My love is like a horse, and other Slovak sayings. (source: www.pexels.com)
After coming up with a list of top 10 Slovak words, I wanted to write a list of top 5 Slovak sayings. After a fortnight of rummaging through books and harassing Slovaks for ideas, however, it became clear that the number was impossibly small. One Slovak book alone lists 12,000 sayings (porekadlá), proverbs (príslovia) and expressions (výrazy).
Learning sayings is a lively way for a language student to examine the way vocabulary teams up with grammar, and if used at the proper time, allows him or her to appear erudite after studying for only five minutes.
Say you're an English teacher living in Slovakia, and you've got some backpacker type English teaching friends sleeping on your floor and eating your food. You might say to them, "Look, bez práce nie sú koláče." (Without work there is no cake.)
During my months as an English teacher avoiding teaching English at all costs I lived with a mother and daughter who had a love/hate relationship. It was easy to make them laugh by saying at a choice moment, Aká matka, taká Katka (like mother, like Katka).
Slovakia is above all a rural nation, or was when most of the country's sayings were thought up. What metaphor do you use in Slovak to give your expressions of affection that added kick? Do you compare your beloved's beauty to a sunset or moonrise, do you fasten the weight of your passion to the cosmic scale? No. You say, I love you like a horse (ľúbim ťa ako koňa).
