Cat's Cradle Game Origin

An ingenious play they call cats cradle.

Cat's cradle game origin. Its rated for level 32. The question of who first played cats cradle the childrens game in which two players alternately take from each others fingers an intertwined cord so as always to produce a symmetrical figure is almost as contentious as the origin of its name. And it may be known in Java Celebes and Australia.

The best guess of most historians is that Cats Cradle got its start in a rudimentary form somewhere in Southeast Asia near China and Korea where the game is still played today. In Swatow the name means. Haddon has pointed out the familiar game of cats-cradle probably had its origin in Asia whence it was introduced into Europe.

Cats cradle is a game in which an intricately looped string is transferred from the hands of one player to the next resulting in a succession of loop patterns. Nobody really knows how they started or who started developing these complex patterns with string. The cats cradle string game has been played since ancient times all over the world.

The lovers Okiku and Yosuke play cats cradle by Eishōsai Chōki. He learned to walk while I was away. That certainly sounds far-fetched today but it was a commonly held superstition back in the 1600s and 1700s.

One ties the two. The odd thing about the 1952 source which is from the American Dialect Society is that it appears as part of what appears to be a questionnaire to determine regional word-choice differences. String figures and games have been found and collected from all over the world.

String figures were widely studied by anthropologists like James Hornell from the 1880s through around 1900 as they were used in attempts to trace the origin and developments of cultures. Cats cradle game origin. The Cats in the Cradle is an old Harry Chapin song and Ive always assumed that that particular phrase originated with the song.