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  • Jürgen Hubertjuergen_hubert@mementomori.social
    Oct 24, 2026, 7:11 PM

    @riley

    I'll have to watch that video when I have the time. I am no trained linguist, but this is a tricky business:

    Are certain folk tale motifs widespread because they are really old?

    Or were they so popular that they spread like wildfire along trade routes?

    Or is it a matter of parallel evolution? For example, most human cultures have myths of "sleep paralysis demons" because "sleep paralysis" is a widespread human experience. And many cultures around the world have phenomena similar to the European Wild Hunt, because (I suspect) "the wind making odd noises at night" is also a widespread phenomenon.

    I'd have to take a closer look at the science behind such studies to judge them.

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Replies

  • Riley S. Faelanriley@toot.cat
    Oct 24, 2026, 10:34 PM

    @juergen_hubert He doesn't go into linguistics much, actually. He talks about the Proto-Indo-Europeans, but mostly as a label for a culture rather than the language family. The linguisic comparison is, well, just another deep time reference that I happened to be somewhat familiar with as a reference.

    My intuitive counterhypothesis to the idea of traceable common folklore motiffs between East Urals and North America would be, over time, the old folklores crumble to rubble / get buried in noise to such a degree that beyond some point, possibly just 1000–2000 years for non-literate cultures, similarities don't indicate common cultural heritage anymore, but possibly the common neuroarchitecture of the people who told these tales. But the substrate analysis of modern linguistics is very intriguing even though I don't understand it very well, and so insomuch as it might be a workable technique for recovering lost words and grammar rules, I can't entirely exclude something similar possibly also being useful in deep time folklore motiff analysis. And, well, I kind of hope you'd have access to somewhat better heuristics than my "maybe can't exclude it".

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  • Riley S. Faelanriley@toot.cat
    Oct 24, 2026, 10:39 PM

    @juergen_hubert Btw, is Wild Hunt imagery specific to a particular environment? I've always imagined it as requiring a forest and horses, but now that I think of it like that, if a comparable tale would have existed among, say, the pre-contact prairie native Americans, then it would presumedly include neither the forest nor the horses.

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