No need to get hairated about it, Anglo.

It appears fairly evident that the idea of this thread was to provide a locus for a discussion about folk music calling on a rather more academic input than the traditional "what is folk.

And it has succeeded in doing so.

A point that has just occurred to me. Are there Child equivalents in the languages of oher countries? And assuming that there have been, but that they must have differed in significant ways (eg, how they defined ballads, not dying before they had finished the work etc) - how that that been reflected in subsequent developments in the countries concerned.