Oral tradition or oral culture is a way of transmitting history, literature or law from one generation to the next in a civilization without a writing system. An example that combined aspects of oral literature and oral history, before eventually being set down in writing, is the Homeric epic poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey. In a general sense, "oral tradition" refers to the transmission of cultural material by means other than written records, and was long held to be a key descriptor of folklore (a criterion no longer rigidly held by all folklorists). As an academic discipline, it refers both to a method and the objects studied by the method. Oral history is an account of something passed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. ... Orature corresponds in the sphere of the spoken (oral) word to literature as literature operates in the domain of the written word. ... An oral law is a code of conduct in use in a given culture, religion or other regroupement, by which a body of rules of human behaviour is transmitted by oral tradition and effectively respected, or the single rule that is orally transmitted. ... Generation (From the Greek γιγνομαι), also known as procreation, is the act of producing offspring. ... The word civilization (or civilisation) has a variety of meanings related to human society. ... Writing Systems of the World today A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. ... Oral literature corresponds in the sphere of the spoken (oral) word to literature as literature operates in the domain of the written word. ... Oral history is an account of something passed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. ... The Homère Caetani bust at the Louvre, a 2nd century Roman copy of a 2nd century BC Greek original. ... The epic is a broadly defined genre of poetry, and one of the major forms of narrative literature. ... The Iliad (Ancient Greek Ιλιάς, Ilias) is, along with the Odyssey, one of the two major Greek epic poems traditionally attributed to Homer, a supposedly blind Ionian poet. ... Odysseus and Nausicaä - by Charles Gleyre For other uses, see Odyssey (disambiguation). ... The word culture, from the Latin colo, -ere, with its root meaning to cultivate, generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. ... Folklore is the body of verbal expressive culture, including tales, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs current among a particular population, comprising the oral tradition of that culture, subculture, or group. ... This is a list of academic disciplines (and academic fields). ... method (from Greek methodos, met hodos literally way across). The word entered English in 1541 via French and Latin. ...

History of the study of oral tradition

Oral tradition as a field of study had its origins in the work of the Serb scholar Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic (1787-1864), a contemporary of the Brothers Grimm. Vuk pursued similar projects of "salvage folklore" in the cognate traditions of the southern Slavic regions which would later be gathered into Yugoslavia, and with the same admixture of romantic and nationalistic interests. Somewhat later, but as part of the same scholarly moment, the turcologist Vasily Radlov (1837-1918) would study the songs of the Kara Khirgiz in what would later become the Soviet Union. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (Вук Стефановић Караџић) (November 7, 1787 - February 7, 1864) was a Serb linguist and major reformer of the Serbian language. ... they are very interesting writers. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Current division of Europe into five (or more) regions: one definition of Eastern Europe is marked in orange Eastern Europe as a region has several alternative definitions, whereby it can denote: the region lying between the variously and vaguely defined areas of Central Europe and Russia. ... Yugoslavia (Jugoslavija in all south Slavic languages, Југославија in Serbian and Macedonian Cyrillic) is a term used for three separate but successive political entities that existed during most of the 20th century on the Balkan Peninsula in Europe. ... Romanticism was a secular and intellectual movement in the history of ideas that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. ... Nationalism is an ideology that creates and sustains a nation as a concept of a common identity for groups of humans. ... The Turkic people are any of various peoples whose members speak languages in the Turkic family of languages. ... Vasily Vasilievich Radlov or Wilhelm Radloff (1837-1918) was the German-born Russian founder of Turcology, or the scientific study of the Turkic peoples. ...

Milman Parry and Albert Lord

Shortly thereafter, Milman Parry (1902-1935), pursuing a degree in Classics at Harvard, would begin to grapple with what was then called the "Homeric Question," usually framed as "who was Homer?" and "what are the Homeric poems?" The Homeric question actually consists of a series of related inquiries, and Parry's contribution was to reconsider the foundational assumptions which framed the inquiries, a re-ordering that would have consequences for a great many literatures and disciplines. Milman Parry (1902 -December 3, 1935) was a scholar of epic poetry. ... It has been suggested that Greco-Roman be merged into this article or section. ... Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ... For other uses, see Homer (disambiguation). ... The Homère Caetani bust at the Louvre, a 2nd century Roman copy of a 2nd century BC Greek original. ...

Parry's further work under Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne would result in his crucial insight into the "formula," which he originally defined as a certain fixed expression, used to convey an essential idea under the same metrical conditions. Furthermore, the formulas would be not the individual and idiosyncratic devices of a particular artist, but the shared inheritance of a tradition of singers, and useful not so much for enabling a verbatim repetition of what would amount to a fixed (but unwritten) text, as to make possible an improvisational composition-in-performance. The idea met with immediate resistance, because it seemed to make the fount of Western literary eloquence the slave of a system of clichés, but it accounted for such otherwise inexplicable features of the Homeric poems as gross anachronisms (revealed by advances in historical and archaeological knowledge), the presence of incompatible dialects, and the deployment of locally unsuitable epithets ("blameless Aegisthos" for the murderer of Agamemnon, or the almost comic use of "swift-footed Achilles" for the hero in conspicuously sedentary moments). Antoine Meillet (Paul-Jules-Antoine Meillet, November 11, 1866 - September 21, 1936), was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. ... The Sorbonne, Paris, in a 17th century engraving The Sorbonne today, from the same point of view The Sorbonne is frequently used in ordinary parlance as synonymous with the faculty of theology of Paris or the University of Paris in its entirety. ... Improvisation is the act of making something up as it is performed. ... Composition deals with the bits and pieces that make up things. ... This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... An anachronism (from Greek ana, back, and chronos, time) is an artifact that belongs to another time, a person who seems to be displaced in time (i. ... For other senses of this word, see history (disambiguation). ... Archaeology, archeology, or archæology (from the Greek words αρχαίος = ancient and λόγος = word/speech/discourse) is the study of human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artefacts, biofacts, human remains, and landscapes. ... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος) is a variant, or variety, of a language spoken in a certain geographical area. ... An epithet (Greek - επιθετον and Latin - epitheton; literally meaning imposed) is a descriptive word or phrase. ... In Greek mythology, Aegisthus (goat strength, also transliterated as Aegisthos or Aigísthos) was the son of Thyestes and his daughter, Pelopia. ... The so-called Mask of Agamemnon. Discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876 at Mycenae. ... The Wrath of Achilles, by François-Léon Benouville (1821-1859) (Musée Fabre) In Greek mythology, Achilles, also Akhilleus or Achilleus (Ancient Greek ) was a hero of the Trojan War, the central character and greatest warrior of Homers Iliad, which takes for its theme, not the War...

Parry was appointed to a junior professorship at Harvard, and during this time became aware of living oral traditions in the Balkan region. In two field expeditions with his young assistant Albert Bates Lord (1912-1991) he would record thousands of songs on aluminum disks. The collection would provide the basis for an empirical documentation of the dynamics of composition of metrical narrative in performance, including the patterns and types of variation at lexical and other levels which would yield a structural account of multiformity – a phenomenon which could only be accounted for in standard literary methodology (document-based, genetic stemmatology) by concepts of “corruption” and “distortion” of a pristine, original “ur-text” or hypothetical “lost Q" ("Quelle", German for "source") – a development that would reduce the prominence of the historic-geographic method in folkloristics. Unscholarly or unsympathetic accounts of oral tradition as a discipline often render this moment, quite inaccurately, as reducing the great epics to the children’s party games of “telephone” or “Chinese whispers;” in fact, these games provide amusement by showing how messages are distorted through uncontextualized transmission, while Parry’s theory showed how the tradition provided a rich, reinforcing context which optimized the noise-to-signal ratio and thus improved the quality of transmission. ... A lexicon is a list of words together with additional word-specific information, i. ... Structuralism is a general approach in various academic disciplines that explores the interrelationships between fundamental elements of some kind, upon which some higher mental, linguistic, social, cultural etc structures are built, through which then meaning is produced within a particular person, system, culture. ... Methodology is a meta-knowledge. ... Folkloristics is the formal academic study of folklore such as fairy tales and folk mythology in oral or non-literary traditions. ... The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) is a software environment used to develop and implement distributed control systems to operate devices such as particle accelerators, telescopes and other large experiments. ... The telephone game, also known as Broken Telephone, Chinese whispers and whisper down the lane, is a game often played by children at parties or in the playground in which a phrase or sentence is passed on from one player to another, but is subtly altered in transit. ... The telephone game, also known as Chinese whispers, is a game often played by children at parties or in the playground in which a phrase or sentence is passed on from one player to another, but is subtly altered in transit. ...

Tragically, Parry was killed in a pistol-accident. His work was posthumously published by his son Adam Parry as The Making of Homeric Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). Lord, however, had meanwhile published The Singer of Tales (1960), and even before that, had exercised great influence on other scholars, notably Francis P. Magoun, whose application of Parry-Lord models to Anglo-Saxon traditions demonstrated the explicative and problem-solving power of the theory – a process that would be repeated by other scholars in numerous independent traditions. Francis Peabody Magoun (January 6, 1895 – June 5, 1979) was an American British Royal Flying Corps Lieutenant, who served in the First World War and became an ace on October 28, 1918. ... The Anglo-Saxons refers collectively to the groups of Germanic tribes who achieved dominance in southern Britain from the mid-5th century, forming the basis for the modern English nation. ...

Walter Ong

In a separate development, the prominent and provocative media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) would begin to focus attention on the ways in which communicative media shape the nature of the content conveyed. He would serve as mentor to the brilliant young Jesuit, Walter Ong (1912-2003), whose interests in cultural history, psychology and rhetoric would result in Orality and Literacy (Methuen, 1980) and the less-known Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness (Cornell, 1981). These two works successfully and accessibly articulated the contrasts between oral and literate cultures, and made possible an integrated theory of oral tradition which accounted for both production (the chief concern of Parry-Lord theory) and reception. The most-often studied section of Orality and Literacy concerns the “psychodynamics of orality” – a series of descriptors which, on the whole, might be used to index the relative orality or literacy of a given text or society. Media studies, a communication science, studies the nature and effects of media upon individuals and society. ... Herbert Marshall McLuhan (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar, professor of English literature, literary critic, and communications theorist, who is one of the founders of the study of media ecology and is today an honorary guru among technophiles. ... This article is in need of improvement. ... Walter Ong Walter J. Ong (November 30, 1912 – August 12, 2003) is an educator, academic, and linguist known for his work in Renaissance literary and intellectual history and in contemporary culture as well as for his more wide-ranging studies on the evolution of consciousness. ... Cultural history, is a literal translation of the German term Kulturgeschichte and at least in its common definition since the 1970s, often combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. ... Psychology (Gk: psyche, soul or mind + logos, speech) is an academic and applied field involving the study of the mind, brain, and behavior, both human and nonhuman. ... Rhetoric from Greek ρήτωρ, rhêtôr, orator) is the art or technique of persuasion, usually through the use of language. ... In psychology, psychodynamics is the study of the interrelationship of various parts of the mind, personality, or psyche as they relate to mental, emotional, or motivational forces especially at the subconscious level. ...

The theory would undergo elaboration and development as it grew in acceptance. For example, the number of formulas documented for various traditions proliferated, and while the concept of the formula remained lexically-bound, innovations appeared, such as the “formulaic system” with structural “substitution slots” for syntactic, morphological and narrative necessity (as well as for artistic invention). Sophisticated models such as Foley’s “word-type placement rules” followed. Higher levels of formulaic composition were defined over the years, such as “ring composition,” “responsion” and the “type-scene” (also called a "theme" or "typical scene"): a basic pattern of narrative details, some of which (“the arming sequence;” “the hero on the beach;” “the traveler recognizes his goal”) would show evidence of trans-traditional distribution. Most importantly, the fairly rigid division between oral and literate was replaced by recognition of transitional and compartmentalized texts and societies, including models of diglossia (Brian Stock, Franz Bäuml, Eric Havelock). Perhaps most importantly, the terms and concepts of “orality” and “literacy” came to be replaced with he more useful and apt “traditionality” and “textuality.” Very large units would be defined (The Indo-European Return Song) and areas outside of military epic would come under investigation: women’s song, riddles and other genres. Syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (syn, meaning co- or together) and τάξις (táxis, meaning sequence, order, arrangement), can in linguistics be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ... Morphology is the following: In linguistics, morphology is the study of the structure of word forms. ... In non-technical terms, no matter what the context (whether scientific, philosophical, legal, etc) a narrative is a story, an interpretation of some aspect of the world that is historically and culturally grounded and shaped by human personality (per Walter Fisher). ... In linguistics, diglossia is a situation where, in a given society, there are two (often) closely-related languages, one of high prestige, which is generally used by the government and in formal texts, and one of low prestige, which is usually the spoken vernacular tongue. ... Attic cup inscribed with the Greek alphabet. ... World literacy rates by country The traditional definition of Literacy is the ability to use language ie to read, write, listen and speak. ... A riddle is a puzzle, consisting of text with a question to answer. ...

John Miles Foley

In advance of Ong’s synthesis, John Miles Foley, studying with Robert Creed (who had in turn studied with Magoun) began a series of papers based on his own fieldwork in Yugoslavia, emphasizing the dynamics of performers and audiences. His massive bibliographical enterprise would establish both a clear underlying methodology which accounted for the findings of scholars working in the separate linguistic fields (primarily Ancient Greek, Anglo-Saxon and Serbo-Croatian) and more importantly, would stimulate conversation among these specialties, so that a network of independent but allied investigations and investigators could be established. Foley effectively consolidated oral tradition as an academic field with the issue of the first bibliography (1985) and the establishment of both the journal Oral Tradition and the founding of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition (1986) at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Foley’s key works include The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology (1988); Immanent Art (1991); Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf and the Serbo-Croatian Return-Song (1993); The Singer of Tales in Performance (1995); Teaching Oral Traditions (1998); How to Read an Oral Poem (2002). Note: This article contains special characters. ... The University of Missouri-Columbia (abbreviated UMC and nicknamed Mizzou) is an institution of higher learning located in Columbia, Missouri and is the main campus in the University of Missouri system. ...

The methodology of oral tradition now conditions an enormous variety of studies in literature, communication and folklore, including virtually every language and ethnic group, and conspicuously in biblical studies (Werner Kelber). Present developments explore the implications of the theory for rhetoric and composition, intergroup communication, for postcolonial studies, popular culture and film studies, and many other areas. The most significant areas of theoretical development at present may be the construction of systematic hermeneutics and aesthetics specific to oral traditions. Biblical studies is the academic study of the Christian and Jewish Scriptures. ... Rhetoric from Greek ρήτωρ, rhêtôr, orator) is the art or technique of persuasion, usually through the use of language. ... The term Composition, in written language, refers to the process and study of creating written works or pieces of literature. ... Popular culture, or pop culture, is the vernacular (peoples) culture that prevails in any given society. ... Film theory seeks to develop concise, systematic concepts that apply to the study of film/cinema as art. ... This article or section is incomplete and may require expansion and/or cleanup. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

See also

• Folklore
• Intangible culture
• Oral law
• Oral history
• Oral Torah
• Secondary orality
• Traditional knowledge
• Patha, Shrauta

Folklore is the body of verbal expressive culture, including tales, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs current among a particular population, comprising the oral tradition of that culture, subculture, or group. ... Intangible culture is the opposite of Tangible Culture. ... An oral law is a code of conduct in use in a given culture, religion or other regroupement, by which a body of rules of human behaviour is transmitted by oral tradition and effectively respected, or the single rule that is orally transmitted. ... Oral history is an account of something passed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. ... When Moses received all of the laws that would define the Jewish tradition, he also received the explanation of these laws. ... The term secondary orality was coined by Walter J. Ong in the early 1970s. ... Traditional knowledge (TK), indigenous knowledge (IK), and local knowledge generally refer to the matured long-standing traditions and practices of certain regional, indigenous, or local communities. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Vedic chant. ... Shruti (what is heard) is a canon of Hindu scriptures. ...

External links

• The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition
• The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature Online