3 ms·

This is not good research, unfortunately. It is impossible to trace back the origin of stories in our past without either written documents or oral traditions.

This is not good research, unfortunately. It is impossible to trace back the origin of stories in our past without either written documents or oral traditions. Everything else is made up correlations and patterns. A sentence like "The results of the analyses suggested that a substantial number of tales exhibit significant correlations with linguistic relationships that are consistent with vertical processes of cultural inheritance." is just empty words. It is baseless speculation covered in a scientific jargon, and what Harry Frankfurt would call Bullshit. You could as well write "The results of the bullshit suggested that a bullshit number of tales exhibit bullshit correlations with bullshit relationships that are bullshit with bullshit processes of cultural bullshit". There is a large part of the academic community where everything that matters is producing academic-sounding material to stay relevant, get more money and continue doing bullshit. Now, the interesting thing is that the actual conclusion of the paper is actually true - fairytales share a common root, we see the same stories worldwide, and this has been known in mythology and psychology for a long time. But this research does not add anything new, and forgets to mention the interesting aspects well-known in comparative mythology. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” - Harry G. Frankfurt

plasticeagle 2y ago
Well, maybe. It might also be academic endeavour that is worth doing for its own sake. Everybody works, everybody eats - and some people work doing things like this because all the useful jobs are taken. Weird, but it's done us proud so far as a species.
bazoom42 2y ago
You call bullshit, but you dont provide any actual argument. What does that make your comment?
- michael9423 2y ago
  Historical linguistics is based on the analysis and comparison of written documents and existing languages (so-called "attested languages"). Past languages are infered either from different languages (comparative) or from a single language (internal). All of this is already very speculative and likely wrong most of the time, especially when internal, but at least you can discover some patterns. What you can't do with linguistics, is infer the existence of stories in the past just because they exist in the present. Language just does not have this kind of data stored. Let's say 4000 year's ago some guy told a fairy tale about a wolf and someone else wrote it on some kind of paper-like material. Then the people died and the paper got destroyed. At some point the entire culture of this guy disappeared, and only the basic language survived into a new culture. So how do you figure out today that a certain story existed back then? Short answer, you can't. We don't even know that the entire culture existed, let alone a story within that culture.
  - bazoom42 2y ago
    Sure, we can’t know about stories which have been lost without a trace. But what does this have do with the research described in the article?
    - michael9423 2y ago
      The authors claim to be able to show that "oral traditions probably originated long before the emergence of the literary record" and trace back a story to the Bronze Age. As I just explained, this is impossible to do with linguistics. Or, as the authors themselves write: "While Grimm believed that many folktales were likely to be thousands of years old, only a tiny minority can be traced back to before the emergence of the literary fairy tale in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This has led to intense debates about the presumed antiquity of traditional tales [16], with some researchers claiming that many canonical fairy tales may actually be relatively recent literary inventions [17,18]." Before the 16th century, everything is dark. Linguistics does not change this, it's wishful thinking. I don't see anything in the paper that changes this fact. They claim that two European tales "can be securely traced back to the emergence of the major western Indo-European subfamilies as distinct lineages between 2500 and 6000 years ago", just using linguistics. And this is what I question, because the authors do not provide any evidence for their claim.
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    if (for the sake of argument) the words dog and wolf and fox have jointly evolved in an apparent way over time, phonetically and morphologically, from proto-indo-european to modern descendent languages, and so have some other words like grapes and manger and cry and villagers, and these modern cultures have similar but different shared stories about dogs in mangers, foxes and grapes, and crying wolf so the villagers will come, and the differences between the stories across cultures just so happens to be in concordance with the evolution of those words, I'd say that is evidence of a shared origin for the stories. I don't think you are showing much imagination about one would investigate such an idea.
    - michael9423 2y ago

plasticeagle 2y ago

Well, maybe. It might also be academic endeavour that is worth doing for its own sake. Everybody works, everybody eats - and some people work doing things like this because all the useful jobs are taken. Weird, but it's done us proud so far as a species.

bazoom42 2y ago

You call bullshit, but you dont provide any actual argument. What does that make your comment?

michael9423 2y ago
Historical linguistics is based on the analysis and comparison of written documents and existing languages (so-called "attested languages"). Past languages are infered either from different languages (comparative) or from a single language (internal). All of this is already very speculative and likely wrong most of the time, especially when internal, but at least you can discover some patterns. What you can't do with linguistics, is infer the existence of stories in the past just because they exist in the present. Language just does not have this kind of data stored. Let's say 4000 year's ago some guy told a fairy tale about a wolf and someone else wrote it on some kind of paper-like material. Then the people died and the paper got destroyed. At some point the entire culture of this guy disappeared, and only the basic language survived into a new culture. So how do you figure out today that a certain story existed back then? Short answer, you can't. We don't even know that the entire culture existed, let alone a story within that culture.
- bazoom42 2y ago
  Sure, we can’t know about stories which have been lost without a trace. But what does this have do with the research described in the article?
  - michael9423 2y ago
    The authors claim to be able to show that "oral traditions probably originated long before the emergence of the literary record" and trace back a story to the Bronze Age. As I just explained, this is impossible to do with linguistics. Or, as the authors themselves write: "While Grimm believed that many folktales were likely to be thousands of years old, only a tiny minority can be traced back to before the emergence of the literary fairy tale in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This has led to intense debates about the presumed antiquity of traditional tales [16], with some researchers claiming that many canonical fairy tales may actually be relatively recent literary inventions [17,18]." Before the 16th century, everything is dark. Linguistics does not change this, it's wishful thinking. I don't see anything in the paper that changes this fact. They claim that two European tales "can be securely traced back to the emergence of the major western Indo-European subfamilies as distinct lineages between 2500 and 6000 years ago", just using linguistics. And this is what I question, because the authors do not provide any evidence for their claim.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  if (for the sake of argument) the words dog and wolf and fox have jointly evolved in an apparent way over time, phonetically and morphologically, from proto-indo-european to modern descendent languages, and so have some other words like grapes and manger and cry and villagers, and these modern cultures have similar but different shared stories about dogs in mangers, foxes and grapes, and crying wolf so the villagers will come, and the differences between the stories across cultures just so happens to be in concordance with the evolution of those words, I'd say that is evidence of a shared origin for the stories. I don't think you are showing much imagination about one would investigate such an idea.
  - michael9423 2y ago