Re: European Martial Arts?
Posted: 2012-01-20 04:12am
I mean how "traditional" styles of fighting were forgotten due to those improvements (the earlier posts about asian martial arts being more 'traditional' based and not so much practical)Spoonist wrote:1) there is/was no decay, instead there were adaptions and improvements
I believed that they preserved more of their ethnic distinctions in specific styles of martial arts though.2) the eastern yuros does not differ with any significance vs western yuros. See my earlier posts above for examples.
I meant that street fighting is not a "formal" thing, is not regulated the same as 'formal' martial arts and is say, more uncoordinated. It doesn't seem like you can build a tradition of written texts of improvement from people fighting in the streets (I do admit I can be wrong). It's also a lot more 'base' and does not emphasize any 'artisticness' (I think you can argue that wrestling can be considered as such due to their roleplay)For something to be a martial art I'd argue that they at least have regular training and a basic concept of how that training works.
In my opinion, it is mainly the informalness of boxing and a lack of strong ritual, as you said. And I heard that there were a lot more european martial arts which were ethnically based before it was whittled down to boxing and whatnot.Simon_Jester wrote:I think part of it is that boxing and wrestling are somehow viewed as "not really" martial arts by some people. They're relatively informal, often associated with the lower classes economically, and they don't have a big body of mysticism to make people think they're cool.
So people just ignore the existence of these 'western' martial arts, or think of them as just a slightly improved version of the usual sort of mindless grappling and punching that completely untrained people do in unarmed combat.
"decay" as in all the preindustrial martial arts that were forgotten due to tech increases, and due to eastern europe being less developed things like 'hopak' were still intact. I remember reading of that on wiki in the past.DudeGuyMan wrote:What does this talk of decay mean exactly, anyway? Every city of any decent size has always had a few boxing gyms, and every high school and college has a wrestling team. I mean you should listen to a bunch of "classic boxing" enthusiasts argue over the relative strengths and weaknesses of fighting and training techniques from a hundred years ago versus now.