God helps those who observe his holy days – Polish religious festivals in old and modern Polish phraseology and paremiology

Elżbieta Skorupska-Raczyńska

Uniwersytet Szczeciński

Abstract

For centuries, religious festivals have played an important culture-creating role in the Polish society. They also refer to the time around the festival seasons. The social importance of the holy days is reflected by a large number of phrasemes and proverbs found in dictionaries of the Polish language and paremiographic collections. The author has reviewed various lexicographic sources and selected several dozen phrasemes related to religious festivals in general as well as over 200 proverbs related to the most important Roman Catholic festivals i.e. Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Pentecost and Corpus Christi. The analysis shows that most of the proverbs relate to Christmas (63%), some of them to Easter (23%), Epiphany (7%) and Pentecost (5.5%), and few are connected to Corpus Christi (1.5%). The largest group of the studied proverbs refers to the weather and economy, few of which are actually in use today. Based on simple syntactic structures and grammatical rhymes, these proverbs once made it easier for Poles to understand and interpret their world. Today, they are a part of the Polish cultural heritage.

Keywords:

phraseology, paremiography, lexis