Some fairy tales may be 6000 years old — 一些可追溯到6000年前的童话故事

发表于 讨论求助 2023-05-10 14:56:27

英译中


 

When it comes to the origin of Western fairy tales, the 19th century Brothers Grimm get a lot of the credit. Few scholars believe the Grimms were actually responsible for creating the tales,but academics probably didn’t realize how old many of these stories really are.A new study, which treats these fables like an evolving species, finds thatsome may have originated as long as 6000 years ago.

 

谈到西方童话故事的起源,十九世纪的格林兄弟可以说享有盛誉。少数学者认为这些故事真的是格林兄弟亲手创作的,但学界可能没有认识到这些故事由来已久。一项新的研究将这些童话视为一个进化中的物种,结果发现一些故事起源可能要追溯到6000年前。

 

The basis for the new study, published in Royal Society Open Science, is a massive online repository of more than 2000 distinct tales from different Indo-European cultures known as the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index, which was compiled in 2004. Although not all researchers agree on the specifics, all modern Indo-European cultures (encompassing all of Europe and much of Asia) descended from the Proto-Indo-European people who lived during the Neolithic Period (10,200 B.C.E.–2000 B.C.E.) in Eastern Europe. Much of the world’s modern language is thought to have evolved from them.

 

这项研究是基于刊载在《皇家学会开放科学》上的一个庞大的在线数据库,囊括了超过2000个来自印欧文化的不同的故事,称为阿尔——汤普森——乌瑟尔指数,于2004年编译。尽管并非所有研究人员都赞同该指数的细节描述,但所有的现代印欧语系民族(包括欧洲全部和亚洲大部分地区)其祖先都是生活在新石器时代(公元前10200——公元前2000年)的东欧的原始印欧人。世界上许多的现代语言被认为是从原始印欧语言进化而来的。

 

To conduct the study, Jamshid Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham University in the

 

为了开展这项研究,英国杜伦大学人类学家詹姆希德·德拉尼(Jamshid Tehrani)和他的同事对数据库进行了扫描了。他们将分析范围控制在包含魔力和超自然元素的童话,因为这囊括了几乎所有人们熟知的童话故事。这样一来样本大小就控制在275个故事,包括经典名篇如《汉瑟和葛丽特》,以及《美女与野兽》。

 

But tracing these tales back through time is no easy task. There are scant historical records, and many of the fables began as oral stories that left no written versions. So the researchers used statistical methods similar to those employed by biologists to trace species lineages back through the branching tree of evolution based only on modern DNA sequences.

 

但是通过时间追溯这些故事可不是容易的事。相关历史记载很匮乏,而且许多寓言故事最初口口相传没有留下书面记载。所以研究者们使用的统计方法类似于生物学家通过进化树追溯物种谱系,而这一方法必须以现代的基因序列技术为基础。

 

Here’s how it worked: Fairy tales are transmitted through language, and the shoots and branches of the Indo-European language tree are well-defined, so the scientists could trace a tale’s history back up the tree—and thus back in time. If both Slavic languages and Celtic languages had a version of Jack and the Beanstalk (and the analysis revealed they might), for example, chances are the story can be traced back to the “lastcommon ancestor.” That would be the Proto-Western-Indo-Europeans from whom both lineages split at least 6800 years ago (see image). The approach mirrors how an evolutionary biologist might conclude that two species came from a common ancestor if their genes both contain the same mutation not found in other modern animals.

 

统计过程如下:童话故事是通过语言传播的,所以印度-欧洲语言树的每个亚种和分支进行了严格的定义,以便科学家可以追溯每个故事在语言树上的位置,从而追溯到具体时间。例如,如果斯拉夫语和凯尔特语有同一个版本的《杰克与魔豆》(并且分析显示他们可能是这样),可能这个故事可以追溯到“最后的共同祖先。”而这两种语言就是至少在6800年前从原始印欧语言这个祖先分裂而来(见图片)。这一方法揭示了一个进化生物学家是如何得出这样的结论:如果两个物种的基因都包含相同的没有在其他现代动物身上发现的突变,则他们来自一个共同的祖先。

 

But it’s not quite so simple. Unlike genes,which are almost exclusively transmitted “vertically”—from parent to offspring—fairy tales can also spread horizontally when one culture intermingles with another. Accordingly, much of the authors’ study focuses on recognizing and removing tales that seem to have spread horizontally. When the pruning was done, the team was left with a total of 76 fairy tales.

 

但事实并非如此简单。与基因几乎无一例外地呈现从亲代到子代的“纵向”遗传不同,当一种文化和另一种文化交织在一起时,童话也可以发生水平方向的传承。因此,作者的大部分研究集中在识别和删除看起来已经发生横向传播的故事。筛查完成后,就只剩下76个童话故事。

 

This approach allowed the researchers to trace certain tales, such as The Smith and the Devil, which tells the story of a blacksmith who makes a deal with the devil in exchange for unmatched smithing prowess, back thousands of years—all the way to the Proto-Indo-European people. If the analysis is correct, it would mean the oldest fairy tales still in circulation today are between 2500 and 6000 years old. Other stories seem to be much younger, appearing for the first time in more modern branches of the language tree.

 

这个方法允许研究人员对某几个故事进行跟踪,如《史密斯和魔鬼》,它讲述了一个铁匠以无与伦比的锻造能力与魔鬼做交易的故事,这个故事有数千年的历史,一直追溯到原始印欧人。如果分析无误,这将意味着今天仍然在流传的最古老的童话故事的历史足有25006000年了。其他的故事似乎年轻得多,是首次出现在更为现代的语言树上。

 

The authors have done “as good a job as possible,” with the data they have, says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the

 

根据已经掌握的数据,作者已经“尽最大可能出色地完成了任务”,英国雷丁大学的进化生物学家马克·佩格尔说。

 

In a new dispatch, published this month in Current Biology, he ruminates on what allows these stories to stand the test of time. “What really interests me is why these cultural forms exist. Why is it that fairy tales, art, songs, poems, why do these things seem to have such longevity?”

 

本月发表在《现代生物学》的一项新的调研中,德拉尼在思考是什么让这些故事经得起时间的考验。“真正让我感兴趣的是为什么这些文化形式得以存在。为什么诸如童话、艺术、歌曲、诗歌这些题材似乎都能历久弥新?”

 

Tehrani says that the successful fairy tales may persist because they’re “minimally counterintuitive narratives.” That means they all contain some cognitively dissonant elements—like fantastic creatures or magic—but are mostly easy to comprehend. Beauty and the Beast, for example contains a man who has been magically transformed into a hideous creature, but it also tells a simple story about family, romance, and not judging people based on appearance. The fantasy makes these tales stand out,but the ordinary elements make them easy to understand and remember. This combination of strange, but not too strange, Tehrani says, may be the key to their persistence across millennia.

 

德拉尼说,成功的童话流传下来可能是因为他们“最低限度地反直觉的叙述”。这意味着他们都含有认知方面不和谐的元素——像超凡的生物或魔法——但大多容易理解。例如,《美女与野兽》包含一个被神奇地变形为丑陋的怪物的男人,但它的情节很简单:家庭、爱情,以及不要以貌取人。是幻想使这些童话故事与众不同,而普通的元素则使他们容易理解和记忆。这种安排很奇怪,但不会太陌生,德拉尼说,可能是他们数千年经久不衰的关键。

 

This is of course something we now need to test more rigorously,” he says. “That’s the next phase of this research.”

 

“这当然也是我们现在需要进行更严格的测试的内容,”他说,“这正是本研究下一个阶段的任务。”

 

By David ShultzApr. 22, 2016 , 10:15 AM

Posted in: Europe Sociology 发表于欧洲社会学

DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf4171

 

原文链接

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/some-fairy-tales-may-be-6000-years-old


 

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