The presence of insects in our everyday lives is affirmed by their presence in idioms (priden kot mravlja – literally ‘diligent as an ant’, busy as a bee; len kot trot – literally ‘lazy as a drone’, lazy as a toad; delati iz muhe slona – literally ‘to make an elephant out of a fly’, to make a mountain out of a molehill). These topics were the focus of a workshop at one of the stalls during the European Researchers’ Night.
In the first part of the workshop, Faculty of Arts researchers gave an interactive presentation on selected insects, their appearance and way of life as well as related types of forming insect names in Slovenian.
In doing so, they revealed the reasons for some insects’ names and how their names were linguistically formed. By comparing these names with their counterparts in a related Slavic language, Czech, they demonstrated differences and similarities in forming names for these tiny animals.
The second part of the workshop demonstrated selected Slovenian idioms featuring insects, comparing them to idioms with the same meanings in Czech. The participants discovered cultural differences between the two Slavic nations and differences in their perceptions of their surroundings.
Coordinator: Petra Stankovska, PhD, Faculty of Arts
