2. ABOUT THIS E-TEXT. The Project Gutenberg Etext Fairy Tales, by the Grimm Brothers Converted to pdf and ps by Carlos Campani, [email protected] We offer the Grimm Brothers' work here for free download in pdf and prc format - just what's needed for students searching for quotes. Over the past forty years or so I had often wondered why nobody had ever translated the first edition of the Grimms' Kinder- und Haus- märchen (/15) into.
Caleb Voos. To fill this gap, I take as a starting point the work by Stubbs , who explains how computer assisted analyses may provide a substantial and well documented alternative to the use of intuitive data as well as a new understanding of form-meaning relations. And two months, and everything was green. When she stood up the prince looked into her face, and he recognized the beautiful girl who had danced with him. In the mill sat twenty miller's apprentices cutting a stone, and chiseling chip-chop, chip-chop, chip-chop. The goldsmith said, "Here is the golden chain for you.
So it was possible to achieve the percentages of use of the selected words in violent situations. By doing this, and after collating all the results, it was possible to prove my hypothesis. Results My first step was to generate a list of the most frequently used words, not taking into account function words. By doing this I was able to check those which were directly or indirectly related to violent and cruel situations.
I worked with just the first words of the frequency list of the tales corpus. This list was cleared out as it is a well known fact that the words which are more frequently used in any kind of text are all those with a mainly grammatical meaning.
Those words are pronouns, prepositions, articles and some others.
I decided to exclude them from my list mainly since they exert no influence on the final results of my research cf. Cleared frequency list. Besides, and more related to the present study, there are some words directly related to violence: The high frequency occurrences of these lexical units in comparison to other words thus highlight a relation of the tales to topics related to violence and cruelty.
One interesting finding is that there are some words which apparently seem to have no relation to the semantic field of violence or cruelty but, if we have a closer look at their concordances within the tales corpus, there is a clear relationship with it. This is the case of words like pieces, fire and heart.
They are amongst the most frequent words used in this corpus pieces is used 17 times, heart 25 and fire If we have a look at their concordances lists, we can observe the high percentage in which these words are used related to violence fig.
Concordances of FIRE. If we study in depth the concordances of the word fire, there are 7 out of 16 direct examples of violent or cruel situations in figure 1.
On the other hand, if we study the word pieces figure 2 which appears 17 times, almost every time this word appears, it is related to violence — 15 out of 17 examples. Figure 2. The word heart, for instance, provided me with interesting data: For example line Figure 3. It has to be taken into account that this one is not a word related per se to it.
These tables are a clear indicator of the content of the tales corpus, but my intention is to go one step forward in the study of the most frequent words. My next step is to research the frequencies of three words selected from the list which, at first sight, are related to violence: I have used ConcApp in order to find their frequency percentages.
Figures 4, 5 and 6 show a detailed screenshot of ConcApp with the frequency percentages lists. As it can be seen, there are 19 examples of the word cut which represents 0. Figure 5. Figure 6. In terms of the word blood, there are 18 examples 0. Finally, I have found 19 examples of the word dead 0.
Frequency percentages of cut, blood and dead.
These percentages can be considered as high percentages bearing in mind we are working with a list composed of the 89 most frequent words in the tales corpus. This table confirms once again the remarkable presence of violence in these tales, since they are words related intrinsically to this semantic field, but are all these examples used violently in the corpus?
If we combine all the percentages in frequencies related to violent situations in just one table table 6: Cut Blood Dead Grimms Tales This study has been carried out in two steps: Secondly, comparing it to the British National Corpus BNC and the Cobuild Concordancer in which I found a high percentage of use of words related directly or indirectly to violence. Thus, I have found out the frequency of use and percentages of some words related to cruelty and violence: After that I have compared these results to other two corpora, the British National Corpus and the Cobuild Concordancer, in order to discover such a high percentage of violence in the text which leads us to think of them as not aimed at children.
It is widely recognized, violence can be found where you least expect it: The true aim of this article was to demonstrate that classical tales aimed at children can be relabelled by way of a corpus-based approach in an objective and empirical way, taking into account the evolution of society.
After doing it, it has become apparent that any lexical unit which might be controversial — in other words, topics which could not be total or at least in part aimed at children- might be detected. My results seem to be pointing to the possibility of getting classical readings relabelled according to a standard, empirical and objective list of conventions on literature aimed at children.
I have only covered eight out of the tales taken from the original version but, as observed, the presence of violent behaviour is a characteristic of almost all of them. To finish with, I want to make it clear that the historical and literary quality of the brothers Grimm Collection is not being questioned in this article.
The only point here is to study the possibility that this collection does not suit the scale of values that we are trying to instil in our children according to the society in which we are living nowadays.
You are not coming with us, for you have no clothes, and you don't know how to dance. We would be ashamed of you. Now that no one else was at home, Cinderella went to her mother's grave beneath the hazel tree, and cried out: Shake and quiver, little tree, Throw gold and silver down to me.
Then the bird threw a gold and silver dress down to her, and slippers embroidered with silk and silver. She quickly put on the dress and went to the festival. Her stepsisters and her stepmother did not recognize her.
They thought she must be a foreign princess, for she looked so beautiful in the golden dress. They never once thought it was Cinderella, for they thought that she was sitting at home in the dirt, looking for lentils in the ashes. The prince approached her, took her by the hand, and danced with her.
Furthermore, he would dance with no one else. He never let go of her hand, and whenever anyone else came and asked her to dance, he would say, "She is my dance partner.
She danced until evening, and then she wanted to go home. But the prince said, "I will go along and escort you," for he wanted to see to whom the beautiful girl belonged. However, she eluded him and jumped into the pigeon coop. The prince waited until her father came, and then he told him that the unknown girl had jumped into the pigeon coop. He had them bring him an ax and a pick so that he could break the pigeon coop apart, but no one was inside.
When they got home Cinderella was lying in the ashes, dressed in her dirty clothes. A dim little oil-lamp was burning in the fireplace. Cinderella had quickly jumped down from the back of the pigeon coop and had run to the hazel tree. There she had taken off her beautiful clothes and laid them on the grave, and the bird had taken them away again.
Then, dressed in her gray smock, she had returned to the ashes in the kitchen. The next day when the festival began anew, and her parents and her stepsisters had gone again, Cinderella went to the hazel tree and said: Then the bird threw down an even more magnificent dress than on the preceding day.
A beautiful tall tree stood there, on which hung the most magnificent pears. She climbed as nimbly as a squirrel into the branches, and the prince did not know where she had gone. He waited until her father came, then said to him, "The unknown girl has eluded me, and I believe she has climbed up the pear tree. The father thought, "Could it be Cinderella? When they came to the kitchen, Cinderella was lying there in the ashes as usual, for she had jumped down from the other side of the tree, had taken the beautiful dress back to the bird in the hazel tree, and had put on her gray smock.
On the third day, when her parents and sisters had gone away, Cinderella went again to her mother's grave and said to the tree: This time the bird threw down to her a dress that was more splendid and magnificent than any she had yet had, and the slippers were of pure gold. When she arrived at the festival in this dress, everyone was so astonished that they did not know what to say. The prince danced only with her, and whenever anyone else asked her to dance, he would say, "She is my dance partner.
When evening came Cinderella wanted to leave, and the prince tried to escort her, but she ran away from him so quickly that he could not follow her. The prince, however, had set a trap. He had had the entire stairway smeared with pitch. When she ran down the stairs, her left slipper stuck in the pitch. The prince picked it up. It was small and dainty, and of pure gold.
The next morning, he went with it to the man, and said to him, "No one shall be my wife except for the one whose foot fits this golden shoe. The two sisters were happy to hear this, for they had pretty feet. With her mother standing by, the older one took the shoe into her bedroom to try it on. She could not get her big toe into it, for the shoe was too small for her.
Then her mother gave her a knife and said, "Cut off your toe. When you are queen you will no longer have to go on foot. The girl cut off her toe, forced her foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the prince.
He took her on his horse as his bride and rode away with her. However, they had to ride past the grave, and there, on the hazel tree, sat the two pigeons, crying out: Rook di goo, rook di goo!
There's blood in the shoe.
The shoe is too tight, This bride is not right! Then he looked at her foot and saw how the blood was running from it. He turned his horse around and took the false bride home again, saying that she was not the right one, and that the other sister should try on the shoe.
She went into her bedroom, and got her toes into the shoe all right, but her heel was too large. Then her mother gave her a knife, and said, "Cut a piece off your heel.
The girl cut a piece off her heel, forced her foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the prince. When they passed the hazel tree, the two pigeons were sitting in it, and they cried out: He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking all red. Then he turned his horse around and took the false bride home again. The prince told him to send her to him, but the mother answered, "Oh, no, she is much too dirty.
She cannot be seen. But the prince insisted on it, and they had to call Cinderella. She first washed her hands and face clean, and then went and bowed down before the prince, who gave her the golden shoe.