Comparative musicology can link together the musical traditions of distant people. For example, Kodály found interesting melodic similarities between Hungarian and Mari folksongs. Although he found no melodic similarities between Hungarian and Indian folksongs, Kodály also believed that the peacock motif in Hungarian folksongs had an Indian origin. That would imply that texts with certain motifs are preserved even more than the melodies in folksongs. In this paper we show that it is indeed the case by describing a possible Rig Vedic origin of various Hungarian folksong texts with the peacock motif.
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