Resources on idioms

Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
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Curlyjimsam
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Resources on idioms

Post by Curlyjimsam »

(A question asked to aid conlanging, but technically about real languages, and interesting enough in its own right, so I suppose it should go in this forum ...)

Does anybody know of any good resources listing idioms in various languages? Ideally grouped by semantic fields - e.g. a list of idioms from different languages about talking, a list of ones about sex, etc. - though not necessarily. It would be interesting to see how different languages go about forming idioms, and while I can find quite a lot of "top 10 most weird idioms in the world's languages"-type lists, my (admittedly rather brief) researches have not uncovered anything more comprehensive than that. Omniglot has a list, but it's not very detailed; there's Wiktionary appendices on idioms in a handful of languages, most again not very detailed.

(Proverbs are easier to uncover, but not all idioms are proverbs.)

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linguoboy
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Re: Resources on idioms

Post by linguoboy »

I think all the works I've ever seen are strictly bilingual (possibly excepting one or two trilingual works).

You could try using Wiktionary's indexing features to look at the category of English idioms, but these aren't sorted by category and the translations are hit-and-miss as far as which languages are included and whether literal equivalents are given.

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