The image of dogs appearing in

Vietnamese and English proverbs

Student: Doan Thanh Phuong

Class: 4B07

English-Vietnamese Comparative Linguistics 2010

Instructor: Dr. Nguyn Ngc V

HCMC, December 2010

Thefreedictionary.com, a reliable website, states that proverb is a short pithy saying in

frequent and widespread use that expresses a basic truth or practical precept, and
according to Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, proverb is a well-known phrase or
sentence that gives advice or says something that is generally true.
Proverbs in each country can reflect its diversity in a large space of life, from very little
things to the biggest ones.
During the process of working, socializing, and observing, people gained their own
acquisition and knowledge of the world around them, and then they used proverbs to
express their ideas about it. It could be about the lessons of failure or experiences of
success. It could also be knowledge of science or feelings of life. And then, it would be
spread out and handed down to posterity. It would be experienced and affirmed from
generations to generations.
The philosophy raised in proverbs is not the same as the one raised by philosophers. It
does not use any terminologies but some simple things taken from daily life to show the
experienced lessons, and it even becomes lodestars for humans behaviors. How much the
philosophy of proverbs can be spread out depends on the spread of lifes circle.

One of the simple things used in proverbs is the image of animals, especially pets such as
dogs or cats. This essay will focus on the image of dogs appearing in Vietnamese and
English proverbs.

According to the statistics published by the American Pet Products Manufacturers

Association in the National Pet Owner Survey in 20092010, it is estimated there are

77.5 million dog owners in the United States. Dogs have lived and worked with humans in
so many roles that they have earned the unique nickname, "man's best friend". Therefore,
in Vietnamese and English proverbs, the appearance of the image of dogs is quite frequent.
For examples:

In Vietnamese:
Ch cy nh, g cy vn.
Ch gy h mt ngi nui.
Ch sa l ch khng cn.
nh ch ng ch nh.
Lc n nm ui ch, lc ng nm ui tru.
Ch treo mo y.
C tin ch ha k ln, khng tin k ln ha ch.
M g th gi, m ch th ma.
Treo u d bn tht ch.
Sng dng gian n ming di ch, thc xung m ph bit c m n.
Con khng ch cha m kh, ch khng ch ch ngho.
V d mt h, ch d mt lng ging.
Yu ch, ch lim mt.
Ch c ch ct th ngi mi ch tin.
Ch ba khoanh mi nm, ngi ba nm mi ni.

Thng gia l b con tin, n chng hin l b con ch.

In English:
Every dog has its day.
Give a dog a bad name (and it will hang him).
Dont keep a dog and bark yourself.
Let the tail wag the dog.
You cannot teach the old dog new tricks.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
A barking dog seldom bites.
Better be the head of a dog then the tail of a lion.
If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas.
Even the dogs in the street know.
Dogs of the same street bark alike.
A good dog deserves a good bone.
Two dogs fight for a bone and a third runs away with it.
He who has a mind to beat his dog will easily find a stick.
Dog does not eat dog.
Many dogs may easily worry one.
While the dogs growled at each other, the wolves devoured the sheep.

The number of proverbs in one country can never be fixed; therefore, it is hard to say
whether that of Vietnamese outnumbers English or vice versa. In this essay, the quantity of
Vietnamese and English proverbs concerning dogs will not be mentioned. I will just focus
on some proverbs I have listed above and analyze them to make the comparison clearer.
Dogs are considered having many good characteristics which make them become the best
pet-friends of human beings, such as loyalty or intelligence. However, it seems that the
image of dogs appearing in Vietnamese proverbs is quite different from that in English.
To be clearer, I myself find that to Vietnamese, dog is still more like a low-rank animal with
lots of bad habits, which also come into proverbs to mainly describe some negative
situations in society or terrible characteristics of humans. For example:
Treo u d bn tht ch
This proverb is not much difficult to guess its meaning. It indicates the kind of person who is
knavish yet showing himself as nice ones to do carry out his evil intention a two-faced
person.
Or Yu ch, ch lim mt
This is somehow like a piece of advice. If you cherish and cosset someone too much, they
may take advantage and disrespect you.
From this proverb, we can easily infer that the act of dog licking face is not welcomed in
Vietnam. People here consider it as a disrespectful deed. This is a little bit different from the
other country where people love dog licking their faces for it is the act of showing closeness
and friendliness:

To English people, dog is far more than just a pet. It is like a friend, a partner whom people
can lean on when they are lonely or have troubles. Hence, the image of dogs appearing in
English proverbs seems to be more positive than that in Vietnamese. For example:
Every dog has its own day
This is a quite popular saying in English, which means everyone, sooner or later, will have
his chance to be successful or lucky in life.
Or A good dog deserves a good bone
It is the same meaning as One good turn deserves another, which indicates that if you do
something good for others, there will be something good coming back to you.
However, it is not that there is no good image of dogs in Vietnamese proverbs or no bad of
that in English ones. For example, Vietnamese people also have positive proverbs
concerning dogs, such as Con khng ch cha m kh, ch khng ch ch ngho to bring
out the loyalty of dogs, which is never betraying their owners even though they are in

poverty; or Lc n nm ui ch, lc ng nm ui tru to indicate the intelligence of

dogs.
Proverbs are consistent sentences which merely show the experiences of life and give
pieces of advice for people; hence, most of them (concerning dogs) (both in Vietnamese
and English) are neutral, which means the image of dogs is neither bad nor good. For
example:
Dont keep a dog and bark yourself (Dont pay someone money to do your tasks and then
do it yourself) is used as a piece of advice,
or Dogs of the same street bark alike (People from the same background have the same
behavior) is used as a fact or a truth which is proved during life experience,
or Give a dog a bad name (and it will hang him) (A person will be in a hopeless plight if his
reputation is blackened) is used as a fact or a piece of advice for people trying not to lose
their credit,
or Ch gy h mt ngi nui, Ch sa l ch khng cn, nh ch ng ch nh.
However, it will be hard for learners to understand the meanings of these proverbs without
having knowledge of their origins. For example, people come from other country may not
understand what the proverb Ch treo mo y means. This is the result of peoples dailyobserving process after quite a long time living close to dogs and cats. They have learned
the fact that to be protected food from dogs, food should to be hung higher for dogs cannot
jump high and from cats, it should be covered.
Accordingly, the more you learn the proverbs and their origins of one country, the more you
can understand its culture, and it will certainly help you a lot in language teaching.

In my own opinion, teacher understanding English and Vietnamese proverbs (through the
image of dogs particularly) can be better at guiding his students to understand the culture of
the target language and helping them feel more interested in studying the beauty of the
language also. To be clearer, when you teach English proverbs, you cannot merely explain
their meanings to your students but you have to put them into a specific context and even
compare them to Vietnamese ones with similar meanings. For example, with the English
proverb Dogs of the same street bark alike, instead of explaining it for your students by
translating it into Nhng ch ch sng trn cng mt con ng sa ting nh nhau, it
will be better to borrow the adequate one in Vietnamese like Ngu tm ngu, m tm m.
By this way, your students may feel the beauty of language and find it interesting to
discover more.

Proverbs can reflect not only the experiences or knowledge of people using them but also
the procedure of development of the country. They are changing day by day and let we
know that so life is and people are. From this narrow essay, I hope that people may find it
interesting in studying proverbs, both in English and Vietnamese, for understanding other
countrys proverbs and comparing them with ours, we can see the beauty of our own
language, and vice versa.

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