Re: [edict-jmdict] Can a yojijukugo be a proverb?

[Nils Roland Barth <jmdict.nbarth@********>]

Concur completely with Jim:
Yojijukugo are special enough to need a tag ([yoji]), but they are not a
separate POS.
They are *syntactically* nouns (sometimes also [vs] etc.), but
semantically are a special kind of idiom.

Other categories don’t work well, as these are Chinese/East Asian
culturally-specific, and when glossing or translating we tend to
render them as expressions.

Regarding the terminology, it’s literally “(4 character) set phrase”,
though these are only phrases in (Classical) Chinese: in
Japanese these are lexical units, hence [n].


A more idiomatic term is perhaps “aphorism”, and a classic close
analog to yojijukugo in the West is the Latin “Ars longa, vita brevis”
(“Art is long, life is short.”)
(…though originally in Greek as “Ὁ βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή,”
“Ho bios brakhys, hê de tekhnê makrê,” which isn’t as pithy.)
Anyway, Wikipedia has other types of sayings, none of which
really fit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saying


BTW, a hobby of mine is minting new 4-char phrases to
translate Western sayings. My favorite so far is:
雨後晴天
for the French:
après la pluie, le beau temps
(after rain [comes] good weather)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apr%C3%A8s_la_pluie,_le_beau_temps

Best, Nils