| Outi Lauhakangas: The Matti Kuusi international type system of proverbs. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia (Academia Scientiarum Fennica). 2001. 158 pp. ISBN 951-41-0882-5 (hardback) 17 euros (hardback) |
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| FROM 1965 TO 1974 Matti Kuusi was editor-in-chief of the famous journal Proverbium and invited proverb scholars to contribute to this forum. During this period he began to keep a card index of literature references to proverb types and made his first experiment in the thematic classification of international proverb materials in the 1970s (FF Communications No. 211). This volume is a study of the development of this type system. Outi Lauhakangas, who as Matti Kuusi’s daughter was able to benefit from his guidance, attempts to show how her father’s practical dream of a common international reference code came to be realised. The reader will find a list of some 700 global or almost global proverb motifs and can access the database via the website of the Finnish Literature Society (http://www.finlit.fi). The international proverb database serves as a tool for various disciplines from folklore to cognitive sciences.
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OUTI LAUHAKANGAS, social psychologist, is a Project Researcher at the Folklore Archive of the Finnish Literature Society. Her main assignment in the 1990s was the development of a database of international proverb types. She has also worked on Baltic-Finnish proverbs in a Finnish-Estonian project and published collections of world proverbs and quotations for Finnish readers.