From: e.karloukovski@uea.ac.uk (Vassil Karloukovski)
Subject: Re: Caucasoid Turks/Bulgars
Date: 28 Jan 1999 00:00:00 GMT
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In article <36a8d455.81661202@news.yale.edu>, cluster.user@yale.edu says...
>On Fri, 22 Jan 1999 13:51:26 GMT, mcv@wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal) wrote:

I was informed about the existence of this thread only now but, without 
being a specialist in the field, I would want to comment on some of the
arguments advanced.

>>Well, I didn't exactly claim the Bolgars were all Turkic, just that
>>some (R-)Turkic speaking people were among them, as suggested by the
>>fact that Chuvash is now spoken in former Bolgaria on the Volga.  


In fact the capital of the former Bulgaria on Volga is situated in the present
republic of Tatarstan and not in Chuvashia. What I read recently in one book 
of a Chuvash historian is that the Chuvash regard themselves to be descendants
not of the Bulgars but of the associated tribe of the Suvars/Sabirs, or as they
call them - the Bolgary-Suvary. The town of Suvar initially rivalled that of 
Bulgar until it was conquered and incorporated into the Bulgar state.

>volga bolgar is known from some inscriptions in arabic script and is
>definitely a turkic language (of the -r variety), which can be
>described as "old chuvash" if you like. also medieval accounts, like
>the lexicographer mahmud al-kashgari testify that it was a variety of
>turkic.


It is a corrupt argumentation in itself as it rests on later accounts,
inscriptions _in Arabic_, that is - post-dating the pagan period. If we apply
the same reasoning to the IX-X-th cc. accounts, inscriptions in Cyrillic, etc.
from the Danube Bulgaria, we will have to conclude that the Bulgars were 
Slavic through and through. 

>>It's true that the inscriptions adduced by Dobrev don't look Turkic
>>at all.  However, Dobrev isn't able to make much sense of them by
>>interpreting them as Iranian either.  Unfortunately, this doesn't
>>stop Dobrev from "translating" the inscriptions.  If no suitable
>>Iranian (Pamiri) word is found, Dobrev does not hesitate to provide
>>Celtic, Chechen, Georgian or "Sumero-Akkadian" parallels.  Anything
>>goes (except, apparently, Turkic).


Chechen and Lezgin are just fine - the Bulgars had inhabited the Caucasus for
centuries before coming to the Balkans. Most of the Georgian parallels come 
from Svanetia, the northern Georgian province that borders the region of 
Balkaria of the Northern Caucasus, and their presence was interpreted by P. 
Dobrev as pointing to a migration to the south of Bulgar speakers from Balkaria,
probably caused by the settling of Kipchak Turks in Balkaria itself. The 
"Sumero-Akkadian" parallels in the reconstructed Bulgar are also fine as long
as they are attested in Lezgin or Chechen.

There is another list compiled by Dobrev which contains several hundred non-
Slavic words in modern Bulgarian and their [proposed] parallels in the eastern-
Iranian l-s (Pashto, the Pamirian dialects, Talish), as well as in Chechen and
Lezgin. In some cases there are both eastern iranian and eastern caucasian
analogues to the Bulgarian words (BUMBAR in Pashto, BUMBAR in Chechen vs. the 
Bulg. BRÂMBAR for 'beetle'; the Mundjani GÂWIA, 'moulded vessel' and the Chechen
GEVENK 'wooden bowl' vs. the Bulg. GAVANKA, 'the same', etc.) which also looks 
very intriguing.

The URL of the page is http://members.tripod.com/~Groznijat/b_lang/index.html 
and it also contains a list of the reconstructed grammatical and phonetical 
features of the old Bulgar language. I would appreciate any comments received 
from specialists on eastern-iranian or eastern-caucasian l-s.


Regards,
Vassil Karloukovski

>>On the basis of Dobrev's materials, it seems safest to say that
>>Danube Bolgarian (like Hunnish) is a language of as yet unknown
>>affiliation, probably with a number of Turkic and Iranian loanwords.
>>
>>=======================
>>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
>>mcv@wxs.nl
>>Amsterdam