How to kill a dragon
In How to Kill a Dragon Calvert Watkins follows the continuum of poetic formulae in Indo-European languages, from Old Hittite to medieval Irish. He uses the comparative method to reconstruct traditional poetic formulae of considerable complexity that stretch as far back as the original common language. Thus, Watkins reveals the antiquity and tenacity of the Indo-European poetic tradition.
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What Hacker News says
- Check out "How to Kill a Dragon" by Calvert Watkins (1995)
- It's a "formula". Kleos aphthiton I think was the first discovery, back in the 1790s, that's etymologically equivalent to sravas aksitam in the Sanskrit (hence, they are from an Indo-European language family), but you're dead on, it was only in the 1930s or so Milman and Parry documented oral composition of stories in Eastern Europe, with tape recorders of the time iirc
The Cal Watkins book "How To Kill A Dragon" is superb for a discussion of formulae in Indo-European languages
- > A great poem is “about” a specific person or moment embedded in a particular culture, composed in such a way that it reaches across time and distance to resonate with readers outside that culture.
Why is this a criteria?
The following piece of metrical poetry from the Rig Veda, is of high importance to me, a bunch of vedic revivalists and connoisseurs scattered across the descendant cultures, perhaps to Indo-europeanists and comparative mythologists who study this in academic manner, even when translated into English. But I don't think most people outside this culture would ever relate to this.
Now perhaps the LLMs can produce something which sounds lot like this, probably even in old Indic if they're trained enough on it.Now, verily, will I declare the exploits mighty and true, of him the True and Mighty. In the Trikadrukas he drank the Soma then in its rapture Indra slew the Dragon.But it will never have the allure of the old indic hymns, because there's no riddle to solve, no real riddle that the machine has hidden in the words. When reading the above hymn, whether in sanskrit or English, whether it's me or an indologist like Jamison or Watkins (who wrote "How to Kill a Dragon" on Indo-European poetics), we are trying to imagine the same thing the original writer had imagined.
In case of LLM, it's just a sequence of words that sounds cool. It may have no meaning.
- For PIE, the most accessible recent book in English is probably The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (Anthony 2007), and I would highly recommend it. (It pulls double duty as a laymen's and as an academic publication, so if you do read it, know that it's OK to skip the minutiae of pottery shards.)
A slightly older but enduringly popular work is In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth (Mallory 1989). I'm told How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Watkins 1995) is very good too, but I have not read it myself.
Chapter 2 of Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction (Fortson 2004) is a very good summary of PIE culture. The book is excellent in general - probably the best English language introduction to PIE linguistics at the moment - but outside the first two chapters it is not generally accessible to laymen.
If you read other European languages it's worth checking out other books that may be available to you. The field by definition requires the ability to read a decent number of languages, so the literature is spread out across English, German, French, Russian, etc.
