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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?
by 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 agoThe 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.