Oral versus Written Traditions
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Reduced toThe Oral tradition is
a manner of passing knowledge down from generation to generation. |
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It is also a “way for a society to transmit history,
literature,
law
and other knowledges across generations without a writing system”
* |
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It may also specify “material held in common by a
group of people, over several generations, and thus distinct from testimony
or oral history”* |
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The Written Tradition is the way in which knowledge is
currently transmitted, that is through the written word. |
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The written word method can become cumbersome because of
the many revisions and additions the scribe has to make to documents |
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* Henige, David. Oral, but Oral
What? The Nomenclatures of Orality and Their
Implications Oral Tradition, 3/1-2 (1988): 229-38. p 232; Henige
cites Jan Vansina (1985). Oral tradition as history.