Posted: Mar 29, 2019 10:53 am
MS2 wrote:As I say, 'parallels', or indeed 'meme-parallels', haven't been rigorously defined. So we don't know that there are 22 of them. (Indeed, if one person's definition is loose enough they could count a great many more; if it is a tight definition they could count considerably less.)
And for any given definition we don't know how many occurrences is significant. I guess it seems intuitive to you that 22 must be significant. But your intuition isn't necessarily correct.
It seems to me that for any two texts there may be a probable number of similarities that can be attributed to coincidence. But we don't know what that number is. Beyond that, there will be other reasons for similarities, just one of which is literary dependence (others being similar settings etc). The situation therefore is far more complex than simply counting parallels. (and I haven't even mentioned the question of the length of the texts, how the texts are selected etc!)
See .