ABSTRACT
With the epigraph to this paper, which I must confess is a homemade, artificial proverb rather than a genuine nugget of folk wisdom, I hope to call attention to several important features of oral tradition. Because they 'work like languages' , oral traditions are first and foremost technologies of communication: they serve their cultural constituencies not as out-of-date, archaic oddities but as current, vital , mainstream ways of transmitting knowledge and experience . They are also self-contained signifying systems that depend on cooperation between a fluent composer and a fluent receiver who can manage their complexities and tap their communicative power. If either the composer or the audience lacks fluency, then all that an oral tradition encodes - and that encoding is far richer than in written documents, as we shall see - must inevitably perish . Again the situation is exactly parallel to that of language in general : a single person speaking Mandarin Chinese, Tulu or Danish is not enough; someone has to be able to understand what is being said.
