4 ms·

I remember by accident quite a few of the tales the Grimms record weren't German folk tales but French one (as unbelievable as this sounds) :https://www.zeit.de

• goto11 6y ago
  Why is that unbelievable? Folktales are an orally transmitted genre which does not respect national borders. Some stories appear in both Decameron and Arabian Nights.
  • andi999 6y ago
    It is not that the stories already diffused in the German population. It is (I think) the person telling the stories was raised by a French person. In an analogy it is more like you write a German English dictionary, but the German words are French (and not yet absorbed by the German language). I find this surprising (of course not if you know the backstory)
  • type0 6y ago
    One example is Reynard the Fox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynard_the_Fox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynard_the_Fox that's probably of Old High German origin but has been adopted into other languages, see how it has transitioned between the languages.
    • azepoi 6y ago
      It was so popular it displaced the french word for fox. Foxes were called "goupil", "renard" in modern french.