of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. Because the origin of agricultural proverbs can be traced back continuously, we have reason to think that the origin of agricultural proverbs is consistent with the origin of agriculture. The origin of agriculture is much earlier than written records, so the origin of agricultural proverbs must be before there are words. If music, dance and ballads all originate from labor, then agricultural proverbs are indeed an important branch of agricultural labor that is different from ballads. The difference between folk songs and agricultural proverbs is that the former confides in the thoughts and feelings of working people, that is, focuses on social relations; Agricultural proverbs, on the other hand, describe the struggle between working people and nature, that is, production is the center. This distinction is the result of gradual development. In fact, there is no clear boundary between them. Because agricultural proverbs can also include the experience of "standing in the world" outside agricultural production, in addition, agricultural proverbs can also include the experience of "standing in the world" outside agricultural production. Moreover, agricultural proverbs are harmonious in melody, rhyme, form and life, so it is difficult to completely break away from folk songs. This is especially true in ancient agricultural society. For example, July, Futian, Datian and Courtiers in The Book of Songs not only praised farming operations, but also expressed farmers' feelings. With the development of agricultural production, agricultural proverbs gradually split from ballads. At the same time, agricultural proverbs, which belong to pure production experience, are constantly increasing and enriching, and become an important part of guiding production.

Second, the role of agricultural proverbs in production

Agricultural proverbs are the crystallization of the experience accumulated by working people in long-term production practice, which will certainly play a guiding role in agricultural production. Especially in feudal society, working people were deprived of the right to read and write, and their experience was mainly passed down by word of mouth, and agricultural proverbs were one of them. For example, in feudal society, there were no equivalent instruments such as thermometers and hygrometers, so farmers used the growth of perennial trees as the basis for forecasting agricultural time. Because the growth of perennial trees reflected certain objective climatic conditions to a certain extent, the agricultural proverb "If you want to know five grains, look at five trees first" came into being. In guiding the sowing period, there are many proverbs reflecting phenology, such as "pear blossoms are white, soybeans are planted"; "Cinnamomum camphora leaves are pink and white bean seeds are good"; And "frogs croak and millet falls" and so on. More is to point out the suitable sowing date of various crops according to the 24 solar terms: for example, "the white dew is early, the cold dew is late, and the autumn equinox grass is just right"; "The Millennium is white, just planting buckwheat" and so on. With these agricultural proverbs, farmers can master timely sowing. In addition, such as "beginning of winter broad bean light snow wheat, you can't catch it all your life"; Proverbs such as "planting oil in October is not enough to make a wife's hair" are a summary of the lessons of failure, reminding people to seize the season and not to miss the farming season.

If the whole process of crop production is divided into several links, almost every link has certain agricultural proverbs. For example, from the sowing of rice, the selection of improved varieties includes "planting good rice and loving mother" and so on; Cultivating strong seedlings includes "planting rice for half a year" and so on; Transplanting techniques include "whether the rice can be inserted depends on the feet", "early rice floats on the water, and late rice is inserted waist-high", fertilization includes "early rice mud is sent down, late rice is held three times", "the middle is light and the two ends are heavy" and so on. Field management includes "touching the roots in summer, a handful of mud and a handful of grain" and so on. Take rice as an example. There are about 500 agricultural proverbs in Zhejiang. Farmers have these agricultural proverbs, just as they now have technical guidance manuals, which have played a great guiding role. Especially among some old peasants, this habit still exists. 1959 we learned from an old farmer about the experience of sowing millet in Lishui county. He quoted the agricultural proverb "A needle on the head of a red millet is afraid of shallowness, but it is not afraid of depth", and compared with sesame, he said: "Sesame has two leaves on its head, but it is afraid of depth", which vividly explained monocotyledonous plants (such as millet) and dicotyledonous plants (. When we summed up the local experience of planting millet (locally called millet) in Pingyang County, the farmers also quoted the agricultural proverb "The rice is half harvested, the wheat is not worth seeing, and the millet is harvested", which shows that the characteristic of millet is that it is not afraid of lodging. Numerous examples like this prove the great guiding role of agricultural proverbs in agricultural production.

Third, the characteristics of agricultural proverbs

Agricultural proverbs are about agricultural production. Agricultural production in a broad sense includes agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, sideline production and fishing, and agriculture also includes crops, fruits and vegetables, sericulture and so on. These contents can be found in agricultural proverbs. Moreover, agricultural production is inseparable from soil, fertilizer, moisture, temperature and even seasonal, meteorological and climatic conditions, which occupy a lot of content in agricultural proverbs. Agricultural production depends on people, so there are still many contents in agricultural proverbs that cannot be separated from the relationship between people and management experience. Fei Jie's new collection of agricultural proverbs in China before liberation consists of five parts: seasons, meteorology, crops, breeding and proverbs. Although it is not ideal, we can see several characteristics of agricultural proverbs from this classification. According to the author's statistics of 5953 agricultural proverbs in this book. [1] There are 296 1 items belonging to seasonal departments, accounting for 40.45% of the total; Meteorological department 1556, accounting for 26.22%, and crop department 1020, accounting for17.18%; Breeding site 25 1, accounting for 4.23%; Proverb 707, accounting for 1 1.9 1%. From the percentage of this distribution, we can see two points: first, meteorological and seasonal agricultural proverbs account for 2/3, reflecting the dependence of agricultural production and development on natural conditions. Timely sowing is a prerequisite for agricultural production. From slash-and-burn cultivation to modern machine farming, agricultural technology has changed greatly, and only timely sowing can not be changed at will. In order to correctly grasp the farming season, the working people have summed up rich experience and learned enough lessons for thousands of years, so the agricultural proverbs centered on seasons account for about 40%. Natural disasters such as drought, flood, wind and cold are even more formidable threats in feudal society with small-scale peasant economy, so agricultural proverbs that try to grasp the laws of natural disasters also account for 1/4.

Due to personal conditions, Fei Jiexin only collected 5953 agricultural proverbs. After the founding of New China, agricultural publishing houses, mainly Lu Ping, collected agricultural proverbs in a planned way all over the country, and * * * got 65438+ 10,000 articles. After consolidation, * * * got more than 3 1400 articles, which were published in two volumes: China Agricultural Proverbs. The first volume is about crops, including field crops, cotton and linen, fruits and vegetables, sericulture, beans, oilseeds, flowers and so on. According to the author's statistics, * * * is about16200; The second volume is an overview of animal husbandry, fishery and forestry, including soil, fertilizer, species, field management, water conservancy, meteorology, etc. 15200. The statistical results of the first and second volumes of the book are classified respectively, which are generally similar to the results of Fei Jiexin mentioned above. But the regularity is more obvious. That is to say, among all agricultural proverbs, meteorological agricultural proverbs are the most, and * * * got 7903, accounting for 25.6438+06% of all. Followed by rice, ***4573, accounting for14.56% of the total; The third is wheat, ***3596, accounting for 1 1.45% of the total. The rest are scattered on various crops, and the number of strips is much less than that of rice and wheat. The number proportion of agricultural proverbs of rice, wheat and millet is very similar to the statistical results of the author's literature of Ancient and Modern Books Integration. In the integration, the literature quantity of rice is also the first, followed by all kinds of wheat and millet, accounting for more than any other crops. [2] The proportion of written records is so consistent with the proportion of farmers' oral proverbs, which is a true reflection of the law of objective things. Only 65,438+0,576,5438+0 fruit trees and vegetables are in short supply, accounting for 5.00% of the total. Cereals, such as corn and sweet potato, were not introduced and popularized until the end of the Ming Dynasty. Corn quickly accumulated 222 pieces, of course, the proportion is not high, accounting for only 0.70%; There were 366 sweet potatoes, accounting for 1. 16%. Since ancient times, agriculture and mulberry have been paid equal attention to, and cotton is a latecomer compared with sericulture, but it has spread rapidly, accumulating more agricultural proverbs than sericulture, with cotton 1243 accounting for 3.95%; There are only 355 silkworms, accounting for 1. 13%. There should not be so few agricultural proverbs about silkworms, and the reason remains to be verified. Among crops and livestock, there are far fewer agricultural proverbs in the livestock sector, only 1 433, accounting for 4.56% of the total. This is the characteristic of food structure in China's agricultural areas, and the pressure of population growth in agricultural areas makes it impossible for agricultural areas to take out more land to raise livestock. In the agricultural proverbs of livestock, pigs are the most common. Pigs are omnivorous in the south, so there is no need for pasture to graze the land. One of the outstanding points of Livestock Peasant Proverbs is that there are many peasant proverbs that identify livestock, which are vivid and well-founded, much like Xiang Ma Jing and Xiang Niu Jing since the Han Dynasty, but few sentences.

Let's try to analyze the characteristics of agricultural proverbs, which can be summarized as three points and six points:

Regional and universal. The regionality of agricultural proverbs actually reflects the regionality of agricultural production. For example, different crops in different regions, different sowing and harvesting seasons and so on. Zhejiang agricultural proverb: "wheat with yellow seeds and hemp, ephedra seeds and wheat", while Shaanxi agricultural proverb is "wheat with yellow seeds and mash with yellow seeds and wheat with yellow seeds", which is because crops vary from place to place. The agricultural proverbs in northern China, "Seven gold, eight silver, nine copper and ten iron" and "If you don't harvest farmland in autumn, you can't make up your mind in the coming year", reflect the winter leisure and one-year cropping system in the north, but not in the south. Zhejiang's agricultural proverb "Planting grass for three years, bad fields will become good fields" and "rotten winter rape and dry winter wheat" reflect that Zhejiang either grows green manure or big winter wheat. The biggest regional difference is the sowing date. The suitable time for planting wheat in North China is "early dew and late cold dew, and the autumnal equinox is just at that time", while in Zhejiang, "early cold dew and late beginning of winter, just before and after the first frost". For planting sesame and millet, North China is "full of sesame seeds" and Zhejiang is "full of sesame seeds".

However, in many agricultural proverbs, although different regions and conditions are different, they all have similar sayings. For example, the "dried flowers and wet pods, eight acres of stone" of soybeans are said all over the north and south; Zhejiang agricultural proverb "cutting wheat is like putting out a fire" is the same as North China agricultural proverb "harvesting wheat is like putting out a fire"; "An inch of wheat is not afraid of water, and a foot of wheat is afraid of water." Zhejiang, northern Jiangsu and other places also have the same agricultural proverbs: "It's not hot in June, and the grain will not bear fruit", "It's hard to buy a pot belly with money" ... and so on are all common agricultural proverbs. This is because they reflect the biological characteristics of crops. The biological characteristics of crops are the expression of their own inheritance, and the required environmental conditions and cultivation principles are often the same. There are also some cultivation links with the same basic principles, such as deep ploughing, fattening and intertillage, which are all reflected in agricultural proverbs. For example, the agricultural proverb in North China and Shaanxi "Farming without fertilization equals muddling along"; Northern Jiangsu agricultural proverb "Don't use manure, fool around", Zhejiang agricultural proverb "You don't need an uncle to farm, as long as you have enough fertilizer"; As well as agricultural proverbs in the north, such as "the hoe divides the water into three parts" and those in Zhejiang, such as "the hoe will yield water when it encounters drought", all have the same meaning.

Regardless of regionality and universality, the similarity of its expression shows that an agricultural proverb may have originated in a certain area at first, and with its spread, various places have changed it according to the characteristics of their own areas (such as crops, farming systems, seasons, oral habits, etc.). ), and the most obvious one, such as the sowing date, is almost "xx ×××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××

Generality and scientificity. Generality and scientificity are the most important characteristics of agricultural proverbs. Because agricultural proverbs are handed down orally, they must be short, fluent and easy to remember. But its content is very rich, so it must be concise, profound and thought-provoking. Many agricultural proverbs seem simple and simple, but they actually contain profound scientific truth, which needs us to analyze and explain. For example, the agricultural proverb of planting green manure: "Good grass often dries." Generally speaking, grass likes wet soil, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't need air. Farmers especially pointed out that "it is often dry here." According to scientific research, the soil moisture of grass seed field is about 70%. Due to the decrease of groundwater level, the thickness of oxide layer increases and the thickness of reduction layer decreases, which can make roots and nodules develop well. This is the generality and scientificity of agricultural proverbs. Others, such as "watering flowers with wheat and watering flowers with vegetables", summarized the key points of fertilization for two winter crops; It is pointed out that sweet potato should adopt different cutting methods according to different water conditions. It seems unreasonable that cow dung is cold and horse dung is hot. In fact, due to the different drinks of cattle and horses, the activity of microorganisms in feces is also different, and the ability of fermentation to produce heat is also very different. Some cultivation measures not only affect yield, but also affect quality. For example, the agricultural proverb points out that "nine plows are barren and three plows are not rotten", which is very reasonable. How to explain it thoroughly deserves further consideration. Some agricultural proverbs can only reveal their theoretical significance through scientific research, such as "it is difficult to plant rice with three eclipses" and "it is difficult to buy a pot belly with money". Chen Yongkang, a farmer rice expert, put forward the problem of "three Huang San blacks". In recent years, through the scientific experiments of Jiangsu Branch of China Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Comrade Chen Yongkang, it has been preliminarily clarified that "yellow is a physiological state representing a turning point in the individual development of late rice, and every time it falls yellow, the plant will turn to another new stage". This can be regarded as a preliminary explanation of the three yellow issues, but there are still different opinions. There are many agricultural proverbs with strong generality and profound scientific principles, which need us to analyze and improve with modern scientific knowledge or through specific experimental research.

Public and popularity. Most of the authors of agricultural proverbs are working people, which determines that the thoughts, feelings and even expressions of agricultural proverbs must be loved by the masses, full of life and earthy flavor, easy to remember and spread to each other. Among them, the most commonly used is to explain the relationship between production technical measures and people, which is most easily accepted by the masses. For example, before pulling out seedlings, a little fertilizer should be applied to help the root system grow, but not too much. The agricultural proverb says, "When seedlings grow up, you should eat snacks", and it is just right to use "snacks" as a metaphor for the role and weight of fertilizers. It is a big problem to grow wheat without gray fertilizer in winter. Agricultural proverbs emphasize the importance of gray fertilizer, saying "no wheat, no ash, no wine, no customers". Rice lacks nitrogen fertilizer, leaves are yellow, and fertilizer is urgently needed. Agricultural proverbs use "the beige owner owes money to bean cakes" as a metaphor. After topping the corn, the plants grow vigorously and the stems are stout. Agricultural proverbs use "corn is as strong as an ox" as a metaphor. Others, such as "sweet potato is not shy until autumn", "planting grass mud, children's sugar stalks swaying", "show beige, eat a piece of sugar; Xiumi is black and can't be eaten "and so on are all vivid and meaningful good agricultural proverbs. When we inherit the heritage and summarize the characteristics of agricultural proverbs, we must grasp the mass and popularity of agricultural proverbs.

Fourthly, the structural analysis of agricultural proverbs.

In order to better summarize agricultural proverbs, it is necessary to dissect the syntactic structure and expression of agricultural proverbs that have been circulated for thousands of years, and draw some useful experiences for developing and creating new agricultural proverbs.

(1) Syntax of agricultural proverbs The sentences of agricultural proverbs are relatively simple, but by analyzing a large number of agricultural proverbs, we can find that the sentences of agricultural proverbs are also quite complicated. First, look at the number of words in each sentence. According to the classified statistics of China 15823 agricultural proverbs (about 360,000 words), [3] there are at least three words, and the most is 196 words. If every sentence with different words is called a "sentence class", it will range from 3 words to 58 words. * * There are 56 different sentence types: from 60 words to 196 words, while * * has 34 sentence types, with 90 sentence types from Note 3 to Note 196. It is worth noting that the number of sentences in these 90 sentence categories is unbalanced, and most of them are concentrated in10,8,/kloc-0,4,/kloc-0,2,7,6,/kloc-0,3,5,/kloc-0,6,20,9,6. In 12 sentences, 10, 8, 14, 12, 7 and 6 are the most, of which *** 1 1857 accounts for 74.93% of the total. In addition, according to the statistics of crops in Zhejiang Agricultural Proverbs, the same distribution situation exists (table 17).

From the table below, we can see some key points:

1, agricultural proverbs are proverbs handed down orally by people. Except for a few cases (such as 99 songs), the number of words in each sentence should not be too large, otherwise it is not convenient to spread orally. Although some agricultural proverbs can reach more than 100 words, most of them do not exceed 20 words, and more do not exceed 14 words. Because the content of agricultural proverbs is very rich and too short to express more content, there are not many 5, 4 and 3 words with less than 6 words. In all 15823 agricultural proverbs, five sentences only appear in 468 sentences, accounting for 2.95%. There are only 150 sentences in sentence 4, accounting for 0.94%; There are fewer than 3 sentences, and only 6 sentences appear (due to space limitations, the distribution of sentence categories is not listed here).

Sentence Distribution of National Agricultural Proverbs and Zhejiang Agricultural Proverbs

Sentence | Number of occurrences of 90 national agricultural proverbs | Number of occurrences of 24 Zhejiang agricultural proverbs | Number of occurrences | Number of occurrences | Number of occurrences of 90 Zhejiang agricultural proverbs | Number of occurrences%.

10 sentence | 3899 | 26.64 | 324 | 30.00

8 words | 2185 |13.80 |151|13.96

Sentence14 | 2149 |13.58 |13 |10.45

Sentence12 |1335 | 8.43 |12 |10.36

7 words |1182 | 7.47 |1|10.26

6 words |1107 | 6.99 | 92 | 8.51

The above six sentences are |11857 | 74.93 | 903 | 83.54.

The sentences of 13, 15,16,20,9,1are * * * meter | 2667 |16.86 |1.

The above sentence 12 is * * |14524 | 91.79 |1030 | 95.28.

The rest of the sentence types are * * * Ji |1299 | 8.21| 51| 4.72.

Total |15823 |100.00|1081|100.00

Note: National agricultural proverbs include crops, fruits and vegetables, animal husbandry, meteorology, seasons, etc. Zhejiang agricultural proverbs only focus on crop cultivation.

2 Sentences consisting of 20 words or 28 words (similar to five sentences and seven sentences in old poems) are not dominant in agricultural proverbs (20 words * * appear in 373 sentences and 28 words * * appear in 132 sentences), on the contrary, they are half of 20 words and 28 words, that is, 10 sentences, 65438.

There are five even sentences and only seven odd sentences in the six sentence categories of 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 and 14, which account for more than three quarters of the total, which is also in line with the habit of China people to express in pairs in oral or written.

In each sentence category with the same number of words, there are several expressions, such as belonging to 10 sentence category, which can be 5 words plus 5 words (represented by 5+5, the same below), 3+7, 4+6, 6+4 and so on. The following are five common sentence patterns: 8-character, 9-character, 10,1word and 12, as shown below (table 18).

Examples of sentence patterns contained in various sentence types of agricultural proverbs

Eight words

Sentence | Example

4+4| Clear water sowing and mixed water transplanting.

3+5| It's autumn, and it's getting smaller.

2+2+2+2| Dry seed, live early; Rapid growth, rapid growth.

Nine sentences

Sentence | Example

4+5| Not afraid of drought, but afraid that the hoe is broken.

5+4| Seventy days of buckwheat and eighty days of rain

3+3+3| Arrive in June, sell quilts and buy grey materials.

10 sentence

Sentence | Example

5+5| Whether it can be inserted or not depends on the foot.

4+6| It's better to buy a hundred catties than to keep a catty.

3+7| In the autumn of July, giving is from the inside out.

3+3+4| One-season grass, double-season rice, good grass and good rice.

4+3+3| After the summer solstice, one carries the seedlings and the other carries the potatoes.

1 1 sentence

Sentence | Example

5+6| There will be one hill, not a thousand hills.

6+5| Plant white rice with flowers and plants, and there are valleys in the mountains.

4+7| A thousand dung fields are better than one dung seedling.

7+4| beginning of autumn planted one day earlier and harvested one day earlier.

3+3+5| If you break the dung jar, you don't have to throw it away. You can eat more.

5+3+3| Farming without fertilization, you cheat it, it cheats you.

12 sentence

Sentence | Example

6+6| Buckwheat is neither frost nor old, and wheat is not yellow without eating wind.

5+7| If you want to get more grains, there are two kinds of corn mung beans.

7+5| Planting sweet potatoes and rice, the output is higher every year.

4+4+4| The first hemp sees seedlings, the second hemp sees chaff, and the third hemp sees frost.

3+3+3+3| Spring, summer, spring of the sun, summer of the sun.

According to the examples in the above table, the author tried to classify 24 sentences of Zhejiang agricultural proverb Crops+008 1 and got 64 sentences. If we classify national agricultural proverbs, there must be more sentence patterns. It should be pointed out that common sentence patterns are basically concentrated in common sentence types, and the rest are not very important. Moreover, due to mistakes in oral recitation or written records, as long as there is a difference in a word or a sound, it will cause changes in sentence patterns. For example, the 4+7 type in the 1 1 sentence above, with the word "lai" removed, belongs to the 4+6 type in the 10 sentence. Therefore, from the perspective of inheriting the heritage and creating new agricultural proverbs, it is worth noting that we should not ask how many sentence patterns there are in agricultural proverbs, but pay attention to those that are most commonly used and easy to remember and recite. For example, in the nine sentences "The Valley of Rice and Bacon", 10 sentence "It's autumn regardless of size", "In winter, just comb your hair and eat", and 13 sentence "It's autumn, there's rain, there's a pond and a dam for quick repair" and "Spring is spring.

(2) Besides the complex changes of syntactic structure, agricultural proverbs also have rich rhetorical expressions. Farmers know how to express their experience in production technology through various rhetorical methods. Here are some examples:

Metaphor: Agricultural proverbs are good at using metaphors, so they are easy to understand and accept. There are two kinds of metaphors in agricultural proverbs, one is simile and the other is metaphor. There are many similes, such as "people are weak, longan and litchi;" The land is weak, and the river mud is grass ","cooked soil adds raw soil, like a patient eating a pig's belly ","winter snow is a wheat quilt, and the longer it is pressed ","broad beans cover mud, like a cotton-padded coat on March 9 ". The metaphor is like: "When the grass grows up, it needs snacks", which means to gain weight with snacks. Whether similes or metaphors are widely used in people's lives, they are friendly and easy to understand.

Metonymy: in agricultural proverbs, metonymy is often used, with parts representing the whole and concrete representing abstraction and comparing images. For example, "if you don't have mud legs, you will starve to death." Here, "mud legs" represent working people, and "oil mouth" represents exploiters. Another example is "every other mountain, many years, every other river, many reeds", which means that planting in different places can increase production, and it is difficult to specify the planting distance and principle, so the agricultural proverb is expressed by "one mountain and one river"

Wanqu: This is a technique widely used in agricultural proverbs. Farmers like to use implicit words to set off their original intention, such as "breaking the root of wheat and breaking the heart of grinding", which means that wheat needs to be cultivated frequently, and after cultivation, it can increase production, but he doesn't have to use explicit words such as increasing production, but when it comes to wheat processing and grinding a lot of wheat flour, it may break the heart of grinding, so as to encourage people to do a good job in field farming. Others, such as "dragon dancing in the wheat field, so is wheat", refer to the suppression of wheat seedling stage; "Summer is bottomless, and there is no rice in the valley" means that not baking the field will cause lodging and prickly heat; "Sesame field will be sunny in three days, and go home to wash the oil bottle" means that drought is beneficial to sesame harvest; "beginning of winter uses a chopstick to grow beans, and two beans are a pair" is a warning not to sow in time; "Gold comes from the corner of the field" encourages people to make full use of gaps to plant various crops; "Cutting rapeseed sadly and harvesting sesame with tears" means that sesame and rapeseed are easy to thresh and lose a lot when they are ripe.

Exaggeration: this is also a common technique in agricultural proverbs, which is often used to emphasize the importance of a certain measure or a certain link. For example, emphasize the importance of rape wax fertilizer: "It is better to pour wax fertilizer once"; Emphasizing the importance of rice irrigation before and after the summer heat, we use "a thousand cars are not as good as one car in the summer heat"; Emphasizing the importance of fertilization in rice fields, he said, "We will give one hill instead of a thousand hills. It is better to give a thousand mountains than one mountain. " When you come across this boastful agricultural proverb, you can't translate it literally, but realize that it is an exaggeration of words.

Analogy: Generally speaking, comparing things to people is infectious. For example: "The soybean is deaf, and the more you hoe, the more you get through"; In fact, it means that soybeans need intertillage so that roots and nodules can grow well. "Wheat's ass itches, and the longer it grows, the more willing it is".

Overlap: It is a common expression in agricultural proverbs. For example: "slap more, cut rice;" Shake more, cut rice and cut wine "; "The head is flat, the roots are dug, and the circles are rounded", "The rice is yellow, and the owner owes it money for bean cakes"; "All kinds of sweet potatoes and rice are good at both ends of the year"; "Corn marries, children and grandchildren are full"; "The wheat ridge is narrow, and there is not half an acre of wheat, and the wheat scab is wide, and one acre is half an acre"; "Sowing in the long summer, the picked cotton flowers are full of fertilizer, the sown cotton is full, and the picked cotton collapses"; "The Millennium is charming, and the autumn equinox is fragrant" ... and so on.

Ellipsis: In order to facilitate oral recitation, ellipsis is one of the important skills of agricultural proverbs. Most nouns as subject words are omitted. For example, "a thousand baskets are not as good as one basket at the root" refers to applying gray fertilizer to grass seeds, omitting the terms grass seeds and plant ash. "Early epidemic and late freezing, no epidemic and no freezing, the first frost in beginning of winter" refers to the relationship between rape sowing and toxin disease and freezing injury, omitting the word rape sowing. "Don't marry your mother-in-law for smallpox" to save corn. There are also omitted verbs, such as "winter solstice, warm weather, winter solstice, cattle are freezing to death", indicating that winter solstice is in the middle or early month.

Contrast: Some people compare the different biological characteristics of two crops together. For example, "wheat and millet are dry, and rice should be soaked;" Wheat is afraid of soaking, rice is afraid of drying ","Red millet fields are dying, go home and change pots; Sesame field will be sunny for three days, and I will go home to wash the oil bottle, pour half a meter without wheat, rotten winter rape and dry winter wheat, and so on. Some compare the different technical requirements of the same crop, such as "one for early rice, one for late rice", "early rice floats on the water, and one for late rice" and so on; Some have different technical requirements, such as "clear water planting, muddy water transplanting", "plowing gold before the winter solstice, plowing iron after the winter solstice" and so on.

Another prominent expression of agricultural proverbs is that the intermodulation position of subject and object or the intermodulation position of attribute reflect completely different meanings. For example, "field is not equal to seedling, and seedling is not equal to field", "wheat can't be separated from beans, and beans can't be separated from wheat", "wheat grows jute, wheat grows ephedra", "many seedlings bully grass, and many grasses bully seedlings" and so on, all of which are achieved through the mutual modulation of subject and object. There is a saying that "an inch of wheat is not afraid of water, and an inch of wheat is afraid of water", "Huang Lao's 90% income is 100%, and Huang 100% income is 100%".

From the above preliminary analysis of the syntax and rhetoric methods of agricultural proverbs, we can realize that agricultural proverbs are not only rich in content and practical, but also creative in the syntax and rhetoric methods of expressing content. This will undoubtedly inspire us how to summarize, analyze and create new agricultural proverbs in the future.

Five, how to correctly understand agricultural proverbs

One of the characteristics of the agricultural proverbs mentioned above is mass and popularity. It doesn't seem to be a problem that agricultural proverbs are easy to understand, but this is not the case. Due to the regionality and generality of agricultural proverbs and historical factors, some situations have changed, and sometimes it is not easy to understand an agricultural proverb completely and correctly. For example, the author heard an agricultural proverb from a farmer in Pinghu county at a seminar on high yield of rapeseed: "On the winter solstice, coriander gives a cup." What does he mean by not being clear? Please explain. Another time, I heard a farmer in Henan introduce the agricultural proverb "Never forget to plant", and I don't know what it means. For agricultural scientists, it should not be a problem to understand agricultural proverbs with modern agricultural scientific knowledge, but it is not entirely true. If you are not fully familiar with the characteristics of agricultural proverbs, it is easy to "learn from the past" and over-understand. For example, "the summer heat does not see the bottom, and the white dew wastes the heart", which originally refers to the drainage and baking of single-season late rice. Some comrades contact the population structure of rice and think that the summer heat is bottomless and it is time to harvest it. If the temperature is not high in summer, it will be too late to reach the Millennium, and the leaf area coefficient is too small to make full use of light energy ... This is an example of overdoing it. "It is better to water the wax fertilizer once", originally to emphasize the importance of wax fertilizer. However, some comrades just understand this agricultural proverb, and a wax fertilizer is enough. Obviously, they have never understood the characteristics of agricultural proverbs. In the process of sorting out, there have also been examples of being smart and changing the original right into wrong. For example, "Tomb-Sweeping Day doesn't panic in March, Tomb-Sweeping Day broadcasts early in February", and the words "three" and "two" are reversed in arrangement, becoming "Tomb-Sweeping Day doesn't panic in February, and Tomb-Sweeping Day broadcasts early in March", but it is wrong. How to correctly understand agricultural proverbs, according to our preliminary experience, we should pay attention to the following points:

(1) Pay attention to astronomy, meteorology, calendars, solar terms and other common sense. As pointed out in the section on classification of agricultural proverbs, two thirds of them are meteorological and seasonal. Therefore, in order to correctly understand agricultural proverbs, we must have some knowledge in this field, including the stars and heavenly stems and earthly branches, which are commonly used to calculate the time of year, month and day, as well as "Jiujiu", "Sanfu", Spring House and Autumn House. These things are more and more divorced from our daily life. Without this common sense, it is not easy to understand such agricultural proverbs. For example, "Ginseng is one of the twenty-eight lodging places in ancient China and one of the seven lodging places in the west", which is an agricultural proverb to determine the sowing date of wheat by taking ginseng as the standard. "dustpan and wind, blue and rain", "the moon is beautiful in dustpan, and the wind blows sand" and so on. Dustpan and dustpan are also the names of constellations. "When the day is ripe, the cooperatives are divided and there is no gnawing", which refers to the relationship between the spring society and the vernal equinox before and after the vernal equinox and the bumper harvest of grains and apology. "After the division, the late rice has no ups and downs; Late rice grew up after the club. " The community here refers to the autumn community and the autumnal equinox. This statement is nonsense in itself, but if you don't understand what clubs and clubs mean, you can't choose. There are many such agricultural proverbs.