The Great Flood

[Birdjaguar]

I read through the second myth and topped. I stand corrected and will re-read the link.

 

[Berzerker]

whats interesting is it suggests Shasta was smoking too

 

[Hrothbern]

This is the shared experience that hurts modern peoples' intuitions about the robustness of oral traditions.

Yes
I think Lyrics of popular songs, that you "just have to know", are a much better example how strong oral tradition can be, than a childrens game designed to prove how bad it can be

 

[Synobun]

It's a fundamentally weak method of propagating consistent information over a long period of time. Believing that hundreds/thousands of people will collectively endure and guarantee original accuracy over the course of millennia is beyond naive. This doesn't even work in a modern society with physical, tangible record-keeping.

It is robust in the sense of maintaining and transmitting cultural identity. It is not a reliable method of propagation for factual information.

 

[uppi]

People were carving the moonth on artifacts more than 30,000 years ago. Why wouldn't a person say they lived so many moons or years? Watching the sun migrate back and forth along the horizon would have provided people with our notion of years and they would have figured out generations occur every 15-25 years, we had several means of keeping track of time without written calendars as we know them today. Just marks on a wall, or bone, or stone would do. Course the oral tradition would become less accurate than marking down the years over the generations, but thats understandable. At some point the myth might change from a number of years to just long ago, but the Tlingit were trying to keep track. And it was the Egyptians who apparently told the Greeks Atlantis existed in 9600 BC.

They could and probably did keep track of the time of any events they told stories about - but only for a limited time. "Last winter" is probably a concept most people understood, but "563 moons ago" not only requires someone to keep track of that (that is an awful amount of marks) but also the ability to understand and express the number 563. I doubt that this ability was widespread 1000 years ago.

With a calendar, keeping track of events in an oral tradition is easy. A new bearer of the tradition just has to repeat the date that was passed to him by the old bearer. Without a calendar, you would have to update the tradition with every telling, requiring skill and cultural developments from the keepers of the tradition and I would bet that almost any case of "Your great-great-great grandfather" morphed into "Your ancestor" at some point.

 

[Hygro]

It's a fundamentally weak method of propagating consistent information over a long period of time. Believing that hundreds/thousands of people will collectively endure and guarantee original accuracy over the course of millennia is beyond naive. This doesn't even work in a modern society with physical, tangible record-keeping.

It is robust in the sense of maintaining and transmitting cultural identity. It is not a reliable method of propagation for factual information.

All of which is you presuming.

 

[Berzerker]

They could and probably did keep track of the time of any events they told stories about - but only for a limited time. "Last winter" is probably a concept most people understood, but "563 moons ago" not only requires someone to keep track of that (that is an awful amount of marks) but also the ability to understand and express the number 563. I doubt that this ability was widespread 1000 years ago.

With a calendar, keeping track of events in an oral tradition is easy. A new bearer of the tradition just has to repeat the date that was passed to him by the old bearer. Without a calendar, you would have to update the tradition with every telling, requiring skill and cultural developments from the keepers of the tradition and I would bet that almost any case of "Your great-great-great grandfather" morphed into "Your ancestor" at some point.

Yeah, I'd agree measuring long periods of time by moons would be problematic. But years or generations is more realistic. Peoples who developed writing usually included 'mythical' times, like the various Mesopotamian kings lists or the Vedas of India and Maya. The latter identify 3113 BC as particularly important as the end (or beginning) of an age, and research shows something might have happened then - a sudden climate shift.

 

[Synobun]

All of which is you presuming.

Is this the newest way to be #woke? It's not a revolutionary or absurd idea that relying on someone's memory and retelling to maintain an accurate record of an event is Bad™ and Unreliable®. It doesn't even require malice on the storyteller's part. Memory is fickle. Details get lost. Things change.

 

[Hygro]

Do you understand the difference between presuming and knowledge?

 

[Synobun]

Do you understand the difference between presuming and knowledge?

Do you understand the difference between acknowledging something as a remote possibility and incorporating that remote possibility as an equal component in considering likelihoods?

That there exists a non-zero chance of lucking out is true. Between 0.0000000001% and 99.9999999999% I'll bet on the latter any day of the week.

 

[Hygro]

Again, all of that reasoning stems from your imagination of how an oral history might be preserved, which in turn comes from your experience playing telephone and your own memory.

Can you recite the words to Happy Birthday? Do you ever have trouble remembering the words? Have the words to Happy Birthday changed over the years?

"I don't see what this has to do with the preservation of oral histories"

Of course not, you're locked into thinking an oral history is a collection of events that someone has to memorize and retell correctly. Like a game of telephone. So how could I be arguing any differently? It must be that Hygro is banking on a 1 in a 10 billion chance. Never, but with enough cultures I'll take one in a million. Still not the point. So how would I argue any differently from you? What do I know that you don't?

 

[Synobun]

Can you recite the words to Happy Birthday? Do you ever have trouble remembering the words? Have the words to Happy Birthday changed over the years?

I can't. I do. Yes.

 

[Hygro]

Do people sing Happy Birthday in Canada?

 

[Synobun]

Okay so then your experience is definitely not one to project in this instance.

I mean, you're the one hyper-focusing on a singular aspect of my original reply and extrapolating that to be the very basis of my entire worldview. I trust that most others are capable of discerning something a little more thoughtful and extensive than "childhood game of Telephone" from what I've said in this thread.

 

[Hygro]

Your whole post was built on that reasoning. You've called everything outside that reasoning both silly and naive. But you are still incorrect because you lack knowledge.

Nowhere do I extrapolate it to your whole worldview—you're projecting, and exaggerating. I am saying your argument on this subject is captured by the intuition informed by that experience. But weirdly what you're trusting that others are capable of discerning more than what you said, i.e...... extrapolating. Only in this case favorably.

What I'm lacking is perseverance in research: I've spent almost two hours today and yesterday trying to find the article I read on this subject years back. I've retraced my steps to Millman Parry's work on epic poems but I haven't found the followup to his Yugoslavian recordings and the article that states that there's almost no fidelity loss to what can be days-long-to-recite oral traditions.

How does this work? In part by being completely unlike a game of telephone, for starters.

 

[Berzerker]

Lexicus posted a link to a myth about the formation of Crater Lake almost 8,000 years ago, the myth describes an eruption. How do you explain that, Synsensa?

 

[Hygro]

you stay out of this Berzerker

 

[Synobun]

Lexicus posted a link to a myth about the formation of Crater Lake almost 8,000 years ago, the myth describes an eruption. How do you explain that, Synsensa?

From my initial reply:

That there are vague details within the realm of being correct isn't proof of consistent or accurate oral tradition. It is very easy to get details right without specifics. "Once there was a flood" is a pretty safe bet in a world where you spend as much time as possible by the rivers which we know flood on a yearly basis.

Nowhere do I extrapolate it to your whole worldview—you're projecting, and exaggerating.

Again, all of that reasoning stems from your imagination of how an oral history might be preserved, which in turn comes from your experience playing telephone and your own memory.

Don't really have a response to the rest of your reply. There isn't anything I can do with "I looked it up but found nothing". I'm willing to bet you won't have a lot of luck proving lack of detail loss or change. If such a thing were provable, that means a written record exists. And if a written record exists, then it's not an oral tradition solely dependent on verbal propagation.

It is the ultimate 'gotcha!' in this dialogue. There is no way to prove that an oral tradition remained intact from its days of origin, and there is no reason to assume that it did remain intact either. Basic human limitation and the circumstances surrounding life and its uncertainties make it woefully unlikely for a retelling to remain untouched for millennia.

My opinion stands without the humorous reference to Telephone. Enforcing original accuracy is challenging even in a modern society with several different apparatuses that can provide time stamps, records, and different methods of consumption. Distant societies entirely reliant on word-of-mouth aren't going to have better luck in that regard, and the already extreme unlikelihood of this enforcement grows more apparent as time goes by. There is no realistic way for an exclusively verbal tale to survive intact for thousands of years.

 

[Berzerker]

That there are vague details within the realm of being correct isn't proof of consistent or accurate oral tradition. It is very easy to get details right without specifics.

Details aren't specific? What is vague about the Indian's description of the volcanic eruption forming Crater Lake almost 8,000 years ago?

 

[onejayhawk]

She answered your question. That you don't like or agree with it doesn't mean she didn't answer it.

No she didn't because the answer was ambiguous. Does she mean that mentioned stories, and other presumably, are based on smaller floods or does she mean that there no memory train of the massive flood, other than it happened. It cannot be both.

I think Noah's ark was a canoe that got exaggerated to being a giant ark over the generations.
'The whole area' (a few miles around where they were settled at the time) is obviously exaggerated to 'the whole world'.
'Hills' exaggerated to 'mountains'

"Grandpa, how did that canoe end up on that hill"
"A guy built a boat to survive the flood"
"Why, how did he know the flood was coming"
"Um, (I don't know), God told him"
"But grandpa, how did the animals survive the flood"
"Oh! That's right! The animals were on the boat, too!"

Canoe is definitely wrong. The Biblical description is of a multi level barge. Depictions of a keeled ship are millennia more recent.

J