[00:01.29]Unit 7 Storytelling
[00:05.13]Expansion 7
[00:10.58]Exercise 1
[00:13.13]Many of the fairy tales that children still
[00:15.82]enjoy today are very old.
[00:18.46]In fact ,they are so old that nobody knows
[00:22.02]who first told them.
[00:23.92]For centuries,
[00:25.66]these stories were passed down orally and,
[00:28.90]as very few people knew how to read or write,
[00:32.50]nobody wrote them down.
[00:35.06]It wasn't until the 17th century that
[00:37.66]writers like the Italian Giambattista Basile
[00:40.44]and the French Charles Perrault published
[00:44.51]collections of fairy tales.
[00:46.39]People enjoyed these tales,
[00:48.09]especially those of Perrault,
[00:50.49]which were more famous.
[00:52.50]However,nobody studied this type of story
[00:55.46]in a serious way.
[00:57.65]Then,in the early 19th century,
[01:01.10]Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm published their
[01:03.11]collections of fairy tales.
[01:05.33]The two brothers studied fairy tales carefully.
[01:08.71]They noticed that many German fairy tales
[01:11.64]were very similar to fairy tales
[01:13.73]from other European countries.
[01:16.02]People began to study fairy tales
[01:17.93]and try to explain the similarities
[01:20.87]between stories from different countries.
[01:23.54]At that time, people still did not know
[01:26.54]about the large number of stories
[01:28.45]that existed in Africa, in the Americas,
[01:30.94]in Asia, and in other parts of the world.
[01:34.83]In recent times,
[01:36.00]it has been possible to compare fairy stories
[01:39.04]from all around the world
[01:41.14]Although some countries are very different
[01:43.41]from each other,like Egypt and Iceland,
[01:46.52]their fairy tales are very similar.
[01:49.17]Both Egypt and Iceland have Cinderella stories,
[01:52.45]for example.
[01:53.92]There are also very similar stories in China,
[01:56.81]in England, in Korea, in Siberia, in France,
[02:01.15]and in many other countries.
[02:03.68]Experts now believe that there may be about
[02:06.13]a thousand versions of the Cinderella story.
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