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| | Mytheme |
 | | In the study of mythology, a mytheme is an irreducible nugget of myth, an unchanging element, not unlike a cultural meme, one that is always found shared with other, related mythemes and reassembled in various ways"bundled" was Claude Lévi-Strauss's image or linked in more complicated relationships, like a molecule in a compound. |
 | | The cataloguer of folk tales Vladimir Propp considered that the unit of analysis was the individual tale: the unitary mytheme by contrast is the equivalent in myth of the phonemes, morphemes and sememes into which structural linguistics divides language: the smallest possible units of meaning within a language system. |
 | | In his work on the myth systems of primitive tribes, working from the analogy of language structure, he adopted the term mythème, with the assertion that the system of meaning within mythic utterances parallels closely that of a language system [1]. |
| www.mlahanas.de /Greeks/Mythology/Mytheme.html (357 words) |
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