THE WOLF, THE FOX, AND THE HORSE: A CROSS-CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF ANIMAL SYMBOLISM IN ENGLISH, RUSSIAN, AND UZBEK PHRASEOLOGY
Keywords:
animal symbolism, wolf, fox, horse, proverbs, idioms, English, Russian, Uzbek, contrastive linguistics, cultural identity, phraseology.Abstract
This article investigates the symbolic meanings of three animals - the wolf, the fox, and the horse - across the phraseological heritage of English, Russian, and Uzbek. These three languages, belonging to the Germanic, Slavic, and Turkic language families respectively, have developed distinct but partially overlapping systems of animal symbolism that reflect their different cultural histories, geographical environments, and value systems. Through a comparative analysis of proverbs and idioms from all three languages, the article demonstrates that while certain core symbolic associations are shared across the three traditions - reflecting universal human observation of animal behavior - significant divergences exist that encode cultural differences of considerable depth. The wolf emerges as the most culturally differentiated of the three animals studied, carrying meanings ranging from deception in English to complex survival in Russian to pastoral danger in Uzbek. The findings contribute to the broader field of contrastive cultural linguistics and have implications for translation practice and intercultural communication.
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