Certain Scriptural Proverbial Phrases Have Their Malay Counterparts.
Thus, The Impossibility Of The Ethiopian Changing His Skin Or The
Leopard
His spots is represented by "Though you may feed a jungle-fowl
off a gold plate, it will make for
The jungle all the same." "Casting
pearls before swine" by "What is the use of the peacock strutting in
the jungle?" "Can these stones become bread?" by "Can the earth become
grain?" "Neither can salt water yield sweet," by a very elaborate
axiom, "You may plant the bitter cucumber in a bed of sago, manure it
with honey, water it with molasses, and train it over sugar cane, but
it will be the bitter cucumber still," and "Clear water cannot be drawn
from a muddy fountain."
Some of their sayings are characteristic. In allusion to the sport of
cock-fighting, a coward is called "a duck with spurs." A treacherous
person is said to "sit like a cat, but leap like a tiger;" and of a
chatterer it is said, "The tortoise produces a myriad eggs and no one
knows it; the hen lays one and tells the whole word." "Grinding pepper
for a bird on the wing" is regarded as equivalent to "First catch you
hare before you cook it." "To plant sugar-cane on the lips" is to be
"All things to all men." Fatalism is expressed by a saying, "Even the
fish which inhabit the seventh depth of the sea sooner or later enter
the net." "Now it is wet, now it is fine," is a common way of saying
that a day of revenge is not far off.
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