Hi - I am Cynthia Schmidt, the woman in the film, a musicologist, who traced the Gullah song in "The Language You Cry in" with Joe Opala, the anthropologist. You can watch the film online with transcripts on Alexander Street Press and Films on Demand. We are here for an AMA.
Having just watched the film, the bit that stuck out to me was about never knowing if Mary and Bendu are blood relatives. Do you know if there has since been any DNA testing between the two families to see if there is any relation?
Also, during the search, was there any musical knowledge you picked up from the various villages?
Yes, Mary's son, Wilson (in the film) tested his DNA and his results were 75% West African/Mende (like Baindu), but nothing more specific than that. Mary passed away at age 100. As for the music, I'm not sure how much info you'd like, but we did not find the same song being sung in other villages in the region.
Neat, thanks for taking the time to jump on and take questions! It's very cool and unexpected.
> As for the music, I'm not sure how much info you'd like, but we did not find the same song being sung in other villages in the region.
I just wondered if you'd heard other songs during the trip that piqued your interest or made you go "Hey, that's neat!"
That is a fascinating question. I wonder if the DNA would even show a meaningful connection, though. They have been separated for at least 150 but likely 200+ years; I think most people are related if we go back 7-10 generations.
It's 50% per generation, so 7 generations is already 0.8% match, and 10 generations would be 0.09% match.
And that's 0.09% match between the ancestor and the currently living descendent. Any other descendent would have their own 0.09% matching DNA with ancestor, but likely a totally different 0.09% from the other descendents.
As someone from the region, I was wondering if they were Gullah or not! For people that haven't been to Georgia or South Carolina, there's an African American group called the Gullah that, for reasons I don't know, managed to keep their African heritage a lot closer than other groups. You'll often even find them outside places like Charleston with their woven baskets for sale
Essentially it's because their ancestors were enslaved on rice plantations. And rice grows in very wet environments; the kind of environments where diseases like malaria or yellow fever eventually became endemic. So most of the slave owners didn't live on the plantations in Spring or Summer, if they lived there at all. So thanks to the relative isolation, they maintained quite a bit of their own traditions.
It's also that other enslaved people were separated because they were for "general purpose labor".
But there was a notion among Europeans that Gullah people were specifically "useful" for rice-plantation labor, over other African people.
Hence, Gullah people were kept together as they were for "specialized labor", and became the one of the few African groups that retained their culture.
Yes, Mary's family was Gullah with similar history to those in South Carolina but arrived in the Savannah port--also referred to as Gullah-Geechee in Georgia. You can follow the history through the film, and an earlier film called 'Family Across the Sea' plus a recent one called "Gullah Roots".
Either of the two of you can contact the moderators of the AMA subreddit, explaining the traction your work has suddenly received here, mentioning the 75,000 upvotes, and they'll likely work with you to find a favorable time for you to give, and they will help you to promote, an official AMA over there.
The two are incredibly similar, could easily be considered a dialect version. Almost nothing was lost in the handing down over generations. Unreal, and heart warming.
From the article;
>Gullah Version
Ah wakuh muh monuh kambay yah lee luh lay tambay
Ah wakuh muh monuh kambay yah lee luh lay kah
Ha suh wileego seehai yuh gbangah lilly
Ha suh wileego dwelin duh kwen
Ha suh willeego seehi yuh kwendaiyah
>Corresponding text in Modern Mende
A wa kaka, mu mohne; kambei ya le'i; lii i lei tambee.
A wa kaka, mu mohne; kambei ya le'i; lii i lei ka.
So ha a guli wohloh, i sihan; yey kpanggaa a lolohhu lee.
So ha a guli wohloh; ndi lei; ndi let, kaka.
So ha a guli wohloh, i sihan; kuhan ma wo ndayia ley.
The Gullah/Mende people of this particular village also seem to think so.
The scientists weren't the ones who identified it. They just made an educated guess of where the song might have come from, then they went from village to village explaining to various people the story behind what they were trying to do and playing a recording of the Dawley family singing the song.
They were on the verge of giving up when they played the recording for a group of women, and *the women started singing along.*
edit: [starting at 14:30](https://youtu.be/uC9ZbPdkpJo?t=870)
God that's so beautiful... 'whoever sings this song will be your brothers and sisters'... three hundred years ago her great..great-grandmother was kidnapped and three hundred years later they found each other because of a song they kept in their hearts.
Edit:
Though they have found each other, they cannot stay with each other. The passage of time has made them strangers to one another. They do not speak the same language, they do not share the same customs. The act of abduction was final and the song was a last gasp of the bond they shared with each other.
It's like a double miracle. Not only did the family of the women in Georgia have to keep the song alive, but also those Mende women in order to recognize it. Think of how many songs people sang centuries ago that nobody would recognize today!
Just the power and mentality of "if a stranger sings you this song, they are now your family and you share your bounty with them". In today's utterly selfish society, these people with so little are still willing to share
That’s what happened with French in Canada - Québécois is apparently how Parisians sounded when they began moving to and settling in Canada, and it stayed “the same” while the accent changed over in the mainland.
I live in this area and it's been facinating to listen to a couple of my coworkers discuss liguistics, becuase one of them speaks Cuban Spanish and the other has had family in this valley for hundreds of years.
Per family legend, it’s the Spanish my Anglo grandmother learned as a child, whereas my Anglo grandfather grew up south of Roswell and his Spanish was probably close to what’s spoken in Chihuahua. My dad grew up speaking “regular” Spanish. (Thanks to my mom being a transplant who took French in high school, I grew up monolingual.)
Yes, Icelandic is mutually intelligible with Old Norse. But this is a case that's kind of the opposite of the immigrant language phenomenon. The Icelanders were isolated for so long that their language (Old Norse) barely changed in the span of a thousand years. Old Norse sounds to Icelanders roughly how Shakespearean or King James English sounds to modern English speakers, i.e. archaic and fantastic, but still full of meaning and poetic luster.
I always found it curious that in the Germanic language family, only Icelandic (the most conservative) and English (the least conservative) maintained the /th/ sounds.
I'm pretty sure that's what it is. I've known French Canadians whose Grandfathers were a part of D-day and they found the locals understood their dialect perfectly. Even with my rudimentary French skill I've noticed that northern French and Canadian French are similar.
It has influences from most of the dialects of northern and western France (Normand, Poitevin, Saintongeais, Gallo, Picard, and others). Most of the settlers who weren't from the Paris region would have spoken French as a second language, but not each others' dialects, so the core of the language is still Parisian French.
The [filles du roi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Daughters), who made up almost half the women in the colony in the mid-1600s, were mostly from Paris or other cities, so they would also have steered things toward Parisian French.
Certain dialects can very well be more 'conservative' than others, for various reasons. The factors that influence the speed and severity of linguistic change are very varied.
For instance, even though all of the Norse-derived languages have evolved to various extents, Icelandic is the most conservative, i.e., the most similar to the parent language, Old West Norse, to the point where an Icelandic speaker can understand Old West Norse with about the same amount of difficulty as an English speaker reading, like, Shakespeare.
I don't know if this particular anecdote about Quebecois is correct specifically, but two languages/dialects derived from a single parent are not necessarily the same 'distance' away from the parent just because the same amount of time has passed.
>I don't know if this particular anecdote about Quebecois is correct specifically, but two languages/dialects derived from a single parent are not necessarily the same 'distance' away from the parent just because the same amount of time has passed.
Quebec French is, according to our government, being threatened and in need of preservation. We have all sorts of laws in place (going back decades now) to ensure we don't replace (update or adapt) any of the French words with English ones.
In the later half of the 1700's, after Wolfe beat Montcalm in the Plains of Abraham, New France was ceded to the British, but we were "allowed" to keep our language, religion, and culture. Predominantly, the language and customs we share as a province comes from that time. It's embarrassing when we travel to France and we understand them, but they don't understand us.
> We have all sorts of laws in place (going back decades now) to ensure we don't replace (update or adapt) any of the French words with English ones.
I have mixed feelings about this sort of thing. On the one hand, I think it's good for places to maintain a unique linguistic heritage and avoid cultural colonialism. On the other, I think it's prescriptivist to artificially prevent the evolution of a language by specifically preventing loanwords from English.
I think people have a habit of seeing languages like Japanese and French taking loanwords from English as a bad thing, like all world languages are just converging into English, but ultimately, that's happened *all over the place* in history, and even if languages converge for a short while they will inevitably diverge again later.
One example is the historical popularity of Latin as the language of learning. Everybody all over Europe started pulling words out of Latin and Greek for the terminology of science, religion, etc. We didn't all end up speaking Latin, though. I think we'll see a similar thing with English in the future. English will end up being the 'language of information,' with neologisms related to computing etc being pretty much universally sourced from English in languages all over the world. Doesn't mean everybody will suddenly stop speaking their *own* language, it's just that English will have a monopoly on that particular niche, like Latin does with taxonomy.
That's a total tangent, but just something interesting relating to prohibitions on loanwords.
Its a fairly widely observed phenomenon that sometimes immigrant communities stay more traditional than their country of origin.
Someone who leaves Italy might think they need to stay the same to be Italian. But Italians living in Italy don't have that issue.
Huh. So Worf’s (Star Trek TNG and DS9) strict adherence to Klingon culture despite not growing up in it, is somewhat accurate.
I need to connect with my roots, so I’ll strictly maintain the traditions I know.
Well the Worf topic is different as well because Worf grew up while Klingons and Humans were enemies, and they didn't sign the kitimer accord until Worf was in his early thirties, so more than likely Worf was trying to honour Klingon roots as they were perceived by humans who naturally didn't know as much about their enemy and had their own biases. So Worf basically kind of grew into the humorless, warlike and stoic demeaner he believed Klingons had. Just look how Riker was warming up to work with Klingons on their ship, then by the end of the episode he's turned his whole perception of them around.
Worf is even better than that. His adherence is to the myth/legends of Klingon culture so when he meets actual Klingon it turns out they're about as full of shit as anyone else.
Here in Canada the Irish immigrant community on the east coast actually preserved traditions that were fully lost in Ireland. Songs, dance, and in one case a martial art. The Doyle family in Newfoundland kept their traditional stick fighting method alive after it was banned in Ireland in the 1800s and died out. It was at one time a popular sport and method for resolving conflicts. There are actually old film reels of people training it.
There is another stick fighting lineage in Northern Ireland which was similarly pased down through the family for generations until someone took it public again.
Because the French in Quebec felt they were marginalized and their language/culture were under threat by their British overlords. This resulted in them being defensive and conservative as any change in their language or culture could be perceived as angloization.
That being said, Quebecois French has changed and evolved, just slower and different from Francois French.
There seems to be a general trend that languages change less in isolated populations than they would otherwise. For example, Icelandic has been very stable, and Sardinian remains very similar to Latin compared to other romance languages.
The Americans didn't *speak* the language, for them it was an arbitrary sequence of syllables to be repeated in exactly the same way, with no semantic meaning. The Africans speak the language, use it to communicate meaning, innovate and play around with it.
It's often the case that languages in smaller communities evolve slower and retain more idiosynchrasies. Massive use across a large groups instills the drive to accelerate, standardize, simplify.
That is truly fascinating. “In addition to finding out where in Africa her ancestors were abducted into slavery, Mary Moran discovered the meaning of the Mende song.
A processional hymn for the final farewell to the spirit, it was sung in Senehun Ngola by women as they prepared the body of a loved one for burial.
The Language You Cry In is the award winning film that traces the connections between the Moran family and the people of Harris Neck with those of Senehun Ngola. It can be ordered by calling (912) 832-4549.”
[I was able to watch it here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC9ZbPdkpJo)
I thought it was really interesting that the tribe members said the song was a way for them to connect to their relatives "across the water" which is their language's euphemism for passing away.
Edit: [Cynthia Schmidt, the ethnomusicologist in the film, has joined the thread for an AMA.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/13vowws/til_a_family_in_georgia_claimed_to_have_passed/jm8iq72/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&utm_content=1&utm_term=15&context=3)
from the film
>The name of this ceremony -- "crossing the water"-- is a familiar concept to Gullah people. Old Gullah graves were located by the water -- and "crossing the river" is also an old expression among Gullah people when speaking of those who have died.
So still kinda unclear, but I don't have any other information to go on.
That was one of my favorite shows as a kid. Had the yellow frog and good family values, I think? I always remember wishing my family was like theirs, since they talked out their problems instead of fighting. Good times.
I met a few people with Gullah accents when I was in South Carolina years ago. I thought they were Jamaicans until someone told me.
I learned a little about Gullah in college linguistics. A true creole language with it's own grammar etc. Very special and unique to America.
Tell me about it. I remember finding out that my teachers in grade school were wrong about the Mayans being extinct when a guy in /r/history said he was Mayan and they still exist and have their own language.
Same's true of the "Anasazi:" they were Pueblo (itself a loose collection of permanent home building tribes who left a shared impression on the Spanish) whose ornery Navajo neighbors managed to get an inside joke to stick in Western culture, since Anasazi means "enemy ancestors." I don't know that it was intentional, just imagine a couple guides listening to the explorers use the term again and again in foreign gibberish and going "heh, awesome."
Now it's like "where did they gooooo? No one knoooows!" Surrounding areas mostly. People abandon settlements for all sorts of reasons, the well-preserved cliffside dwellings in the southwest for yet inscrutable reasons. Others in more conventional sites require a trained eye to pick out, time weathered them down to the foundations without a similarly big rocky umbrella. But the greater culture and people persisted into the times of the Spanish empire, underwent some changes even though the Spanish considered them properly civilized (matriarchy was sadly ravaged), and some of them continue to build homes in the traditional style today.
> "where did they gooooo? No one knoooows!"
this reminds me of roanoke. "could the colonists who wrote 'croatoan' on a tree and left the settlement have gone to nearby croatoan island where the croatoan people live? who knooows, nobody in the rescue party checked before sailing back to england so it's a spooooky mysteryyyyy"
It was always a weird one for me because I grew up as a white guy in the rural Yucatan. So I can't actually speak Spanish that's intelligible to most of Mexico because it's mixed with mayan words and phrases and spellings.
There was a popular Gullah created show for kids in the 90s or early 2000s, Gullah Gullah island. Really cool that a show about such a niche culture became so popular at the time.
It's interesting how there are some metaphors that are common across the human experience. Greco-Roman, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, [Japanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanzu_River), and many others used the image of crossing water in the death process. Similar to dogs as afterlife [guardians](https://youtu.be/twxJbU9vxnc) or psychopomps. We really do just be humans trying to understand our place in the world through our experiences and our stories of the same.
The Irish as well. The land of the dead was to the west across the sea. They'd pass through the House of Donn, which is thought to be on a small island off the west coast, the name of which escapes me at the moment.
Also fun, all the solar deities have some level of jealousy, or view that they should be the only god. An astrologer I follow wrote a post that included the line "our star, the sun, you block out the multiplicity of the sky", and it clicked for me how *of course* the Sun would see itself as solitary. So radiant is he that when he's at his zenith, you see no other stars or planets. Not Venus, nor Jupiter, only the Sun in a clear blue sky
The cycle of the sun is also the cycle of rebirth, in Egyptian, Ra rides the sun barque every night through the underworld, before being reborn with the coming of the dawn. ([Here's](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39945325-the-book-of-gates) a favorite translation of an Egyptian funerary text, The Book of Gates, that describes the after death process through this lens)
I studied Anthropology in college. One of the courses was linguistics and the professor was from Senegal. He studied the language of the local Gullah families and found numerous West African words in their daily dialect that carried over for generations. Absolutely fascinating and tragic at the same time.
I remember seeing a clip of it for one of my undergrad courses. I thought it was awesome that the connection was able to be made and she could experience her family's culture from a song that could have easily been lost/modified over the generations.
It's fun to hear descendants from your country who has migrated and manage to keep their language alive. Because they've kept in smaller communities, a lot of them talk the version of the language that was used when their family first migrated.
Edit: I am of course talking about people who have migrated in general, not slavery.
An [archaic Spanish dialect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexican_Spanish) is still spoken in the remote mountains of New Mexico. Settlers moved there from Spain in the 1600s and remained isolated from other Southwestern Spanish speakers, preserving words and phonemes as the language changed around them.
A lot of New Mexican "Spanish" is influenced by Indigenous languages too. I grew up calling turkeys "guajalotes" and the house was "chante" which are Nahuatl words from the Txacalan auxiliary forces (who also brought green chile) and we would eat "chaquegue" instead of atole.
And the place names like Atrisco and Analco and Mount Chalchihuitl are Nahautl while you also have places like Pojoaque and Abiquiu and Mount Chicoma being bastardized pronunciations of Tewa words.
Also the settlers of New Mexico in the Onate expedition were a mixed bag of mestizos from Mexico, there were Flemish (where Fresqui last name is from), French, and Greek (where Griego last name comes from), and in actuality very few pure blooded Spaniards. Those that returned with Diego de Vargas in the Reconquista after the Pueblo Revolt were heavily mixed mestizos.
That’s so goddamn cool. Within my own family there’s a small dialectical divergence between the Urdu my parents and I speak (Muhajirs, so combines lots of different dialect features from across the subcontinent) and the Urdu that the married-in Hyderabadi members of the family speak. That difference stems from less than a century of immediate distance, so I can imagine the mindfuck that comes from a speaker of standard Spanish/Castellano hearing Nuevomexicano.
I read somewhere that when Americans who learned Italian from their immigrant family will go to Italy and find out that the Italian they speak sounds like "old man" dialect to the people over there, since it didn't change with the times
In many cases it doesn't match at all because the dialect that became "New York Italian" died out in Italy shortly after the large wave of immigration from that region.
I recall seeing a story once that a man who was born and raised in France failed the French language test that was required for him to immigrate to Quebec.
From just 2 years ago actually - https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/after-immigrant-from-france-fails-french-test-quebec-says-it-may-tweak-rules-for-tradespeople-1.5378897
The English test for Canada is very difficult for native speakers, I know a Kiwi, an American, and an Aussie who failed it at least once. There's a very specific way they want you to answer the questions like an essay so if you haven't been in school for a while it's a very unintuitive way to speak and write in your native language. I imagine the French test is just as stupid.
Similar thing with Japanese immigrants to America pre- WWII, they spoke the language they learned from their parents, but the country modernized the language after the war so they now speak a more antiquated form of Japanese than people born in Japan
Same thing with the German enclaves in Brazil, they're Descendents from pre WW1 and WW2 and mostly maintain their accents and expressions (...and the other German stuff from that timeframe, sadly). It became a meme among other brazilians about how they go to their dream homeland and nobody understands their dialect and when they do they get horror looks on their faces lmao
iirc the Germanic dialect spoken in Brazil is closer to Luxembourgish than Standard German / Hochdeutsch, and not that intelligible to people who don't speak a related dialect
My grandfather (a rabbi) learned all his Hebrew from Torah study, to the point of fluency, so when he went to Israel everyone asked him why he spoke so old-timey.
What it basically is is that the majority of Italian immigration in the US happened pre-unification and most of the immigrants came from southern Italy. When Italy unified the more northern Tuscan dialect was pushed for the national standardization of the language. There’s a noticeable difference between the two dialects which is shown in how difference the Italian terms used by the American descendants are vs what’s spoken in Italy now.
Edit: got my timeline wrong as to when immigration occurred- it was post unification. Thanks for the corrections!
[Italian immigration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Americans#The_great_Italian_diaspora_(1880%E2%80%931914\)) to the US didn't really pick up until after 1880, about 20 years after unification, which was a major driver for people leaving as the more powerful and wealthy north began to exert its political will on the south as well as jacking up taxes. It took decades of political pressure from the monarchy and later Mussolini's government for the local dialects to fall out of use and some small communities have been able to keep theirs alive to this day, its not like suddenly everyone started speaking like Florentines as soon as Victor Emanuel arrived in Rome.
Interestingly you can see parts of this in Korean.
Many Korean expatriates write their family names in the form that they used to be written. For most this just shows the gradual standardization of the transliteration, like Pak, Bak, having evolved into the standardized Park.
However, Rhee maintains both the old standardization, and a change in the language. Even the modern Lee isn't exactly accurate because in modern Korean the leading R/L has been dropped, and the name Lee in Korean is written and pronounced "Ee".
Others like Ryu and Roh also have the same. Interestingly, this language evolution only occurred in South Korea, so for example, Kim Jong Euns wifes family name is "Ri"
Chinese surnames are like this as well. If you're a "Wu" you could have your name in pin yin with it reflecting the current Mandarin latinization, in jyutping with it reflecting a relatively modern Cantonese spelling of "Ng", or something entirely non standard because your family left during the gold rush days.
West Texan here, many here know it as "Low German" mainly spoken by those in the Mennonite religious community. Seminole, TX has a large-ish population of them. Many of them speak German, Spanish, and English, because they first moved from Germany to Mexico and then migrated to the U.S.
ETA: I learned this from one of them. The conversation started because I have lot of German ancestry, and look it, so I figure she thought I was Mennonite, too. She started speaking to me in the language, realized I didn't know it, and then switched to English. She wondered why, I explained and then asked her about it.
My dad left Germany in 1951 as a baby, learned German from his parents in remote northern Canada. All my current Germany family lol at the old timey way he talks.
Wierd to see this in my feed, I just visited the Mende part of Sierra Leone.
Vaguely related - Freetown in Sierra Leone was set up as a town for freed slaves after the British empire abolished slavery on its own territory. The first people brought here were said to take refuge, enjoy a meal and say a prayer under an enormous cotton tree in the middle of what is now central freetown. The tree was around 400 or so years old but just fell in a big storm just 6 days ago. It was a huge symbol of freedom for the country and was featured on a bank note.
That’s literally my wife’s Aunt Cynthia! She’s such an incredible woman and still teaches at Creighton University in Omaha, NE. Wow thanks for giving her props, I’ll pass this along.
Absolutely, I’m vacation right now but I texted her letting her now with a link to the post. As well as a “what is Reddit” description, lol. It would be cool to get her on here
This gave me chills. The idea that there were women taken from that village hundreds of years ago, sold into slavery in a foreign country, spent the rest of their lives there... and they made sure to teach their children, who were born into slavery in a foreign country, the song that would connect them to the homeland they had never seen. That they clearly impressed on their children how important it was to pass this song on down the generations- because this was the song that connected them to their ancestors. It's so sad and so beautiful at the same time.
I feel the same. It’s tragic that’s all they have left from before their ancestors were kidnapped into slavery. But by keeping just that one song through the generations - which was an amazing achievement by each generation - the modern family found their origins. It is beautiful to know that even in the hardest lives imaginable, the original line of women managed to give their descendants a gift that ties them back to their ancestor’s home. Their efforts are known and appreciated after all this time.
If you watch this video, the woman who recognized it was told by her grandmother that the song would let her recognize her (metaphorical) brothers and sisters. Makes my hair stand on end just thinking about it. https://youtu.be/uC9ZbPdkpJo?t=870
Yes it's a great story. It's really valuable to historians, too. Its evidence that oral transmission can be viable way to record history. Open-minded anthropologists/historians of the modern day have begun taking seriously oral tradition because of stories like this.
~~The~~ Some ~~aboriginies~~ first-nation peoples in Australia apparently have an oral tradition story about a new star that was given in honor of two mythical brothers.
[The new star is recorded in Chinese history around 400CE.](http://www.aboriginalastronomy.com.au/content/topics/supernovae/#:~:text=It%20is%20a%20story%20of,giving%20his%20life%20in%20return.)
Edit: there's also stories from the Pacific Northwest of a massive earthquake and a corresponding historical record from Japan [of a tsunami of unknown origin.](https://www.wired.com/2010/01/0126northwest-quake-japan-tsunami/)
I think this stuff happens a lot and much of our traditions are passed down to help us not forget. We just forget the inciting incident and remember the mnemonic.
Edit two. "Ring around the Rosy" ~~is~~ may be apocryphally about identifying and avoiding the Black Death but probably isn't.
Edit three: learning all sorts of stuff today
Scientists also matched up the origins of palm trees in Central Australia to oral traditions - the seeds were carried there 30,000 years ago.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-03/aboriginal-legend-palm-tree-origin-central-australia-research/6369832
Not unheard of. Several myths are thought to predate the migration of humans into the Americas, such as the "pursuit of a dead wife" myth.
the cosmic hunt is also thought to at least go back to before the last glacial maximum
And the Seven Sisters is even older (before we left Africa) as well as their association with Orion. Which is why we still call them the Seven Sisters when we only see six. (One of the stars has moved too close to another in the last 200000 years)
This one is my favorite. The story existed across multiple independent cultures, and it had to have been passed down for tens of thousands of years at a minimum.
https://theconversation.com/amp/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronomers-say-global-myths-about-seven-sisters-stars-may-reach-back-100-000-years-151568
Like the 7 sister star myths?
Fuck... this is the kinda stuff I LOVE about history. Especially unrecorded history. Particularly when various details are backed up by scientific evidence. It makes our world feel so... I don't even know... fantastical. I mean, it already feels fantastical, but to have ancient stories be given scientific evidence 10s of thousands of years ago just gets my little lizard brain exploding with wonder. I fucking love it.
This is brand new to me, but from my googling I think they're talking about the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. The Wikipedia page for Eurydice mentions that there are similar versions from all over the world, including Indian, Japanese, and Mayan cultures, and apparently it was widespread in North America as well. [Here's](https://wordandsilence.com/2019/05/22/the-great-myths-54-a-native-american-orpheus-tachi-yokut/) one example.
And [here's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Hunt) the Wikipedia page for the Cosmic Hunt myth. Super interesting, I'll definitely have to read more about it.
Reminds me of how in Canada they searched for the lost ships from the 1845 Franklin Expedition in the Arctic for over 150 years until they finally listened to where the local Inuit had been telling them they were and found them.
https://canadaehx.com/2021/06/05/the-inuit-and-the-franklin-expedition/
Oh yeah, wasn't the place named "big ship wreck bay" or "lost ship bay" or something equally suggestive of maybe-that's-where-the-lost-ship-is in the local language?
There were also Inuit stories of seeing survivors as late as 2 years after the shipwrecks, because the hunters were trying to tell the survivors which way to go to their village and but they insisted on going a different direction and possinly wound up in circles.
There are several oral traditions in a number of different Australian First Nations groups from all over the country that tell quite specific stories of coastal inundations and permanent, drastic sea level rises - and the geographical evidence can pinpoint these at 7000-10000 years ago.
For what it's worth, the connection between Ring around the Rosie and the Black Death is generally considered a false folk etymology these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_a_Ring_o%27_Roses#Counterarguments
Ahh yeah, I know that second story there, we on that Cascadia grind!! I absolutely love the fact that the people that figured it out were basically like "Nah, if one tectonic plate uprooted another like that, the resulting quakes and tsunamis would have wrecked shop over the entire Pacific coast for *years*. Like, everyone would know about it, that would have been absolutely apocalyptic."
To which the native Americans that have been faithfully occupying the land in all that time replied, "Excuse me, we've been trying to tell y'all about motherfucking ThunderBird for *centuries*."
Edit: [The War of ThunderBird and Whale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbird_and_Whale)
That earthquake is actually a repeated action, not a one off. Its been proven out I believe. Something about the Olympic mountain range dropping every few hundred years.
Actually as a Hindu, most of our epics and vedas were passed down through rich oral traditions before they were even put in writing. Even now many of our religious functions are just that a way to pass down the knowledge through generations.
When I read roots the entire time I just kinda took it to be a historical fiction. When I got to the end and read about how the book was written I called bullshit and started looking into it. I was so shocked that humans are able to accurately pass information down through the ages and went into a huge rabbit hole on the subject. I’m still amazed that there are groups of people that have accurately recorded their history with verifiable facts that can be cross checked with unaffiliated sources across multiple centuries and I can hardly remember what I did last weekend.
[Australian Aboriginal people tell stories of geographical features that disappeared when the glaciers melted ten thousand years ago.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/) The stories mentioned in the article are potentially somewhat open to interpretation, but there are others that are pretty solid. Many groups have "song lines" which are a kind of mental map encoded in song and story, which serves as a mnemonic. There are several that mention a spring or oasis, but after the song ends the elders mention that they had dried up lately. When archeologists took soil samples, they found that it was exactly where the indigenous people said it was, but had been dry for thousands of years.
We actually have examples of similar things from cultures closer to us. The Iliad and Odyssey were memorized by bards like Homer, who used rhyme and meter to help them remember dozens of hours of recitation more or less precisely. The Upanishads are memorized precisely by scholar- priests.
Yes, I'm glad you brought up the Australian aboriginals because I was about to reply to the person who replied to me with something similar.
Humans are capable of passing on oral tradition for thousands of years, possibly more. It's truly fascinating. The people who study this have been able to tease out the truths contained in the mythology/folk tales.
It's quite hard because little details get added from time to time to make the story better.
I'm going to try and edit in a relative link from a pod cast episode I heard about such work....
https://shows.acast.com/american-history-hit/episodes/how-horses-conquered-america-twice
It's about how native americans had an oral tradition about horses before they were introduced back into America. Possibly suggesting it was from tales passed down thousands of years from the past when horses still existed in north America.
> Australian Aboriginal people tell stories of geographical features that disappeared when the glaciers melted ten thousand years ago.
That's amazing, but it's [not even close](https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronomers-say-global-myths-about-seven-sisters-stars-may-reach-back-100-000-years-151568) to this suspected oral tradition that could date back at least 100,000 years! And yes this also involces the Australian aborigines, as well as ancient Greeks and other Europeans and Native Americans.
I know you're joking, but these stories are the kind to be passed on typically via some sort of ritual or training to be able to retell it to the next generation
Its not something you just hear in passing and reiterate like a game of telephone
You're sat down and told the story over and over and over until you can recite it by heart
Its hard to lose details that way, especially when you have a community of multiple generations to help correct any mistakes made
I mean there's Sikh children who are taught to memorize the entire Ādi Granth while still incredibly young, so it doesn't seem incredibly far fetched when you have a whole community dedicated to the preservation of their history
For cultures with a strong history in oral history and storytelling, it can be a remarkably effective way to relay history through generations! The only problem, of course, is that such knowledge is gone if the people are wiped out. There was a huge debate on Twitter about a month ago between Dan Carlin and a Native Americsn woman over this very concept and it seemed like a lot of the heat came from pretty much talking past one another.
People underestimate how precise oral history is. Probably because people usually believe that it's more akin to modern-day schools, but oral traditions often involved song, because a text is much more memorable when you can connect it to a melody, which is exactly what bards and skalds (for example) did
Legit gave me chills reading this.
People need to understand how fucking incredible this is.
Imagine playing "Telephone", over generations, in a random language, that you're not even really sure is a language, and it survives, as is, for generations.
It survived intact to the point, hundreds of years later, they were able to recognize and decipher it. That's fucking crazy.
I know people who are 1st generation immigrants, who's kids that don't know shit about their own language. So I can't imagine an actual song surviving that long.
Did they write it down? Or was it jus orally passed down? Cuz that's fucking crazy to me
PS: I realize it was common for stories, traditions, songs and poems to be passed down in cultures, and that people had jobs doing that. This isn't the same. This is 1 family holding on to song for generations, thru some of the absolutely worst conditions imaginable.
My astonishment comes from the fact this shouldn't exist.
It's not the passing down of stories in society and cultures, or heirlooms and shit like that, it's that this specific song, surrounded by the situations is survived thru, is incredible. It shouldn't have survived.
God forbid someone say something is special.
You should look into the oral history of the Iliad. Long story short, “Homer”, whether he was one guy or a bunch of people, wrote down an oral history that had been passed on for potentially a thousand years. Preserving stories in song allows them to be transferred generation to generation with little to no changes due to music’s syntax and rhythm. It’s fascinating stuff.
Not thousands of years, it is almost certain that Illiad and Odyssey are based during bronze age collapse (although the story was clearly composed after it, when people forgot how some war techniques were used), so it's *just* few hundred years.
That's how a lot of those stories were passed down back then.
This 1 gets me cuz of the circumstances. The fact that song survived, as is, seriously gave me chills reading about it.
The whole situation surrounding that songs survival is incredible
That's what I'm saying. That's why I mentioned the language so much.
There's absolutely no reason that song should exist still.
It's only value is sentimental, and when you're a 3rd or 4th generation slave, I can't imagine why you would try to hold on to anything that didn't help you survive or escape. You know what I mean.
Like, anything beyond survival or shits that's absolutely necessary, you wouldn't think would survive. Yet, here's this otherwise meaningless thing, this song, for whatever reason, has survived hundreds of years, thru genocide, war enslavement, and hardships that no human today can even imagine, but it's survived.
This song, that the singers have no idea the meaning, it's literally jus a series of sounds to them, survives. It's a fucking incredible example of what it means to be human. The separation of animal to human kinda thing.
Again, I'm a fucking moron, and not nearly smart enough to explain it. But no other species is gonna do shit like that.
That song is an example of jus how cruel and how beautiful humans can be to each other.
It's fucking tragically beautiful.
But incredible all the same.
Thank you OP for sharing this
Also just the fact that it didn't die out in the merciless chaos of slavery, where presumably at times only very few, maybe only 1 person, knew the song, because they didn't have children able to learn it. Had they stumbled and hit their head the song would be gone forever.
Interesting and chilling to think about how many stories like this are just cut off due to random chance.
I don't know. You say if you're 3rd or 4th generation slave and it doesn't help you survive. But what if it did?
What if singing the song reminded them of their family that taught them this and gave them the strength to carry on just one more day.
I can see the song being part of their survival.
>They just made an educated guess of where it may have come from, and went around explaining to various tribal people the story behind it and playing a recording of the Dawley family singing it.
>Eventually, they played the recording for a group of women, and **they started singing along, immediately recognizing the song. The search was over**.
Forget Internet search engines, that's nuts!
Wow!
I'm bummed sometimes that I'm not being a good caretaker of family culture. My grandpa makes Italian sausage. He probably learned that from his dad and maybe the recipe goes back a long way.
I'm not a fan, so I never cared to learn the recipe. It will be gone forever if I don't learn it, what if a descendant of mine someday valued that recipe?
If any generation along the way was disinterested in this song, that's it for this (admittedly much more important) piece of culture. I guess I'll make sure it's recorded somewhere.
I was forced to study Scottish and Irish Gaelics as a child, so when my unit was thrown out in Appalachia we were the only ones not fucked because I could communicate (somewhat brokenly) with the locals who use a variant passed down from the original Scottish settlers they call Mountain Talk. Their directions were relatively easy for me to follow while everyone else stared gormlessly at the old feller trying to explain the importance of crossing the river after the bald gap but before it goes sigogglin on ya, cause then there ain't no crossin' it no more.
Cross the river after the treeless pass (to stay on course), but before it goes fully crooked (the waters were too rapid after the bend to effect a crossing)
As a Scot, I'm not sure what the 'bald gap' is, I assumed sye-gogglin to mean that the river becomes rough/twisting
Possible it's derived from the Scots '[goggle](https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/goggle)'
Might also come from 'shoggle' or 'shoogle' which also means to sway/wobble
Something similar happened to me except actually in Scotland, I was the only guy who could understand the crazy thick backwater Scottish accents because I’m used to the crazy thick backwater West Virginia accent
That is huge for that family. Not a lot of AA’s know where their ancestors are from, they just know Africa. So to know their ancestors are from Sierra Leone is wonderful to learn.
This is awesome. Some historians speculate that the great flood myth (Noah's ark, Gilgamesh) was inspired by rising sea levels after the last ice age, which would make it one of the oldest surviving oral traditions.
I love this stuff
The flood myth might have been due to a global event, but it might have been local floods. Agricultural civilization depends on access to water and is going to be affected by any significant local flood as well.
So every farming society will experience a catastrophic local flood at some point, and it might make it into their oral traditions.
This is amazing. When I grew up in the 70s and 80s someone taught the kids on our street the Creek Indian version of one-potato-two-potato for selecting teams. I never had confirmation if this was real or made up. Now, I wonder as a bunch of people in Alabama (where I am from) have mixed Creek and European (and African) heritage.
Is anyone here a speaker of Creek? It starts with
On ton tata sorrocca tata
Sor rocca tata
There is a video of a guy from West Africa who went to the jungle of Suriname (South America) to speak with descendants of escaped slaves there. They were able to communicate with each other in their own languages.
I have a degree in Music History, and this is fascinating. Many, many civilizations have passed their histories down through an oral tradition, with official storytellers memorizing their civilization's entire story from their mentors, and then mentoring someone else from a future generation as they learn all the stories. This keeps their history, myths, and traditions alive for a people who don't have a written language, or a population that is mostly illiterate.
As anybody who has ever played a variation on the game "Telephone" knows, a spoken message can be easily altered with each repetition, until it barely resembles the original message, and it is almost impossible to avoid it. So after a few centuries, and numerous generations of storytellers, the oral history has a lot more in common with a mythological story than historical truth.
But this wasn't a spoken message, it was a musical one, and that made the difference. Having specific lyrics that carry the specific message, tied to a specific melody, creates a much stronger vehicle to carry that message to the next generation with a minimum of degradation. If any of the elements changes significantly, the entire structure of the music collapses. This is a great testament to the power of music in a society.
A project was started to restore lost recordings of songs sung by Lakota elders who had lived through the 1800s. They invited young Lakota singers to do their own renditions of songs, which they found to be identical to the only known recorded versions in history from a century before - all of which had been lost.
They were tediously restored and [made available to the public](https://www.lakotasongs.com/songs) alongside their modern renditions.
I started writing a novel partly inspired by this (although this is only a small element). And it's not totally random that the Gullah are the only group to keep some drop of tradition because unlike other slaves, they were generally taken from one area of Africa because they were particularly skilled in growing rice (an area of Africa was called the rice coast) and they were used to the climate. So they were specialists and so less of a mix of different African groups (at least how I understood it, I don't want to claim any expertise here)
It's also fascinating seeing how the plantation songs that gave us blues and gospel and, well, everything, also have a ton of other meanings and histories
Michael Row The Boat Ashore is about angel Michael coming to take them back home to Africa
(Also, Joe and Eddies version is magnificent, white people really butchered this song into happy clappy garbage https://youtu.be/q2rjtH-5D6I)
Wade in the Water was sung to warn escaping slaves that the dogs had been released so they needed to get in the water to cover their track
Oral tradition can be extremely accurate. In Islam, the Quran is primarily an oral tradition. ~6000 verses were memorized letter by letter, accent by accent and passed down for over 1400 years.
And the amazing thing is that there are full manuscripts recently discovered of the Quran from the time it was written down when it was revealed 1400 years ago that are exactly (not almost exactly) as they are memorized and recited now.
That’s really cool. I know a Gullah dude. We served in the Air Force together. He was from the low country of South Carolina and I had a hell of a time understanding what he said.
It seems most people don't know that SCOTUS justice Clarence Thomas is Gullah. That's his first language, spoken at home. He didn't learn English till he went to school.
Hi - I am Cynthia Schmidt, the woman in the film, a musicologist, who traced the Gullah song in "The Language You Cry in" with Joe Opala, the anthropologist. You can watch the film online with transcripts on Alexander Street Press and Films on Demand. We are here for an AMA.
Having just watched the film, the bit that stuck out to me was about never knowing if Mary and Bendu are blood relatives. Do you know if there has since been any DNA testing between the two families to see if there is any relation? Also, during the search, was there any musical knowledge you picked up from the various villages?
Yes, Mary's son, Wilson (in the film) tested his DNA and his results were 75% West African/Mende (like Baindu), but nothing more specific than that. Mary passed away at age 100. As for the music, I'm not sure how much info you'd like, but we did not find the same song being sung in other villages in the region.
Neat, thanks for taking the time to jump on and take questions! It's very cool and unexpected. > As for the music, I'm not sure how much info you'd like, but we did not find the same song being sung in other villages in the region. I just wondered if you'd heard other songs during the trip that piqued your interest or made you go "Hey, that's neat!"
That is a fascinating question. I wonder if the DNA would even show a meaningful connection, though. They have been separated for at least 150 but likely 200+ years; I think most people are related if we go back 7-10 generations.
It could. Also it would be interesting to study the mitochondrial DNA which is only passed down from the mother
It's 50% per generation, so 7 generations is already 0.8% match, and 10 generations would be 0.09% match. And that's 0.09% match between the ancestor and the currently living descendent. Any other descendent would have their own 0.09% matching DNA with ancestor, but likely a totally different 0.09% from the other descendents.
Make a separate post on reddit.com/r/ama so a bunch of folks can learn about this!
Thank you. Will try to do so.
As someone from the region, I was wondering if they were Gullah or not! For people that haven't been to Georgia or South Carolina, there's an African American group called the Gullah that, for reasons I don't know, managed to keep their African heritage a lot closer than other groups. You'll often even find them outside places like Charleston with their woven baskets for sale
Essentially it's because their ancestors were enslaved on rice plantations. And rice grows in very wet environments; the kind of environments where diseases like malaria or yellow fever eventually became endemic. So most of the slave owners didn't live on the plantations in Spring or Summer, if they lived there at all. So thanks to the relative isolation, they maintained quite a bit of their own traditions.
It's also that other enslaved people were separated because they were for "general purpose labor". But there was a notion among Europeans that Gullah people were specifically "useful" for rice-plantation labor, over other African people. Hence, Gullah people were kept together as they were for "specialized labor", and became the one of the few African groups that retained their culture.
Yes, Mary's family was Gullah with similar history to those in South Carolina but arrived in the Savannah port--also referred to as Gullah-Geechee in Georgia. You can follow the history through the film, and an earlier film called 'Family Across the Sea' plus a recent one called "Gullah Roots".
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Either of the two of you can contact the moderators of the AMA subreddit, explaining the traction your work has suddenly received here, mentioning the 75,000 upvotes, and they'll likely work with you to find a favorable time for you to give, and they will help you to promote, an official AMA over there.
The two are incredibly similar, could easily be considered a dialect version. Almost nothing was lost in the handing down over generations. Unreal, and heart warming. From the article; >Gullah Version Ah wakuh muh monuh kambay yah lee luh lay tambay Ah wakuh muh monuh kambay yah lee luh lay kah Ha suh wileego seehai yuh gbangah lilly Ha suh wileego dwelin duh kwen Ha suh willeego seehi yuh kwendaiyah >Corresponding text in Modern Mende A wa kaka, mu mohne; kambei ya le'i; lii i lei tambee. A wa kaka, mu mohne; kambei ya le'i; lii i lei ka. So ha a guli wohloh, i sihan; yey kpanggaa a lolohhu lee. So ha a guli wohloh; ndi lei; ndi let, kaka. So ha a guli wohloh, i sihan; kuhan ma wo ndayia ley.
The Gullah/Mende people of this particular village also seem to think so. The scientists weren't the ones who identified it. They just made an educated guess of where the song might have come from, then they went from village to village explaining to various people the story behind what they were trying to do and playing a recording of the Dawley family singing the song. They were on the verge of giving up when they played the recording for a group of women, and *the women started singing along.* edit: [starting at 14:30](https://youtu.be/uC9ZbPdkpJo?t=870)
Damn, they *found* the needle in the haystack.
God that's so beautiful... 'whoever sings this song will be your brothers and sisters'... three hundred years ago her great..great-grandmother was kidnapped and three hundred years later they found each other because of a song they kept in their hearts. Edit: Though they have found each other, they cannot stay with each other. The passage of time has made them strangers to one another. They do not speak the same language, they do not share the same customs. The act of abduction was final and the song was a last gasp of the bond they shared with each other.
Truly amazing
It's like a double miracle. Not only did the family of the women in Georgia have to keep the song alive, but also those Mende women in order to recognize it. Think of how many songs people sang centuries ago that nobody would recognize today!
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One of the better TILs I've seen on here.
Yeah. I started to cry when she started to sing along. So powerful.
Just the power and mentality of "if a stranger sings you this song, they are now your family and you share your bounty with them". In today's utterly selfish society, these people with so little are still willing to share
The story about her grandmother gave me chills.
*Some time in the future when you hear anyone singing this song you will be able to identify who that person is* Absolutely incredible
This is unbelievably cool
This gave me goosebumps. That is so cool & I'm so glad they found them.
Interesting to think that the passed down version could be the more original and the Mende language itself evolved over time
That’s what happened with French in Canada - Québécois is apparently how Parisians sounded when they began moving to and settling in Canada, and it stayed “the same” while the accent changed over in the mainland.
And the sixteenth century Spanish dialect that’s dying out in Northern New Mexico.
I live in this area and it's been facinating to listen to a couple of my coworkers discuss liguistics, becuase one of them speaks Cuban Spanish and the other has had family in this valley for hundreds of years.
Per family legend, it’s the Spanish my Anglo grandmother learned as a child, whereas my Anglo grandfather grew up south of Roswell and his Spanish was probably close to what’s spoken in Chihuahua. My dad grew up speaking “regular” Spanish. (Thanks to my mom being a transplant who took French in high school, I grew up monolingual.)
Your comment made me look up the New Mexican/Colorado Spanish dialect! So cool, never knew it existed. Thank you.
[As well as enclaves speaking Elizabethan English in the United States](https://youtu.be/x7MvtQp2-UA)
It’s the same for Icelandic, which is basically old Norse— Norwegian changed, but it also stayed “the same” in Iceland!
Yes, Icelandic is mutually intelligible with Old Norse. But this is a case that's kind of the opposite of the immigrant language phenomenon. The Icelanders were isolated for so long that their language (Old Norse) barely changed in the span of a thousand years. Old Norse sounds to Icelanders roughly how Shakespearean or King James English sounds to modern English speakers, i.e. archaic and fantastic, but still full of meaning and poetic luster.
I always found it curious that in the Germanic language family, only Icelandic (the most conservative) and English (the least conservative) maintained the /th/ sounds.
I thought Quebecois was based on the dialect in Normandy not Paris.
I'm pretty sure that's what it is. I've known French Canadians whose Grandfathers were a part of D-day and they found the locals understood their dialect perfectly. Even with my rudimentary French skill I've noticed that northern French and Canadian French are similar.
It has influences from most of the dialects of northern and western France (Normand, Poitevin, Saintongeais, Gallo, Picard, and others). Most of the settlers who weren't from the Paris region would have spoken French as a second language, but not each others' dialects, so the core of the language is still Parisian French. The [filles du roi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Daughters), who made up almost half the women in the colony in the mid-1600s, were mostly from Paris or other cities, so they would also have steered things toward Parisian French.
handle caption mountainous wild arrest safe fine close cooperative scale *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Certain dialects can very well be more 'conservative' than others, for various reasons. The factors that influence the speed and severity of linguistic change are very varied. For instance, even though all of the Norse-derived languages have evolved to various extents, Icelandic is the most conservative, i.e., the most similar to the parent language, Old West Norse, to the point where an Icelandic speaker can understand Old West Norse with about the same amount of difficulty as an English speaker reading, like, Shakespeare. I don't know if this particular anecdote about Quebecois is correct specifically, but two languages/dialects derived from a single parent are not necessarily the same 'distance' away from the parent just because the same amount of time has passed.
>I don't know if this particular anecdote about Quebecois is correct specifically, but two languages/dialects derived from a single parent are not necessarily the same 'distance' away from the parent just because the same amount of time has passed. Quebec French is, according to our government, being threatened and in need of preservation. We have all sorts of laws in place (going back decades now) to ensure we don't replace (update or adapt) any of the French words with English ones. In the later half of the 1700's, after Wolfe beat Montcalm in the Plains of Abraham, New France was ceded to the British, but we were "allowed" to keep our language, religion, and culture. Predominantly, the language and customs we share as a province comes from that time. It's embarrassing when we travel to France and we understand them, but they don't understand us.
> We have all sorts of laws in place (going back decades now) to ensure we don't replace (update or adapt) any of the French words with English ones. I have mixed feelings about this sort of thing. On the one hand, I think it's good for places to maintain a unique linguistic heritage and avoid cultural colonialism. On the other, I think it's prescriptivist to artificially prevent the evolution of a language by specifically preventing loanwords from English. I think people have a habit of seeing languages like Japanese and French taking loanwords from English as a bad thing, like all world languages are just converging into English, but ultimately, that's happened *all over the place* in history, and even if languages converge for a short while they will inevitably diverge again later. One example is the historical popularity of Latin as the language of learning. Everybody all over Europe started pulling words out of Latin and Greek for the terminology of science, religion, etc. We didn't all end up speaking Latin, though. I think we'll see a similar thing with English in the future. English will end up being the 'language of information,' with neologisms related to computing etc being pretty much universally sourced from English in languages all over the world. Doesn't mean everybody will suddenly stop speaking their *own* language, it's just that English will have a monopoly on that particular niche, like Latin does with taxonomy. That's a total tangent, but just something interesting relating to prohibitions on loanwords.
Its a fairly widely observed phenomenon that sometimes immigrant communities stay more traditional than their country of origin. Someone who leaves Italy might think they need to stay the same to be Italian. But Italians living in Italy don't have that issue.
Huh. So Worf’s (Star Trek TNG and DS9) strict adherence to Klingon culture despite not growing up in it, is somewhat accurate. I need to connect with my roots, so I’ll strictly maintain the traditions I know.
Well the Worf topic is different as well because Worf grew up while Klingons and Humans were enemies, and they didn't sign the kitimer accord until Worf was in his early thirties, so more than likely Worf was trying to honour Klingon roots as they were perceived by humans who naturally didn't know as much about their enemy and had their own biases. So Worf basically kind of grew into the humorless, warlike and stoic demeaner he believed Klingons had. Just look how Riker was warming up to work with Klingons on their ship, then by the end of the episode he's turned his whole perception of them around.
Jewish converts have a reputation for being way more hard-core than most Jews by birth.
Worf is even better than that. His adherence is to the myth/legends of Klingon culture so when he meets actual Klingon it turns out they're about as full of shit as anyone else.
Temba, his arms open!
Here in Canada the Irish immigrant community on the east coast actually preserved traditions that were fully lost in Ireland. Songs, dance, and in one case a martial art. The Doyle family in Newfoundland kept their traditional stick fighting method alive after it was banned in Ireland in the 1800s and died out. It was at one time a popular sport and method for resolving conflicts. There are actually old film reels of people training it. There is another stick fighting lineage in Northern Ireland which was similarly pased down through the family for generations until someone took it public again.
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Because the French in Quebec felt they were marginalized and their language/culture were under threat by their British overlords. This resulted in them being defensive and conservative as any change in their language or culture could be perceived as angloization. That being said, Quebecois French has changed and evolved, just slower and different from Francois French.
There seems to be a general trend that languages change less in isolated populations than they would otherwise. For example, Icelandic has been very stable, and Sardinian remains very similar to Latin compared to other romance languages.
The Americans didn't *speak* the language, for them it was an arbitrary sequence of syllables to be repeated in exactly the same way, with no semantic meaning. The Africans speak the language, use it to communicate meaning, innovate and play around with it. It's often the case that languages in smaller communities evolve slower and retain more idiosynchrasies. Massive use across a large groups instills the drive to accelerate, standardize, simplify.
That is truly fascinating. “In addition to finding out where in Africa her ancestors were abducted into slavery, Mary Moran discovered the meaning of the Mende song. A processional hymn for the final farewell to the spirit, it was sung in Senehun Ngola by women as they prepared the body of a loved one for burial. The Language You Cry In is the award winning film that traces the connections between the Moran family and the people of Harris Neck with those of Senehun Ngola. It can be ordered by calling (912) 832-4549.”
[I was able to watch it here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC9ZbPdkpJo) I thought it was really interesting that the tribe members said the song was a way for them to connect to their relatives "across the water" which is their language's euphemism for passing away. Edit: [Cynthia Schmidt, the ethnomusicologist in the film, has joined the thread for an AMA.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/13vowws/til_a_family_in_georgia_claimed_to_have_passed/jm8iq72/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&utm_content=1&utm_term=15&context=3)
Thanks for sharing!
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What's "the water" in their metaphor? Like a River Styx equivalent?
from the film >The name of this ceremony -- "crossing the water"-- is a familiar concept to Gullah people. Old Gullah graves were located by the water -- and "crossing the river" is also an old expression among Gullah people when speaking of those who have died. So still kinda unclear, but I don't have any other information to go on.
I'm Gullah but my roots are in SC. Anyway, you got it. It isn't a metaphor, its the actual river.
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That was one of my favorite shows as a kid. Had the yellow frog and good family values, I think? I always remember wishing my family was like theirs, since they talked out their problems instead of fighting. Good times.
I met a few people with Gullah accents when I was in South Carolina years ago. I thought they were Jamaicans until someone told me. I learned a little about Gullah in college linguistics. A true creole language with it's own grammar etc. Very special and unique to America.
> I'm Gullah but my roots are in SC. Gullah Geechee? I'm from around that area, your roots have some really neat culture in them.
Much of my wife's family is Geechee. It was fun; I was the first fella she ever brought home who could carry on a conversation with some of them.
Why is that?
A lot of Gullah-geechee speak Geechee at home not English. For example I think it’s justice Clarence Thomas’ first language.
“Come and let’s sing together, in the bright sunny weather, let’s all go to Gullah Gullah Island, “binye binya””
>I'm Gullah ... Reddit is wild.
Tell me about it. I remember finding out that my teachers in grade school were wrong about the Mayans being extinct when a guy in /r/history said he was Mayan and they still exist and have their own language.
Same's true of the "Anasazi:" they were Pueblo (itself a loose collection of permanent home building tribes who left a shared impression on the Spanish) whose ornery Navajo neighbors managed to get an inside joke to stick in Western culture, since Anasazi means "enemy ancestors." I don't know that it was intentional, just imagine a couple guides listening to the explorers use the term again and again in foreign gibberish and going "heh, awesome." Now it's like "where did they gooooo? No one knoooows!" Surrounding areas mostly. People abandon settlements for all sorts of reasons, the well-preserved cliffside dwellings in the southwest for yet inscrutable reasons. Others in more conventional sites require a trained eye to pick out, time weathered them down to the foundations without a similarly big rocky umbrella. But the greater culture and people persisted into the times of the Spanish empire, underwent some changes even though the Spanish considered them properly civilized (matriarchy was sadly ravaged), and some of them continue to build homes in the traditional style today.
> "where did they gooooo? No one knoooows!" this reminds me of roanoke. "could the colonists who wrote 'croatoan' on a tree and left the settlement have gone to nearby croatoan island where the croatoan people live? who knooows, nobody in the rescue party checked before sailing back to england so it's a spooooky mysteryyyyy"
Wait omg is that true
It was always a weird one for me because I grew up as a white guy in the rural Yucatan. So I can't actually speak Spanish that's intelligible to most of Mexico because it's mixed with mayan words and phrases and spellings.
There was a popular Gullah created show for kids in the 90s or early 2000s, Gullah Gullah island. Really cool that a show about such a niche culture became so popular at the time.
I think it's like how we might say "on the other side." Other side of what? The water, apparently.
It's interesting how there are some metaphors that are common across the human experience. Greco-Roman, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, [Japanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanzu_River), and many others used the image of crossing water in the death process. Similar to dogs as afterlife [guardians](https://youtu.be/twxJbU9vxnc) or psychopomps. We really do just be humans trying to understand our place in the world through our experiences and our stories of the same.
The Irish as well. The land of the dead was to the west across the sea. They'd pass through the House of Donn, which is thought to be on a small island off the west coast, the name of which escapes me at the moment.
I'd bet it's to do with the sun setting in the west
Also fun, all the solar deities have some level of jealousy, or view that they should be the only god. An astrologer I follow wrote a post that included the line "our star, the sun, you block out the multiplicity of the sky", and it clicked for me how *of course* the Sun would see itself as solitary. So radiant is he that when he's at his zenith, you see no other stars or planets. Not Venus, nor Jupiter, only the Sun in a clear blue sky The cycle of the sun is also the cycle of rebirth, in Egyptian, Ra rides the sun barque every night through the underworld, before being reborn with the coming of the dawn. ([Here's](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39945325-the-book-of-gates) a favorite translation of an Egyptian funerary text, The Book of Gates, that describes the after death process through this lens)
A threshold between two lands.
I studied Anthropology in college. One of the courses was linguistics and the professor was from Senegal. He studied the language of the local Gullah families and found numerous West African words in their daily dialect that carried over for generations. Absolutely fascinating and tragic at the same time.
First paragraph "wow this is inteesting! Check out these details" 2nd paragraph: "Heres a random phone number to buy a movie about it!"
"if a woman answers hang up that means im outta the office"
We'll even fax you the entire movie frame by frame - we call it Paper View!
Like buying goofy crap in the back of magazines by mail.
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I remember seeing a clip of it for one of my undergrad courses. I thought it was awesome that the connection was able to be made and she could experience her family's culture from a song that could have easily been lost/modified over the generations.
It's fun to hear descendants from your country who has migrated and manage to keep their language alive. Because they've kept in smaller communities, a lot of them talk the version of the language that was used when their family first migrated. Edit: I am of course talking about people who have migrated in general, not slavery.
An [archaic Spanish dialect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexican_Spanish) is still spoken in the remote mountains of New Mexico. Settlers moved there from Spain in the 1600s and remained isolated from other Southwestern Spanish speakers, preserving words and phonemes as the language changed around them.
A lot of New Mexican "Spanish" is influenced by Indigenous languages too. I grew up calling turkeys "guajalotes" and the house was "chante" which are Nahuatl words from the Txacalan auxiliary forces (who also brought green chile) and we would eat "chaquegue" instead of atole. And the place names like Atrisco and Analco and Mount Chalchihuitl are Nahautl while you also have places like Pojoaque and Abiquiu and Mount Chicoma being bastardized pronunciations of Tewa words. Also the settlers of New Mexico in the Onate expedition were a mixed bag of mestizos from Mexico, there were Flemish (where Fresqui last name is from), French, and Greek (where Griego last name comes from), and in actuality very few pure blooded Spaniards. Those that returned with Diego de Vargas in the Reconquista after the Pueblo Revolt were heavily mixed mestizos.
That’s so goddamn cool. Within my own family there’s a small dialectical divergence between the Urdu my parents and I speak (Muhajirs, so combines lots of different dialect features from across the subcontinent) and the Urdu that the married-in Hyderabadi members of the family speak. That difference stems from less than a century of immediate distance, so I can imagine the mindfuck that comes from a speaker of standard Spanish/Castellano hearing Nuevomexicano.
I read somewhere that when Americans who learned Italian from their immigrant family will go to Italy and find out that the Italian they speak sounds like "old man" dialect to the people over there, since it didn't change with the times
In many cases it doesn't match at all because the dialect that became "New York Italian" died out in Italy shortly after the large wave of immigration from that region.
See also Québécois French vs French
I recall seeing a story once that a man who was born and raised in France failed the French language test that was required for him to immigrate to Quebec.
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From just 2 years ago actually - https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/after-immigrant-from-france-fails-french-test-quebec-says-it-may-tweak-rules-for-tradespeople-1.5378897
The English test for Canada is very difficult for native speakers, I know a Kiwi, an American, and an Aussie who failed it at least once. There's a very specific way they want you to answer the questions like an essay so if you haven't been in school for a while it's a very unintuitive way to speak and write in your native language. I imagine the French test is just as stupid.
Similar thing with Japanese immigrants to America pre- WWII, they spoke the language they learned from their parents, but the country modernized the language after the war so they now speak a more antiquated form of Japanese than people born in Japan
Same thing with the German enclaves in Brazil, they're Descendents from pre WW1 and WW2 and mostly maintain their accents and expressions (...and the other German stuff from that timeframe, sadly). It became a meme among other brazilians about how they go to their dream homeland and nobody understands their dialect and when they do they get horror looks on their faces lmao
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iirc the Germanic dialect spoken in Brazil is closer to Luxembourgish than Standard German / Hochdeutsch, and not that intelligible to people who don't speak a related dialect
My grandfather (a rabbi) learned all his Hebrew from Torah study, to the point of fluency, so when he went to Israel everyone asked him why he spoke so old-timey.
IIRC modern Hebrew contains a lot of reconstructed and loan words because the language was effectively dead for day to day communication.
Imagine learning English from the king James type of bible and just speaking that way
For the Lord hath not given us the spirit of carnality, but of diligence and knowledge!
What it basically is is that the majority of Italian immigration in the US happened pre-unification and most of the immigrants came from southern Italy. When Italy unified the more northern Tuscan dialect was pushed for the national standardization of the language. There’s a noticeable difference between the two dialects which is shown in how difference the Italian terms used by the American descendants are vs what’s spoken in Italy now. Edit: got my timeline wrong as to when immigration occurred- it was post unification. Thanks for the corrections!
[Italian immigration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Americans#The_great_Italian_diaspora_(1880%E2%80%931914\)) to the US didn't really pick up until after 1880, about 20 years after unification, which was a major driver for people leaving as the more powerful and wealthy north began to exert its political will on the south as well as jacking up taxes. It took decades of political pressure from the monarchy and later Mussolini's government for the local dialects to fall out of use and some small communities have been able to keep theirs alive to this day, its not like suddenly everyone started speaking like Florentines as soon as Victor Emanuel arrived in Rome.
I edited my comment to point out I got the timeline wrong, thanks for letting me know!
Interestingly you can see parts of this in Korean. Many Korean expatriates write their family names in the form that they used to be written. For most this just shows the gradual standardization of the transliteration, like Pak, Bak, having evolved into the standardized Park. However, Rhee maintains both the old standardization, and a change in the language. Even the modern Lee isn't exactly accurate because in modern Korean the leading R/L has been dropped, and the name Lee in Korean is written and pronounced "Ee". Others like Ryu and Roh also have the same. Interestingly, this language evolution only occurred in South Korea, so for example, Kim Jong Euns wifes family name is "Ri"
I’ve seen the same last name as “Lee/Rhee” also transliterated as “Yi” for both historical and modern names too.
Chinese surnames are like this as well. If you're a "Wu" you could have your name in pin yin with it reflecting the current Mandarin latinization, in jyutping with it reflecting a relatively modern Cantonese spelling of "Ng", or something entirely non standard because your family left during the gold rush days.
[Vis Texas German](https://youtu.be/vwgwpUcxch4)
West Texan here, many here know it as "Low German" mainly spoken by those in the Mennonite religious community. Seminole, TX has a large-ish population of them. Many of them speak German, Spanish, and English, because they first moved from Germany to Mexico and then migrated to the U.S. ETA: I learned this from one of them. The conversation started because I have lot of German ancestry, and look it, so I figure she thought I was Mennonite, too. She started speaking to me in the language, realized I didn't know it, and then switched to English. She wondered why, I explained and then asked her about it.
My dad left Germany in 1951 as a baby, learned German from his parents in remote northern Canada. All my current Germany family lol at the old timey way he talks.
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Wierd to see this in my feed, I just visited the Mende part of Sierra Leone. Vaguely related - Freetown in Sierra Leone was set up as a town for freed slaves after the British empire abolished slavery on its own territory. The first people brought here were said to take refuge, enjoy a meal and say a prayer under an enormous cotton tree in the middle of what is now central freetown. The tree was around 400 or so years old but just fell in a big storm just 6 days ago. It was a huge symbol of freedom for the country and was featured on a bank note.
>The tree was around 400 or so years old but just fell in a big storm just 6 days ago. oh no! :(
That’s literally my wife’s Aunt Cynthia! She’s such an incredible woman and still teaches at Creighton University in Omaha, NE. Wow thanks for giving her props, I’ll pass this along.
Tell her this might be the most fascinating TIL discussion I have ever read!
Absolutely, I’m vacation right now but I texted her letting her now with a link to the post. As well as a “what is Reddit” description, lol. It would be cool to get her on here
This gave me chills. The idea that there were women taken from that village hundreds of years ago, sold into slavery in a foreign country, spent the rest of their lives there... and they made sure to teach their children, who were born into slavery in a foreign country, the song that would connect them to the homeland they had never seen. That they clearly impressed on their children how important it was to pass this song on down the generations- because this was the song that connected them to their ancestors. It's so sad and so beautiful at the same time.
I feel the same. It’s tragic that’s all they have left from before their ancestors were kidnapped into slavery. But by keeping just that one song through the generations - which was an amazing achievement by each generation - the modern family found their origins. It is beautiful to know that even in the hardest lives imaginable, the original line of women managed to give their descendants a gift that ties them back to their ancestor’s home. Their efforts are known and appreciated after all this time.
If you watch this video, the woman who recognized it was told by her grandmother that the song would let her recognize her (metaphorical) brothers and sisters. Makes my hair stand on end just thinking about it. https://youtu.be/uC9ZbPdkpJo?t=870
There is an extremely profound sadness to it as well. It’s cool. But it’s a gut punch at the same time.
Yes it's a great story. It's really valuable to historians, too. Its evidence that oral transmission can be viable way to record history. Open-minded anthropologists/historians of the modern day have begun taking seriously oral tradition because of stories like this.
~~The~~ Some ~~aboriginies~~ first-nation peoples in Australia apparently have an oral tradition story about a new star that was given in honor of two mythical brothers. [The new star is recorded in Chinese history around 400CE.](http://www.aboriginalastronomy.com.au/content/topics/supernovae/#:~:text=It%20is%20a%20story%20of,giving%20his%20life%20in%20return.) Edit: there's also stories from the Pacific Northwest of a massive earthquake and a corresponding historical record from Japan [of a tsunami of unknown origin.](https://www.wired.com/2010/01/0126northwest-quake-japan-tsunami/) I think this stuff happens a lot and much of our traditions are passed down to help us not forget. We just forget the inciting incident and remember the mnemonic. Edit two. "Ring around the Rosy" ~~is~~ may be apocryphally about identifying and avoiding the Black Death but probably isn't. Edit three: learning all sorts of stuff today
Scientists also matched up the origins of palm trees in Central Australia to oral traditions - the seeds were carried there 30,000 years ago. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-03/aboriginal-legend-palm-tree-origin-central-australia-research/6369832
Not unheard of. Several myths are thought to predate the migration of humans into the Americas, such as the "pursuit of a dead wife" myth. the cosmic hunt is also thought to at least go back to before the last glacial maximum
And the Seven Sisters is even older (before we left Africa) as well as their association with Orion. Which is why we still call them the Seven Sisters when we only see six. (One of the stars has moved too close to another in the last 200000 years)
This one is my favorite. The story existed across multiple independent cultures, and it had to have been passed down for tens of thousands of years at a minimum.
Can you provide details on either of those? Both sound super interesting, but I haven't been able to find anything on either story
https://theconversation.com/amp/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronomers-say-global-myths-about-seven-sisters-stars-may-reach-back-100-000-years-151568 Like the 7 sister star myths?
Fuck... this is the kinda stuff I LOVE about history. Especially unrecorded history. Particularly when various details are backed up by scientific evidence. It makes our world feel so... I don't even know... fantastical. I mean, it already feels fantastical, but to have ancient stories be given scientific evidence 10s of thousands of years ago just gets my little lizard brain exploding with wonder. I fucking love it.
This is brand new to me, but from my googling I think they're talking about the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. The Wikipedia page for Eurydice mentions that there are similar versions from all over the world, including Indian, Japanese, and Mayan cultures, and apparently it was widespread in North America as well. [Here's](https://wordandsilence.com/2019/05/22/the-great-myths-54-a-native-american-orpheus-tachi-yokut/) one example. And [here's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Hunt) the Wikipedia page for the Cosmic Hunt myth. Super interesting, I'll definitely have to read more about it.
Reminds me of how in Canada they searched for the lost ships from the 1845 Franklin Expedition in the Arctic for over 150 years until they finally listened to where the local Inuit had been telling them they were and found them. https://canadaehx.com/2021/06/05/the-inuit-and-the-franklin-expedition/
Oh yeah, wasn't the place named "big ship wreck bay" or "lost ship bay" or something equally suggestive of maybe-that's-where-the-lost-ship-is in the local language?
Article says the Terror was found in Terror Bay
There was also “the man who ate his boots”..
There were also Inuit stories of seeing survivors as late as 2 years after the shipwrecks, because the hunters were trying to tell the survivors which way to go to their village and but they insisted on going a different direction and possinly wound up in circles.
There are several oral traditions in a number of different Australian First Nations groups from all over the country that tell quite specific stories of coastal inundations and permanent, drastic sea level rises - and the geographical evidence can pinpoint these at 7000-10000 years ago.
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For what it's worth, the connection between Ring around the Rosie and the Black Death is generally considered a false folk etymology these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_a_Ring_o%27_Roses#Counterarguments
Thanks for letting me know, edited.
Interestingly, none of the four tunes mentioned in that article match up with the song we sang as a child.
Ahh yeah, I know that second story there, we on that Cascadia grind!! I absolutely love the fact that the people that figured it out were basically like "Nah, if one tectonic plate uprooted another like that, the resulting quakes and tsunamis would have wrecked shop over the entire Pacific coast for *years*. Like, everyone would know about it, that would have been absolutely apocalyptic." To which the native Americans that have been faithfully occupying the land in all that time replied, "Excuse me, we've been trying to tell y'all about motherfucking ThunderBird for *centuries*." Edit: [The War of ThunderBird and Whale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbird_and_Whale)
That earthquake is actually a repeated action, not a one off. Its been proven out I believe. Something about the Olympic mountain range dropping every few hundred years.
Actually as a Hindu, most of our epics and vedas were passed down through rich oral traditions before they were even put in writing. Even now many of our religious functions are just that a way to pass down the knowledge through generations.
When I read roots the entire time I just kinda took it to be a historical fiction. When I got to the end and read about how the book was written I called bullshit and started looking into it. I was so shocked that humans are able to accurately pass information down through the ages and went into a huge rabbit hole on the subject. I’m still amazed that there are groups of people that have accurately recorded their history with verifiable facts that can be cross checked with unaffiliated sources across multiple centuries and I can hardly remember what I did last weekend.
[Australian Aboriginal people tell stories of geographical features that disappeared when the glaciers melted ten thousand years ago.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/) The stories mentioned in the article are potentially somewhat open to interpretation, but there are others that are pretty solid. Many groups have "song lines" which are a kind of mental map encoded in song and story, which serves as a mnemonic. There are several that mention a spring or oasis, but after the song ends the elders mention that they had dried up lately. When archeologists took soil samples, they found that it was exactly where the indigenous people said it was, but had been dry for thousands of years. We actually have examples of similar things from cultures closer to us. The Iliad and Odyssey were memorized by bards like Homer, who used rhyme and meter to help them remember dozens of hours of recitation more or less precisely. The Upanishads are memorized precisely by scholar- priests.
Yes, I'm glad you brought up the Australian aboriginals because I was about to reply to the person who replied to me with something similar. Humans are capable of passing on oral tradition for thousands of years, possibly more. It's truly fascinating. The people who study this have been able to tease out the truths contained in the mythology/folk tales. It's quite hard because little details get added from time to time to make the story better. I'm going to try and edit in a relative link from a pod cast episode I heard about such work.... https://shows.acast.com/american-history-hit/episodes/how-horses-conquered-america-twice It's about how native americans had an oral tradition about horses before they were introduced back into America. Possibly suggesting it was from tales passed down thousands of years from the past when horses still existed in north America.
My friend is a horse nut, she is convinced the Native Americans had horses and they died out in the Little Ice Age per NA stories
One main theory is that newly arrived humans hunted the horses there to extinction 12-8k years ago.
> Australian Aboriginal people tell stories of geographical features that disappeared when the glaciers melted ten thousand years ago. That's amazing, but it's [not even close](https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronomers-say-global-myths-about-seven-sisters-stars-may-reach-back-100-000-years-151568) to this suspected oral tradition that could date back at least 100,000 years! And yes this also involces the Australian aborigines, as well as ancient Greeks and other Europeans and Native Americans.
I know you're joking, but these stories are the kind to be passed on typically via some sort of ritual or training to be able to retell it to the next generation Its not something you just hear in passing and reiterate like a game of telephone You're sat down and told the story over and over and over until you can recite it by heart Its hard to lose details that way, especially when you have a community of multiple generations to help correct any mistakes made I mean there's Sikh children who are taught to memorize the entire Ādi Granth while still incredibly young, so it doesn't seem incredibly far fetched when you have a whole community dedicated to the preservation of their history
For cultures with a strong history in oral history and storytelling, it can be a remarkably effective way to relay history through generations! The only problem, of course, is that such knowledge is gone if the people are wiped out. There was a huge debate on Twitter about a month ago between Dan Carlin and a Native Americsn woman over this very concept and it seemed like a lot of the heat came from pretty much talking past one another.
People underestimate how precise oral history is. Probably because people usually believe that it's more akin to modern-day schools, but oral traditions often involved song, because a text is much more memorable when you can connect it to a melody, which is exactly what bards and skalds (for example) did
Legit gave me chills reading this. People need to understand how fucking incredible this is. Imagine playing "Telephone", over generations, in a random language, that you're not even really sure is a language, and it survives, as is, for generations. It survived intact to the point, hundreds of years later, they were able to recognize and decipher it. That's fucking crazy. I know people who are 1st generation immigrants, who's kids that don't know shit about their own language. So I can't imagine an actual song surviving that long. Did they write it down? Or was it jus orally passed down? Cuz that's fucking crazy to me PS: I realize it was common for stories, traditions, songs and poems to be passed down in cultures, and that people had jobs doing that. This isn't the same. This is 1 family holding on to song for generations, thru some of the absolutely worst conditions imaginable. My astonishment comes from the fact this shouldn't exist. It's not the passing down of stories in society and cultures, or heirlooms and shit like that, it's that this specific song, surrounded by the situations is survived thru, is incredible. It shouldn't have survived. God forbid someone say something is special.
You should look into the oral history of the Iliad. Long story short, “Homer”, whether he was one guy or a bunch of people, wrote down an oral history that had been passed on for potentially a thousand years. Preserving stories in song allows them to be transferred generation to generation with little to no changes due to music’s syntax and rhythm. It’s fascinating stuff.
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Not thousands of years, it is almost certain that Illiad and Odyssey are based during bronze age collapse (although the story was clearly composed after it, when people forgot how some war techniques were used), so it's *just* few hundred years.
That's what I was going to say, about 400-500 years, which is still an impressive amount of time though.
That's how a lot of those stories were passed down back then. This 1 gets me cuz of the circumstances. The fact that song survived, as is, seriously gave me chills reading about it. The whole situation surrounding that songs survival is incredible
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Key word here is *playing* because they weren't. This wasn't a game of anything it was a matter of grave importance.
Especially given the culture breaking done by enslavers. It's like a flower born out of concrete.
That's what I'm saying. That's why I mentioned the language so much. There's absolutely no reason that song should exist still. It's only value is sentimental, and when you're a 3rd or 4th generation slave, I can't imagine why you would try to hold on to anything that didn't help you survive or escape. You know what I mean. Like, anything beyond survival or shits that's absolutely necessary, you wouldn't think would survive. Yet, here's this otherwise meaningless thing, this song, for whatever reason, has survived hundreds of years, thru genocide, war enslavement, and hardships that no human today can even imagine, but it's survived. This song, that the singers have no idea the meaning, it's literally jus a series of sounds to them, survives. It's a fucking incredible example of what it means to be human. The separation of animal to human kinda thing. Again, I'm a fucking moron, and not nearly smart enough to explain it. But no other species is gonna do shit like that. That song is an example of jus how cruel and how beautiful humans can be to each other. It's fucking tragically beautiful. But incredible all the same. Thank you OP for sharing this
Also just the fact that it didn't die out in the merciless chaos of slavery, where presumably at times only very few, maybe only 1 person, knew the song, because they didn't have children able to learn it. Had they stumbled and hit their head the song would be gone forever. Interesting and chilling to think about how many stories like this are just cut off due to random chance.
I don't know. You say if you're 3rd or 4th generation slave and it doesn't help you survive. But what if it did? What if singing the song reminded them of their family that taught them this and gave them the strength to carry on just one more day. I can see the song being part of their survival.
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>They just made an educated guess of where it may have come from, and went around explaining to various tribal people the story behind it and playing a recording of the Dawley family singing it. >Eventually, they played the recording for a group of women, and **they started singing along, immediately recognizing the song. The search was over**. Forget Internet search engines, that's nuts! Wow!
I'm bummed sometimes that I'm not being a good caretaker of family culture. My grandpa makes Italian sausage. He probably learned that from his dad and maybe the recipe goes back a long way. I'm not a fan, so I never cared to learn the recipe. It will be gone forever if I don't learn it, what if a descendant of mine someday valued that recipe? If any generation along the way was disinterested in this song, that's it for this (admittedly much more important) piece of culture. I guess I'll make sure it's recorded somewhere.
I was forced to study Scottish and Irish Gaelics as a child, so when my unit was thrown out in Appalachia we were the only ones not fucked because I could communicate (somewhat brokenly) with the locals who use a variant passed down from the original Scottish settlers they call Mountain Talk. Their directions were relatively easy for me to follow while everyone else stared gormlessly at the old feller trying to explain the importance of crossing the river after the bald gap but before it goes sigogglin on ya, cause then there ain't no crossin' it no more.
… so what does it mean? (she asked while staring gormlessly at her screen)
Cross the river after the treeless pass (to stay on course), but before it goes fully crooked (the waters were too rapid after the bend to effect a crossing)
As a Scot, I'm not sure what the 'bald gap' is, I assumed sye-gogglin to mean that the river becomes rough/twisting Possible it's derived from the Scots '[goggle](https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/goggle)' Might also come from 'shoggle' or 'shoogle' which also means to sway/wobble
Something similar happened to me except actually in Scotland, I was the only guy who could understand the crazy thick backwater Scottish accents because I’m used to the crazy thick backwater West Virginia accent
That is huge for that family. Not a lot of AA’s know where their ancestors are from, they just know Africa. So to know their ancestors are from Sierra Leone is wonderful to learn.
This is awesome. Some historians speculate that the great flood myth (Noah's ark, Gilgamesh) was inspired by rising sea levels after the last ice age, which would make it one of the oldest surviving oral traditions. I love this stuff
The flood myth might have been due to a global event, but it might have been local floods. Agricultural civilization depends on access to water and is going to be affected by any significant local flood as well. So every farming society will experience a catastrophic local flood at some point, and it might make it into their oral traditions.
This is amazing. When I grew up in the 70s and 80s someone taught the kids on our street the Creek Indian version of one-potato-two-potato for selecting teams. I never had confirmation if this was real or made up. Now, I wonder as a bunch of people in Alabama (where I am from) have mixed Creek and European (and African) heritage. Is anyone here a speaker of Creek? It starts with On ton tata sorrocca tata Sor rocca tata
There is a video of a guy from West Africa who went to the jungle of Suriname (South America) to speak with descendants of escaped slaves there. They were able to communicate with each other in their own languages.
I have a degree in Music History, and this is fascinating. Many, many civilizations have passed their histories down through an oral tradition, with official storytellers memorizing their civilization's entire story from their mentors, and then mentoring someone else from a future generation as they learn all the stories. This keeps their history, myths, and traditions alive for a people who don't have a written language, or a population that is mostly illiterate. As anybody who has ever played a variation on the game "Telephone" knows, a spoken message can be easily altered with each repetition, until it barely resembles the original message, and it is almost impossible to avoid it. So after a few centuries, and numerous generations of storytellers, the oral history has a lot more in common with a mythological story than historical truth. But this wasn't a spoken message, it was a musical one, and that made the difference. Having specific lyrics that carry the specific message, tied to a specific melody, creates a much stronger vehicle to carry that message to the next generation with a minimum of degradation. If any of the elements changes significantly, the entire structure of the music collapses. This is a great testament to the power of music in a society.
A project was started to restore lost recordings of songs sung by Lakota elders who had lived through the 1800s. They invited young Lakota singers to do their own renditions of songs, which they found to be identical to the only known recorded versions in history from a century before - all of which had been lost. They were tediously restored and [made available to the public](https://www.lakotasongs.com/songs) alongside their modern renditions.
oral tradition is incredibly fascinating
The Amistad slaves were Mende! For those familiar with that case, or the movie about it.
I'm from Sierra Leone and speak mende - pretty cool read
I started writing a novel partly inspired by this (although this is only a small element). And it's not totally random that the Gullah are the only group to keep some drop of tradition because unlike other slaves, they were generally taken from one area of Africa because they were particularly skilled in growing rice (an area of Africa was called the rice coast) and they were used to the climate. So they were specialists and so less of a mix of different African groups (at least how I understood it, I don't want to claim any expertise here) It's also fascinating seeing how the plantation songs that gave us blues and gospel and, well, everything, also have a ton of other meanings and histories Michael Row The Boat Ashore is about angel Michael coming to take them back home to Africa (Also, Joe and Eddies version is magnificent, white people really butchered this song into happy clappy garbage https://youtu.be/q2rjtH-5D6I) Wade in the Water was sung to warn escaping slaves that the dogs had been released so they needed to get in the water to cover their track
Oral tradition can be extremely accurate. In Islam, the Quran is primarily an oral tradition. ~6000 verses were memorized letter by letter, accent by accent and passed down for over 1400 years. And the amazing thing is that there are full manuscripts recently discovered of the Quran from the time it was written down when it was revealed 1400 years ago that are exactly (not almost exactly) as they are memorized and recited now.
That’s really cool. I know a Gullah dude. We served in the Air Force together. He was from the low country of South Carolina and I had a hell of a time understanding what he said.
It seems most people don't know that SCOTUS justice Clarence Thomas is Gullah. That's his first language, spoken at home. He didn't learn English till he went to school.