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Not relevant, but "the fish rots from the head" is relevant to Chinese? I cannot find any explanation of that connection. Just curious.
by justicezyx 8y ago
Not relevant, but "the fish rots from the head" is relevant to Chinese? I cannot find any explanation of that connection. Just curious.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gojomo 8y agoWhen I search Google for [fish rots from head], the top 3 results each mention some Chinese connection – one calls it a "Chinese proverb", others say it's been variously attributed to many traditions, often Turkish, Greek, or Chinese. (So: maybe that's an origin. Or perhaps there's something vaguely similar in some Chinese traditions. Or perhaps it's just a common mal-attribution, as there's a tendency in the west to ascribe various highly-figurative or riddle-like pearls of wisdom to "the Chinese", or "the Arabs", or "the Buddhists", etc.)
- monomyth 8y agohttps://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fish-rot-from-the-head-down.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fish-rot-from-the-head-d...
- anyfoo 8y agoI cannot answer that question, but I can add that it's a common German saying as well, in a slightly different form: "The fish smells from the head."
- vl 8y agoIt's widely used in Russia and considered to be a classical Russian proverb.
- paganel 8y agoIt's also very much used in Romania, so I suspect we either got it from the Turkish (the source mentioned by someone above) or it comes from our Slavic roots (from where it might have originated in modern Russian, too). Living at the crossroads of different civilizations and migration routes can be fun like that.
- oh-kumudo 8y agoI can't really think of a Chinese proverb out of my instincts that linked to this translation, the closest one being "上梁不正下梁歪", literal translation "When the upper beam (of a house) is not in the right place, the lower beam follows"