BREAD AND WATER IN ROMANIAN AND SPANISH PAREMIOLOGY
BREAD AND WATER IN ROMANIAN AND SPANISH PAREMIOLOGY

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the representation of bread and water in Spanish and Romanian paremiology from a comparative and cultural perspective. Drawing on a corpus extracted from the “Multilingual Proverb Collection” of the Cervantes Virtual Centre, the study analyses Spanish proverbs and their Romanian equivalents in order to explore the cultural models and symbolic values associated with these two fundamental elements of human subsistence.Beyond their literal reference to food and survival, bread and water emerge as culturally salient symbols that encode collective experiences, social values, and traditional forms of knowledge. Through a qualitative and contrastive analysis, the study investigates both the convergences and divergences between the Spanish and Romanian proverbial traditions, paying particular attention to the processes of cultural adaptation that underlie paremiological equivalence. The findings reveal that, although both linguistic communities share common conceptualizations related to subsistence, prudence, experience, and the passage of time, these meanings are frequently expressed through culturally specific images and symbolic associations.The analysis further demonstrates that proverbs function as repositories of cultural memory, preserving inherited interpretations of reality and transmitting collective knowledge across generations. In this regard, bread and water transcend their material dimension and become symbolic categories through which communities conceptualize fundamental aspects of human existence. By integrating insights from paremiology, cultural linguistics, and semantic studies, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationship between language, culture, and collective memory in the Romance-speaking world.

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