The Number Three...
In 1846 W. J. Thoms proposed the term "Folklore" as a replacement for the then used "popular antiquities." And depending on the quality and quantity of resources one cares to gather definitions, "Folklore-ology" is generally considered to be the study and scientific investigation of traditional beliefs, legends, sayings, customs, etc., that are passed on from one generation to the next via oral transmission. To be such an investigator, many researchers feel a need to emphasize the requirement of distancing themselves from that which is being studied, in order to facilitate objectivity. However, other researchers such as a police detective may produce a type of over-indulgent absorption of a criminal's activities in order to facilitate their capture. Likewise, many people consider an ability to appreciate the intimations of a culture's language is due to a deeply ingrained attachment. Needless to say, objectivity can be defined differently from various perspectives.
When a Folklorist looks at Fairy Tales and finds a prominent pattern such as the number Three (i.e. 3 bears, 3 pigs, 3 Billy goats gruff, 3 notes to the Pied Piper, 3 kittens, Cinderella and her 2 sisters, 3 wishes, 3 characters, 3 tasks to be performed, travel to the third bend in the road, etc.,) recurring in a single culture or among a group of related peoples and does not find the same persistant recurrence in other cultural groups, there is a tendency to categorize such an occurence as a cultural artifact. Take for example the short paper published by Alan Dundes in 1968 entitled The Number Three in American Culture which can be found on page 401 of the book entitled Every Man His Way. While he gives numerous examples to support his view that while trichotomy exists and that number three is the predominant cognitive category, such examples represent the nature of culture and not the nature of nature.
While he provides a few examples of scientific categories, and he can be forgiven for not mentioning humans as being the third chimpanzee, he doesn't mention the obvious circumstance of we humans are on the 3rd planet from the sun, nor that most people tend to hold a pen or pencil with 3 fingers. He didn't discuss DNA's Triplet codon system, nor make the connection between the prominence of three-patterned ideas in America, which is a conglomeration of cultural offshoots from the larger 3rd born group of Indo-Europeans. This is particularly significant because of the wide-spread inter-relatedness of Indo-European languages and the oral transmission of folklore.
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