A good one

[OC Richard]

If something isn't currently practiced it's not a tradition, it's matter of history.

A perfect example of a living traditional thing is language.

People speak of "the ancient Gaelic language" or "modern English" but in fact all the world's languages are the same age.

All languages spoken by living communities today have an unbroken line of evolutionary descent from whatever was being spoken by the rather small band of "anatomically modern humans" we are all descended from. (Humans have less-diverse DNA than other mammals due to Humans going through a severe genetic bottleneck.)

Yet as we know all living languages evolve. Traditional and ever changing, in the manner of all living traditions.

Yes we can go back along that unbroken chain of language forms and pluck out what was being spoken at a specific time and place, like classic Latin. But Latin is spoken by millions today, in its various modern forms. Latin never died, it was never frozen in amber. Rather it continued as an everyday language right down to the present day. Ditto Sanskrit, which is spoken by millions, in its present forms.

Another aspect of tradition, in the form of language: the people growing up with a tradition don't feel "pressure" to follow it, nor are they aware of the "rules".

A toddler has a vocabulary of thousands of words and follows quite complex grammar rules, yet is unaware both of the size of vocabulary and the rules that govern speech. The child is merely mimicking what he hears around him, in order to communicate with others.

It was like that with my Highland Dress when I first started playing pipes in the 1970s. I saw what people wore, saw what the sellers sold, and I bought and wore things. Pressure from dead people wasn't something that ever occurred to me.