From: e.karloukovski@uea.ac.uk (Vassil Karloukovski)
Subject: Re: Caucasoid Turks/Bulgars
Date: 01 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT
Message-ID: <794h61$4iq@cpca3.uea.ac.uk>
References: <369E3BE1.5C45@sbu.ac.uk> <77li2j$qi0$1@whisper.globalserve.net> <369F52FE.2B6@sbu.ac.uk> <77rc86$auj$1@brokaw.wa.com> <36A444B3.F3B70F1C@alum.mit.edu.-> <7827sb$269$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36A52D70.9E372DD2@alum.mit.edu.-> <36A556AB.9927BD29@montclair.edu> <36a63533.58309714@news.yale.edu> <7866ud$i9m$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36cdb21e.883120019@news.wxs.nl> <36A7FCC8.79790A6B@earthlink.net> <36d77e23.1000882888@news.wxs.nl> <36AAB4E8.D02BD385@montclair.edu>
Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=US-ASCII
Organization: University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Mime-Version: 1.0
Newsgroups: sci.archaeology,sci.anthropology,sci.lang

In article <36AAB4E8.D02BD385@montclair.edu>, hubeyh@montclair.edu says...
>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
 
>> Celtic, Chechen, Georgian or "Sumero-Akkadian" parallels.  Anything
>> goes (except, apparently, Turkic).
>
>YOu hit the nail on the head as usual. Bulgarians are still suffering
>from an identity crisis. They have to be told that they were all heroes
>suffering from the Barbaric Turks (Ottomans) but then they find out that
>the Bulgars were Turkic, and anything but that! Anything at all,
>Nigerians, Martians, Venusians, Klingons,..


The turkic theory was/is supported by bulgarian scholars, taught in the bulgarian
schools and so on for decades. Dobrev also stated that his research started by
searching for possible turkic or, generally, altaic parallels.

You, however, push the discussion to a very slippery ground with this reference 
to popular preferences or political suitabilities. Should I stress on how sweet 
and 'positive' was the example of "the turkic bulgars and the balkan slavs mingling
into a single slavic nationality" at the time of the old Soviet union? With its 
two poles - slavic and turkic, and with its political agenda about the future of
the 'soviet' man and the 'soviet' people?...  The modern "eurasianists" also don't
mind one such treatment of the problem. Or take the campaign for bulgarisation of 
the bulgarian turks from the 80's and how the same 'positive example of the past' 
and the presence of earlier, pre-osmanic turkic groups in Bulgaria were used to 
say how the modern turkic groups 'deserved'/'were entitled' to return to the bosom
of the bulgarian rather than to the turkish national idea. Not that I buy the 
mythology around the modern turkish nation-building process, but you invited this
response.

>> 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.
>
>Marshall Lang does not think so and the names and words in there are
>clearly Turkic but of course, they probably had others in the
>confederation.


Marshall Lang is not an expert on these questions, he is a specialist on Armenia
and the few pages on the proto-bulgarians in his book are based on secondary and
tertiary sources. More important are his original observations on the style of the 
architecture in Pliska, on the Madara horseman and his comparison of them to middle-
eastern examples.


Regards,
Vassil Karloukovski

>-- 
>Best Regards,
>Mark
>-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>hubeyh@montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey
>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=