Comment by devindotcom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devindotcom | Hacker News Reader

I read some of the classic epics before learning about their mode of delivery and memorization, and was a bit perplexed at some of the repetitions and formulae.

Then I learned that, for example, some characters would have multiple epithets (grey-eyed, neat-ankled, all-seeing, etc) that in Greek would be selected essentially not because they were the best descriptor, but because they were the ones that would complete the line within the meter! So if there were two extra syllables, the reciter would use one of these, but if there were three extra, they could use one of the other two.

There are a bunch of these formulaic sayings, lines, or even entire little episodes, that could be recited to gain a little time to remember the next part, or speed up the action if the audience was flagging, and so on. The entire form was structured around live performance and improvisation. That was really revelatory for me.

Naturally they lose something in being recorded in static form - retaining other forms of natural beauty and (as hnaa points out in another comment) their symmetry, symbolism and meta-construction. Still such a pleasure to read!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_blues_verses

> In the folk tradition, there are many traditional blues verses that have been sung over and over by many artists. Blues singers, who include many country and folk artists as well as those commonly identified with blues singers, use these traditional lyrics to fill out their blues performances. Artists like Jimmie Rodgers, the "blue yodeler", and Big Joe Turner, "the Boss of the Blues" compiled virtual encyclopedias of lyrics. Turner reputedly could sing the blues for hours without repeating himself.

> Although many blues songs, such as "Jelly Jelly" or "St. Louis Blues" are composed in the usual fashion with lyrics focusing on a single theme and telling a story, many others, like "Roll 'Em Pete" or "T for Texas" combine one or two new verses with a flock of traditional ones.

> Traditional blues verses are most common in twelve bar blues with the characteristic repeated first line (indicated here by x2).

> See that spider crawlin' up that wall (x2)

> He's crawlin up there to get his ashes hauled.

> If you see me comin', heist your window high (x2)

> If you see me goin', baby, hang your head and cry.

Similar problem, similar solution.

Reggae dancehall is similar. It's very much based around live performances and the deejays will usually have lines and verses they can use over riddims of differing tempos and keys or will adapt their own songs to whatever riddim the selector chooses.

Yep, all of the "wine-dark sea"s and "rosy-fingered dawn"s might have worked as filler while the poet was queueing up the next part of the narrative.

kennings, as this game is called in anglo-saxon, aren’t filler per se. Though they are also a memory aide (for the poet and the audience), they are primarily part of the way the skill of a scop (bard/epic poet) was judged was by how cleverly he could choose the right kenning for the mood and meter of where in the poem he was.

A saxon kenning for poet is “story-weaver”, and that’s actually very apt.

Yes, it reminds me of the "memory palace" trick that's taught for remembering e.g. numbers by associating them with a series of images. And similar tricks with "themes", audible or visual, are still used for particular characters in some modern media.

yes. and for long works like Beowulf that were told episodically, the repetition of events serves the same purpose as the 90-second “last time on dragon ball Z...” recaps of fight hilights.

That's interesting, where can I read more about this?

There's probably a lot of literature out there. I like the scholarly essays that accompany Chickering's translation of Beowulf -- maybe start there and follow the reference trail if you get sucked in.

ISBN-13: 978-1400096220

Wine-colored sea is a different story, I think. I've seen other languages also describe the sea as red, orange, etc. This is more of a situation with color naming: cultures separate colors on the spectrum into named categories in a more or less consistent way (e.g. blue and green come apart towards the end, and some languages still have the two merged). Red is one of the first colors to be named.

Apparently there is still scholarly debate around this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...

yes, that could be true. but the point still stands, that the repetition of certain phrases, even if they understood colours differently than modern audiences, still served the purpose of aideing memory and familiarity among the storyteller and the audience.

The "bard" usually also had an instrument, so it's highly likely that if he was having trouble composing/recalling the next few stanzas, he may have stalled for time by performing an interlude on his lute.

Today, we attach error correcting codes to digital data. The first I learned about was the parity bit on RS232 transmission. The bits of each byte had to add up to a certain value, or the byte was wrong.

Another linguistic example would be the military phonetic alphabet, which intentionally adds extra syllables to each letter for the purpose of making them easily distinguishable even over noisy lines.

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