Comment by cubefox
8 hours ago
100 years isn't that long though. Enough to transmit an exact date to multiple people. Also, the oldest surviving record isn't necessarily the earliest record there ever was.
8 hours ago
100 years isn't that long though. Enough to transmit an exact date to multiple people. Also, the oldest surviving record isn't necessarily the earliest record there ever was.
Go play a game of telephone with 20 people and see how well information travels. Now multiply that by 100 years.
If that game of telephone includes the sentence "I'm going to kidnap your child", I'll bet it travels faster and more accurately than you think it will.
100 years doesn't require a game of telephone with 20 people. It requires maybe 2 or 3. And for a event known to a whole town, you have multiple independent narrators which can help stabilize information.
My family has far more trivial information passed down orally that is way older than 100 years.
Mine doesn't. I know just a handful of things about my great grandparents. Things I do know about my family history didn't come from oral traditions but rather records placing my ancestors in places.
Even from what I know of my parents, I'm sure I've forgotten or misremembered a bunch of stories that they've told me about their lives. I couldn't reliably retell more than a handful of stories.
That calculation doesn't make sense.
The telephone game lacks features in the telling that are common in oral storytelling that help reinforce the content and reduces the number of errors. Repeated telling, repetition in the structure, rhyming and alliteration (which is used, or even if they're used, depends on the language), being made into a song (seems to stick better than just straight speaking), etc. If you played the telephone game with a deliberately constructed story using those elements and taught that story to the next "generation" by repetition over a period of time before they, in turn, repeated it to the next generation it would be much more reliable. It also wouldn't be the telephone game.
I'm convinced that poems are an effective error-correcting code for remembering things.
Except oral histories seemed to have been very important to people and passing them down accurately has been noted throughout history
No TV, no books. Lightly populated rural communities, without a lot of visitors.
People loved stories because they were bored.
3 replies →
Yeah it is. It's a full generation.
The Spanish flu is a great example of that phenomena. It's hardly mentioned in history books yet we had a flu season where people were dying in the streets. Very shortly after it happened, people stopped talking about it or mentioning it.
COVID is looking like it will very much turn into the same thing.
These are massive global events that may only get small blubs 100 years later. Now imagine an event that happens in a localized area. How much of that event will get carried on or reported?
You also have to remember that in the 1200s, things like paper and ink were a lot more expensive than modern paper. That's part of the reason literacy rates were a lot lower.
> It's a full generation.
This is wrong. It is 4 generations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation
« the average period, generally considered to be about 20–30 years, during which children are born and grow up, become adults, and begin to have children. »
> a great example of that phenomena
This is wrong. "Phenomena" is plural. The singular is "phenomenon."
> It's hardly mentioned in history books
Because it is living memory for a small number of people.
"Spanish flu" is widely remembered, and just 4-5 years ago thousands of articles were published comparing the measures taken a century before against a pandemic.
> small blubs
I think you meant "blurbs", as in "short informal pieces of writing", and it's a poor choice of words anyway. "To blub" means to cry.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/blub
These repeated errors strongly weaken your argument, and suggest that despite your confident tone you don't know as much as you think.
Your off-topic ad hominems or pedantic takedowns weaken any point you might have had, if you'd had one. This is not high school debate or reddit. We can do better here. It's best to take the most generous view of a post and address the core thesis.
Wow, you achieved being an asshole. Good for you?