As culturally distilled and quintessential elements

proverbs play in speech communication a subtle and irreplaceable function. The proverbs that denote human possessed linguistic competence reflect the core of communicativeness in the same or similar genre from a number of languages

the author tries to come up with 1) In general terms

a comparative study of proverbs can throw insight upon the ways and means of human communication; 2) Communicative intention provides an effective basis for the classification of proverbs referring to speech and silence; 3) This group of proverbs constitutes a source of ethnographic data that are valid in constructing a picture of universal traditional cultural core.