From: mcv@wxs.nl (Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
Subject: Re: Caucasoid Turks/Bulgars
Date: 02 Feb 1999 00:00:00 GMT
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On 2 Feb 1999 11:07:17 GMT, e.karloukovski@uea.ac.uk (Vassil
Karloukovski) wrote:

>Well, if the borrowings had been very old, shouldn't they have been 
>present in other Uralic l-s, not in Mari alone as Dobrev claims? 

Borrowings from Iranian abound in other Uralic languages, not
only in Volga Finnic (Mari and Mordvin), but in Ugric and Permian
too.  And also in Slavic, by the way (words such as bog "god",
sto "100" and sobaka "dog" are believed to be of Iranian origin).

>On the other hand, isn't it plausible to suppose that these borrowings 
>have entered Mari at the time when they switched to agriculture or 
>have come into contact with the agricultural terminology of other 
>people? And it is archeologically attested that the ploughing agriculture
>was introduced in the middle Volga region by the bulgars. 

It's possible that these specific agricultural terms of Iranian
origin are found only in Mari (and Mordvin?).  I don't have a
list handy right now of Iranian borrowings into Uralic.  If so,
that, combined with the archaeological evidence you speak of,
would indeed indicate that these terms were introduced to the
Volga Finns by the Bulgars.  That still leaves us with three
possibilities about the linguistic affiliation of the Bulgars:

- they were East Iranians
- they were a mix of East Iranians and R-Turks
- they were R-Turks who had borrowed the agricultural terminology
themselves from Iranians

I lean towards the second possibility, but the question can only
be resolved by a careful and detailed analysis of borrowed
vocabulary in Volga Finnic and other Uralic languages (including
Hungarian), in Chuvash, in Z-Turkic languages now spoken in the
area such as Tatar and Bashkir, and in the East Iranian languages
I mentioned earlier (Ossetic, Yaghnobi; Sogdian, Bactrian,
Saka-Khotanese etc.).  Parts of the puzzle may also be found in
Slavic languages (Russian/Ukrainian and Bulgarian).  Plenty of
stuff here for a whole bunch of Ural-Altai-Indo-Europeanists to
write doctoral dissertations about.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@wxs.nl
Amsterdam