Do oral traditions exist?

[GoneWithTheWind]

The day the Ottomans got your mom.

Since when are you my mom?

[wvwvw]

Since when are you my mom?

Since never

[Scholarios]

THAT IS NOT ORAL TRADITION!

Something has to have been practiced for generations without the use of or access to writing to be called an oral tradition.

Yes, and that is what oral tradition is. That is what the Homeric epics were. I am just demonstrating that human memory is capable of memorizing thousands of lines of dialogue through repetition. In addition, my next point is that oral tradition was never simply about memorization, but about composition during recitation.

Tradition means ACCURATE dissemination beyond living memory. Writing is what offers 99.9999% reliability of accurate transmission.

It doesn't mean accurate. There are a dozen versions of poems because people memorized and performed things in various forms and passed them down differently, each time adding something unique.

These songs are all copyrighted and written down or recorded. There is no evidence of an oral tradition in their propagation. Songs are part of a written tradition because they had go be composed first. And even if they were an oral tradition they would be impossible to prove. The songs date no earlier to the time they were first written down. There is no way you can verify if there were any changes to the original concept before then, unless you have a time machine.

Aside from the anachronistic horse shit about "copyright". Again, I am just saying, it is possible to memorize thousands of lines of dialogue without ever looking at a manscript. There are various ways to memorize massive amounts of material. Illiterate medieval Christians used such mechanisms:

Even more common was the imagining of some structure or building that could be used with all its nooks and crannies to store memorized information and then revisited by a mental walk and the information recalled. Often biblical structures such as the Ark, the Temple, and the Tabernacle were used. Also common are a Roman house, rungs on a ladder, a world map, a monastery grounds, and especially a well-organized medieval walled garden. See the famous picture of the Plan of St. Gall which was used for such meditative memory purposes


Do you think it is some coincidence that many of the famous poets and memorizers also happened to be blind? Was Homer using braille in the Dark Ages? Or Didymus the Blind, who lost his eyesight at 4 and yet became perfectly well-versed in and could recite the Scriptures? Or the Serbian Homer, Visnjic who could recite tens of thousands of lines on the conquest of Serbia? He was blind since youth as well.

And how would you preserve these for posterity without writing them down? You can't memorise something that has not even been composed.

Easy- you pass it on to the next generation. Like every single profession until the modern period. Bard's son becomes a bard. The position was known to be hereditary, and still is in traditional cultures.

If songs could be passed down orally then we would have known what music in Ancient Greek sounded like

.

Pointless observation, as the ancient Greeks had written word, and still didn't pass down much on what it sounded like. Anyways, the ancient Greeks and their culture went extinct, for all intents and purposes. There was an abrupt breakdown of culture and tradition. In fact there were several of these. However, as Lawson points out, many of their ideas and traditions did get passed down to modern Greeks (and other Balkanians, solely through oral tradition.). Even when the Church had a near monopoly on the written word, these ideas managed to survive. This is one of the greatest achievements of our ancestors, which you shit on.

Everyone in their right mind with the option of writing something down for posterity or attempting the impossible of trying to pass it on orally would write it down. Today there is also the option of recording the piece so you argument goes out the window.

You are speaking from only the modern perspective. But not from the perspective of an illiterate shepherd or reaver from the 6th Century BC

Try learning an entire opera from just one preference, complete with instrumental arrangements with every thing sung in the right key with deviation. Operas did not exist before the invention of western musical notation. It was impossible to even contemplate composing multi-part harmonies without such a notation let along teaching people to sing them correctly.

Homer isn't opera.

On top of that how the hell can you possibly compose a story as long a the Iliad except in writing. There is NO WAY anything longer that a few verses could possibly composed except using pen and paper.

Maybe for developmentally disabled people with ADD and eating 60% of their meals at McDonalds, that might be true. But for people like the medieval Anglo-Saxons, it wasn't.

When was Beowulf composed?


Nobody knows for certain when the poem was first composed. Beowulf is set in the pagan world of sixth-century Scandinavia, but it also contains echoes of Christian tradition. The poem must have been passed down orally over many generations, and modified by each successive bard, until the existing copy was made at an unknown location in Anglo-Saxon England.

How about you prove your stupid theory and go out on Friday an buy a Harry Potter book like order of the Phoenix and tell your mum to read it out to you aloud and then come back here on Saturday and type it all out.

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When we talk about from now until Saturday, then of course not. When we talk about a lifetime, then yes, of course I could, with a lot of error. But it is okay, because Homer didn't have a script and could make up or change parts This follows the idea that the author of the Illiad and Odyssey was not a single author, but many over centuries.

Homer's works were orally transmitted and orally performed poems, ever changing in the mouths of the different people who learned them and told them again. The Iliad survived for hundreds, if not thousands, of years as a spoken poem and was eventually written down, around 700 to 750 B.C. But no manuscripts survive from that time.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...-travel-world/

You just try memorising the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Prokofiev including the parts for every instrument by just listening to them.

Retard- you are comparing apples to oranges here. What we are saying is that the Homeric poems, consisting of words, were improvised.

These works would have been impossible to even compose if it had not been for the invention of western music notation. With out stave notation music would
have been limited at most to one part harmonies (which is not a harmony at all) and the pentatonic scale. Homer and Hesiod were to literature is what Mozart and Beethoven were to music. None of their work would have been possible except in writing.

Your ad nauseum comparison of Homer to Mozart is completely arbitrary- and I know why. You have nothing else to base it on. You are a fraud.




Here is again an illiterate Irish shepherd who memorized whole epics of ten thousand lines.

[Myanthropologies]

Since when are you my mom?

Dayum. I thought she pwned you, but you came back with a good one.

[Profileid]

One of Raine's greatest hits.

[ВЛАД]

anal traditions exist

Hahaha