SUMMARY:
The old Oral Tradition was a medium and several genres merged into one page, and Mythology and Myth And Legend redirected to it. We agreed to split this page.
Oral Tradition has been redefined as a medium in which a work is not written or otherwise recorded in any way. We're now writing new pages for the genres.
(By definition it is basically impossible to trope an unrecorded work, so I assume that nothing troped or used as an example on this wiki can actually be Oral Tradition.)
Still To Do:
- 1. New genre pages still to be created (With page type Trope or Trope+Index and Literature Genres index.):
- A. Heroic Literature is in YKTTW
- B. Myth is in YKTTW
- C. Folklore is a disambiguation page and the new version is at the sandbox stage
- D. Other genre pages such as Wisdom Literature, Folktale, Folk Ballad, and Folk Legend have been proposed.
- A. Heroic Literature is in YKTTW
- 2. All of these pages need to be indexed.
- 3. Wicks need to be sorted out.
- A. Oral Tradition, Mythology, Folklore, and the sandbox wicks are not fixed.
- B. Myth And Legend, Legend, and Myth wicks are Done (for now).
- C. Lots of folders and AC's are labeled Mythology, Folklore, Oral Tradition, whatever, but don't generate wicks. Somehow they need a "wick" cleaning.
- 4. Fairy Tales may need to be modified to clarify its relation with Folklore, but that probably requires a separate TRS thread.
- 5. Mythology Tropes is in YKTTW right now. The existing Mythology Tropes page is a duplicate of the works list now at Mythology.
THE ORIGINAL OPis here
1. Acts like/implies all Oral Tradition is really really old. States outright every Oral Tradition trope is from The Oldest Ones in the Book. But this is a medium, not a time period, and of course is still used today. Jokes and rumors, for example, are often circulated this way. Certainly there is no cause to assume that all oral works were composed before writing was ever invented, before 3500 BCE. That's just ridiculous.
2. Makes statements that all Older Than Dirt works have their origin in this medium... which isn't really right. Sure many things that have been written down were, or might have been, circulated in an oral form first. But
- A. Written works, even Older Than Dirt ones, could have been composed first in writing.
- B. Unless they're doing an in-depth textual or archaeological analysis, tropers should not assume one way or the other.
3. The list that follows the description isn't a list of material composed in this medium. It's a list of Mythology and Folklore pages. But those pages include works that were composed originally in written form, with no oral precourser (for example, ancient Greek and Roman plays were composed for Theatre, which is a different medium).
4. Lastly, two of the three sub-types of tropes are red links.
In short, this is a medium, not a genre. I want to rewrite the description into something more reasonable, and move the content to a separate Mythology and Folklore genre page.
edited 12th Jun '13 8:27:58 AM by ArcadesSabboth
Wait. Is there any wick cleaning required on Oral Tradition?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Began checking the wick list, but stopped. Frankly, I doubt that the decision to redefine Oral Tradition into a medium page, and a medium page only, was a good change. In common usage, the name "oral tradition" can be applied to two different things:
- the practice of oral storytelling (a medium)
- traditional stories which are passed down orally (a body of works)
And often, it's not even clear which of the two speakers have in mind, or they can mean both things at once. But now that Oral Tradition is strictly a medium page, I would have to remove all wicks that use Oral Tradition in the sense of "traditional oral tales".
There are some Oral Tradition captions in example lists, usually for jokes, which is okay for our new terminology because jokes are primarily told orally and example lists are supposed to be ordered by media. But take, for example, this bit from Chivalric Romance:
Per our new Oral Tradition page, I would have to change this, because it refers to actual oral tales, not the medium of oral storytelling in itself. Only, the above sentence and its use of 'oral tradition' sounds totally okay to me. This "oral tradition" = medium, never actual tales" terminology feels like a wiki artifact to me. I would actually prefer to call the medium Oral Storytelling or something similar, rather than Oral Tradition.
edited 29th Jan '14 12:06:04 PM by LordGro
Let's just say and leave it at that.
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
Rewriting perfectly fine language to enforce an artificial wiki-internal terminology is exactly what I don't like.
edited 29th Jan '14 1:05:53 PM by LordGro
Let's just say and leave it at that.
Zzzzzzzzzz
Clocking. Finish this or it will be locked and declared decided and dead.
edited 10th May '14 4:49:35 AM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Hi
Locking for inactivity.
Crown Description:
Should we split Oral Tradition? Proposal to split this page into the medium Oral Tradition (for works transmitted orally), and the genre Myth, Legend, and Folklore, based on the draft at Sandbox.Myth Legend And Folklore.
Given that this thread hasn't seen much activity lately, I agree.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman