I'm afraid I cannot - although the video title is Russian ("A strange creature has been captured in the Caucasus. It resembles a house-sprite*"), the language being spoken is not one I recognise. Apparently Azerbaijani and Turkish are very similar. Are there any Turkish speakers in the house?
I was afraid of that ... It didn't sound like Russian to me, but I was still vainly hoping it might be some sort of dialect variation that was throwing me off. Thanks for checking it out.
I will add that the voice in the first segment has a peculiarly artificial undertone, at any rate to my ears. This may of course just be an artefact of either my playback equipment or the recording device. Also, it seems to me to have a repetitive, lullaby-esque quality to me, presumably the equivalent of what you'd say to your dog while fussing him/her, or your child, who you are desperate to keep calm. But you probably don't need me to point that out.
Yep - that's one of the factors that pushed me from my original 'monkey' presumption toward seriously considering it might be a child. At first I paid little attention to the vocal tone, thinking it was meant to be soothing to an animal. As I found myself slipping toward the radical 'maybe it's a child' impression, it seemed to support rather than counteract that shift.
The rest of your analysis seems to me to be typically astute.
Thanks!
I had to wrestle with myself on this one. It didn't take long to conclude there was fakery here, but for some reason I was resisting the notion it was fakery wrapped around a child rather than an animal. The more I looked at the footage the more I came to realize this wasn't any stranger or 'worse' than benign pranks or gags I've known parents to pull with their very young kids.
That said, I have a clarification request and a minor observation to make that I hope are not entirely trivial.
Can I check I've understood this correctly - you're suggesting the eyes are human as opposed to those of any other primate, of any age?
Yes. The eyes were the main thing that bothered me when first reviewing the video. Something didn't sit right with the 'monkey' presumption. The more I studied the eyes, the more I began to suspect they were human. I've tried to locate photo evidence to assure myself those eyes could indeed be demonstrated to be consistent with another primate, but the result was to drive myself toward concluding otherwise.
That doesn't strike me as necessarily unusual, especially in that part of the world (although my experience of there is almost wholly restricted to ethnic Russians in the Northern Caucasus) - if the cultural norm is sitting on the floor rather than on seats or chairs, I would expect to see many rugs and cushions as a matter of course, just as we in fact do in this footage.
Understood and agreed. On this point, the thing that nudged me toward the child hypothesis had more to do with the 'negative' issue of whether the rugs would be there with an animal in the residence than the 'positive' point of assuming the rugs may have represented a parental precaution.
Another such 'negative' issue that affected my thinking was why the little creature would be considered worthy of being tethered / 'leashed' (cf. 3rd segment), but using nothing more substantial than a length of string or yarn.
The house-sprite (домовой, domovoi) is a standard fixture in the Russian folkloric imagination, often depicted as - you'll never guess - a small hairy creature. Without looking them up, I think they are pretty standard household entities: keep them sweet with the odd saucer of milk etc. and enjoy serene domesticity/domestic serenity. Or don't.
'Domovoi' I recognized, by comparison with the Swedish 'tomte', from personal experience many years ago. I thought it odd that a video purporting to illustrate a cryptid would be titled in relation to a relatively benign folklore figure.
This video makes a lot more sense to me if I presume the 3 segments are presented in reverse order as follows:
- One or more adults (perhaps playing around with cosplay or makeup activities of their own), crudely wrapped the child (or maybe a primate) in fake fur and led it around the apartment(?) as a joke. (3rd segment; quite active little creature)
- This amused them sufficiently to start elaborating the gag / costume, moving on to faking hands at an early stage (2nd segment; no dark nails). By this point the child is sufficiently bored to be passive.
- The makeup project continued until it was sufficiently compelling to support a protracted close-up of the finished (?) product (1st segment; dark nails added). By this point the child is so bored he / she is starting to nod off.
Of course, all this could have occurred over several hours or even multiple days.
