TEODOR FLONTA
WELL BEGUN IS HALF DONE...
I begin this second editorial in the life of De
Proverbio with a great sense of satisfaction. In the
six months that have passed since the first issue was
published, we as paremiologists have achieved a lot. Not
only has our electronic journal put 'paremiology' on the
Web, but it has also met with instant success and its
international appeal continues to grow day by day. In fact,
from the humble beginnings of accesses of the order of tens
a week, De
Proverbio (see Statistics)
now attracts a regular readership averaging over 1,300
accesses a day, coming from a weekly average of 50 countries
from all continents. The last couple of weeks registered
days with well over 1,550 accesses. This means that every
minute somebody from somewhere out there in this smaller and
smaller cyberworld of ours clicked on a De
Proverbio document. What's more, our journal
transfers at the moment an average of 63,000,000 bytes per
day to the world, which is the equivalent of some 21,000 A4
pages. The editor and the journal's Editorial Board members
are very proud of this achievement and also very grateful to
you, the readers, for the encouragement you give us simply
by looking at our work.
We have had exchanges of ideas and information on
proverbs with people from different countries as well as
many congratulatory messages from our readers. We appreciate
the impetus they give us to maintain the standard already
achieved by De
Proverbio.
In this second issue we are able to offer a series of
articles on Hispanic proverbs, all
by the authority on the subject, Professor Shirley
L. Arora. We join Proverbium, which has dedicated its 1995 issue as a "Festschrift" to
Shirley, and congratulate her for an outstanding
contribution to paremiology. On a personal note, my
heartfelt thanks for her continuous support and advice on
editorial matters.
In the Current Research section we publish three
articles, one by Wolfgang
Mieder (USA) dealing with Churchill's use of proverbs, the second by Jonathan Charteris-Black (UK)
on speech and silence
proverbs and the third, written in Spanish by
Herón Pérez Martínez (Mexico), on ethnic identity in
Mexican proverbs.
In the Notes and Queries we
have placed enquiries regarding proverbs. We invite anyone
able to answer to send an e-mail to our readers directly
from that page.
I am delighted to announce that the next issue's MASTERS
section will be devoted to the writings of the late Archer
Taylor, the "grand master of international paremiology"
(Wolfgang
Mieder).
Copyright © Teodor Flonta
Teodor
Flonta
October 1995