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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

Have to agree here. Also just kind of doesn't pass the common sense test. We all learn the "game of telephone" as a kid and how information can change even just being passed once.

In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions.

A claim of 12000 years needs strong evidence. Given what I've seen from the field lately I have a counter-theory, but I'm not really comfortable sharing.

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Where I grew up "game of telephone" didn't include repetition over and over and over again. It also didn't include meter or rhymes.

Okay. Take Shakespeare then. https://thegreatthinkers.org/shakespeare-and-politics/biblio...

Confirms what I'm hinting at, through tradition a version is consolidated that becomes the consensus and can reach a very long-lived stability.

> In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions.

Maybe you meant 1000 years?

If you really meant 100 years, there's an obvious counterexample: The "Happy Birthday Song", published in 1893. Arguably no one learns it by reading the words and notes from a page.

Furthermore, considering that until pretty recently in history most people were illiterate, the stories they learned were transmitted to them orally (even if read from a book).

You are aware that the Happy Birthday Song has dozens upon dozens of variations (and not just the parody ones), right?

The Happy Birthday Song isn't even the Happy Birthday Song! It's Good Morning To All! Happy Birthday lyrics didn't even make it into print until 1912 and that's not even the version that we use today. That version was first published in 1924 by Robert Coleman. The copyrighted version that even credited the Hill sisters with the melody (from Good Morning to All, in 1893) didn't come around till 1935.

As for peoples' literacy, yes, that's the point. That history is often unreliable. We even have disputes between early _written_ historians writing about the same events and have to compare them and also evaluate whether they were alive at the time of the events and what their sources were. Often we can discount what those people wrote today based on what we've learned from the past.

I said 100 years and I meant it. If you really think about it deeply, it should be obvious. Hell, I don't know who my father is and my own mother couldn't manage to stay consistent between tellings of that story...

You expect a complicated tradition to stay the same for 12000 years? I went to Catholic Church my whole childhood and I couldn't even tell you beat-for-beat what happens at mass if you put a gun to my head.

My point is that the Happy Birthday song is an oral tradition which has lasted more than 100 years. That seems corroborated by the 1924 date you cited. That's all.

Of course I don't think oral traditions go unchanged for 12,000 years. Some very old oral traditions, like the ones from ancient India, stayed relatively unchanged only because their emphasis shifted suddenly and dramatically from active composition to ritual performance, to the extent that most people had no idea what the actual language used meant. Their opacity became a feature, not a bug.

However, despite the details changing, consistent storylines and story fragments exist across many ancient cultures, sometimes because they are derived from the same narrative source, and other times because of shared experiences across divergent cultures.

Please do share! Often those are the most interesting ones :)

Several cultures have developed techniques to error-correct and prevent these kinds of transmission errors.

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