Wikipedia Trail: Aesop's Fables

I heard about Aesop’s fables via the class announcements so I decided to follow a Wikipedia trail inspired by this.  

Aesop: was a Greek fabulist and story teller who wrote fables which are now known as Aesop's Fables. A fun fact is that his very existence is unclear. However, it is thought that he lived around 620 BC. Many of his tales include animals and objects that speak. LINK

Aesop’s fables: These were fables that were written by Aesop, a slave in ancient Greece. The fables were originally told by the oral tradition. After they were finally collected and written, they were translated in many languages. The fables covered a wide array of topics, concerning religious, social and political themes. LINK

Fables: Believe it or not, I actually didn’t know the definition of a fable but I wanted to learn. A fable is a literary genre that includes a usually “brief fictitious story in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized (given human qualities, such as the ability to speak human language) and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a pithy maxim.” A parable is similar to a fable, however, a parable does NOT include animals. Parables are some of the most persistent and long-lasting genres in recorded history. LINK

Registers: While reading, I learned that Aesop’s fables had been told in “many different registers” over the years. So, I investigated what this meant. “A register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting. For example, when speaking in a formal setting, an English speaker may be more likely to use features of prescribed grammar than in an informal setting—such as pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal (e.g. "walking", not "walkin'"), choosing more formal words (e.g. father vs. dad, child vs. kid, etc.), and refraining from using words considered nonstandard, such as ain't.” The importance of registers presents itself in a variety of ways including keeping the rhythm of the story. LINK


                                                         Image result for aesop 
                                                               Stonework of Aesop

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