The Turkic –r/-l Theory: Problematic Etymologizations. The Language of “Danube Proto-Bulgarians”: Caucasian Parallels

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Pages: 37-65
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/XTIM8386

Abstract:

The article examines a large number of early Turkic loanwords in Hungarian and Slavic languages, which are often regarded in Turkic studies as borrowed from the language of Danube Bulgars. The main source of our research are the investigations of the Russian linguist Anna Dybo in this field. After a critical analysis of the Hungarian examples, I conclude that there is no certain evidence confirming their Danube Bulgar origin. With respect to the early Turkic loanwords in Slavic languages, I emphasize the circumstance that most of them are present in all South Slavic, in some of the Eastern and Western Slavic languages, and even in the Baltic and German languages. Arguments are provided for the hypothesis that the words in question have been borrowed before the Slavic migrations towards the Balkans – probably in the late proto-Slavic period. In my opinion, the available material, preserved from the language of “Danube Proto-bulgarians” in medieval sources, does not correspond to the phonetic and morphological peculiarities of the Turkic languages, and points to an entirely different language family. On the basis of a linguistic analysis of an essential part of the available Proto-Bulgarian anthroponymical material, the Proto-Bulgarian plural suffixes and other available morphological, phonetic, and lexical elements known from the language of Proto-Bulgarians, I coclude that there are a lot of semantic, phonetic, and morphological similarities between the language of Danube Bulgars and the Lezgic group of the Nakh-Dagestanian language family.

Keywords:

Turkic loanwords; Hungarian; Slavic languages; Turkic etymologizations; Lezgic languages.

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