Emotional and Evaluation Characteristics of Professions and Types of Activity in Ancient Greek Proverbs

Abstract

The results of ancient Greek phraseological units study, which represent the emotional and evaluative characteristics of different professions and activities by ancient Greeks, are presented. 138 ancient Greek phraseological units were analyzed, which include lexemes of the semantic field "professions and activities" (in particular, those that denote the object, result, tool, place of (professional) activity, as well as people's proper names – representatives of a profession that have become a precedent). The lexemes of the semantic subgroups "musical art", "judiciary", "poetic art" have been found to have the highest phraseological productivity, "military affairs", "philosophy", "criminal activity", "medicine" and "sports" have the lowest one. It is important to emphasize that the core lexemes in the analyzed proverbs do not have an evaluative component in their semantics, but in the structure of phraseological units represent a socially fixed assessment or certain social stereotypes due to previous historical experience and cultural preconditions. Quite often stereotypical ideas of the ancient Greek linguistic and cultural community about the representatives of a certain profession or type of activity and their assessment depending on their place of residence or origin are verbalized in phraseological units. Quantitative analysis of phraseological units by type of axiological component revealed a significant advantage of proverbs with a negative connotation over positively or neutrally marked units. Professions and activities in the ancient Greek proverbs are evaluated in two aspects: the relationship between the subject and activity (matching skills, abilities of the subject of activity, effectiveness and benefit to society from the work performed) and personal characteristics of the subject of activity those that are associated in ethnic consciousness with representatives of certain professions and activities, that affect the quality and performance of work (such as mental abilities, taciturnity, truthfulness, ambition, greed, etc.).