4 ms·

Thank you for not letting me assume it was a typo.

• throwanem 10y ago
  Nice thing about verses, unless they're the worst, is the scan and the rhyme can in parsing save time; when a word fits the scheme, though unlikely it seem, it's been chosen with care for the meaning that's there. (What did you think it was a typo for?)
  • pavel_lishin 10y ago
    > Nice thing about verses, unless they're the worst, is the scan and the rhyme can in parsing save time; I remember someone mentioning that in the oral tradition - pre-literate stuff - rhyming was a sort of checksum to make sure that your story didn't drift too much with retellings.
    • jacobush 10y ago
      A very good checksum. Even if the listener might not always be able to recite a saga or poem, she would likely be pretty able to detect a deviation from the standard telling. I think the rhyming did not exactly prevent changes, but made patches obvious. Kinda like git and source control. :) Oral tradition has been proven to be extremely stable under the right circumstances. Australia has tales about ancestral hunting grounds which have been lost to the sea for millennia. https://www.sott.net/article/291976-Australian-aboriginal-stories-of-ancient-sea-level-rise-have-survived-for-10000-years https://www.sott.net/article/291976-Australian-aboriginal-st...