The Wild Flowers of Thought

"Too many cooks spoil the broth"--so goes a proverb that is as familiar to most Americans as its meaning. The Iranians expressed the same thought with different words: "Two midwives will deliver a baby with a crooked head." So do the Italians: "With so many roosters crowing, the sun never comes up." The Russians: "With seven nurses, the child goes blind." And the Japanese: "Too many boatmen run the boat up to the top of the mountain."

These lean, didactic, aphoristic statements, so varied in their language, seem to distill a universal wisdom. In the Samoan fishing culture, which is dependent on the canoe, islanders would have no difficulty in recognizing the kinship of the English proverb, "It never rains but it pours," to one of their own: "It leaks at the gunwale, it leaks in the keel." From the Biblical injunction, "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," it is only a short and negotiable step to an old saying of the Nandi tribe in East Africa: "A goat's hide buys a goat's hide and a gourd a gourd."

Hidden Code. Can it be that the proverb--literally, "before the word"--provides a clue to the common denominator of all human thought? This possibility has been raised by George B. Milner, 50, a linguist at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. Many anthropologists and linguists have long suspected that the human mind obeys a hidden code--just as the computer follows instructions programmed into it before it begins to "think." In an article for Britain's New Society magazine, Milner contends that the proverb may stand breathtakingly near to the source of that code.

Milner's 'interest in the proverb began in 1955, when he flew to the South Pacific to compile the first Samoan dictionary since 1862. There he found a rigidly stratified culture that relied on the proverb as a guide through the thicket of social life. The Samoans had proverbs for every human exchange, says Milner: "To pay respect, to express pleasure, sympathy, regret, to make people laugh, to blame or criticize, to apologize, to insult, thank, cajole, ask a favor, say farewell." Intrigued, he collected thousands of these pithy sayings.

Back in England, Milner compared his Samoan stock with the proverbs current in Europe, and was struck by the many similarities in structure, rhythm and content. It was almost as if the proverb shared a common source. Since this was culturally impossible, Milner considered another potential origin: the universality of human thought.

Regardless of their genesis, Milner argues, the best proverbs easily transcend ethnic and geographical barriers. They deal in the fundamental stuff of life: love and war, birth and death, sickness and health, work and play. Like the human mind itself, they seek the core meaning of things and the satisfying symmetry of antithesis. They touch the taproots of the mind without requiring the service of the intellect.

Precursor Sage. Many words in a given language can be traced to their root origins by a skilled lexicographer. The ancestry of proverbs can rarely be determined with scientific accuracy. Aeschylus was as familiar as Solomon with the proverb, "A soft answer turneth away wrath," but no one can say to what precursor sage both men owed the saying. It remains a mystery, moreover, why some civilizations are rich in proverbs and others are not. Why did the Incas, the Mayans and nearly all the Indian tribes of North America produce such a meager crop of proverbs, when the Spaniards, the Samoans, the Arabs and the Chinese were minting them by the thousands?

The answers must await further exploration of that greatest mystery of all: the processes of the mind. Milner's contention is that the proverb, the wild flower of human wisdom, may now help to direct the search into the deep.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.