Proverbs are among the most fascinating language phenomena that transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries. Yet, much of the global landscape of proverbs remains underexplored, as many cultures preserve their traditional wisdom within their own communities due to the oral tradition of the phenomenon. Taking advantage of the current advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), we focus on Greek proverbs, analyzing their sentiment and emotion. Departing from an annotated dataset of Greek proverbs, (1) we propose a multi-label annotation framework and dataset that captures the emotional variability of the proverbs, (2) we up-scale to local varieties, (3) we sketch a map of Greece that provides an overview of the distribution of emotions. Our findings show that the interpretation of proverbs is multidimensional, a property manifested through both multi-labeling and instance-level polarity. LLMs can capture and reproduce this complexity, and can therefore help us better understand the proverbial landscape of a place, as in the case of Greece, where surprise and anger compete and coexist within proverbs.

翻译：谚语是最迷人的语言现象之一，能够跨越文化和语言的界限。然而，由于谚语主要通过口耳相传，许多文化将其传统智慧保留在各自社群内部，导致全球谚语景观在很大程度上仍未得到充分探索。借助自然语言处理（NLP）领域的最新进展，我们聚焦于希腊谚语，分析其情感与情绪特征。基于一个已标注的希腊谚语数据集，我们（1）提出了一个多标签标注框架及数据集，以捕捉谚语的情感多样性；（2）将分析扩展至方言变体；（3）绘制了希腊情感分布概览图。我们的研究结果表明，谚语的解读具有多维性，这一特性既体现在多标签标注中，也体现在实例层面的情感极性上。大语言模型（LLM）能够捕捉并复现这种复杂性，从而帮助我们更好地理解一个地区的谚语景观——以希腊为例，其谚语中惊奇与愤怒既相互竞争又和谐共存。