Bulgar language

Bulgar (also spelled Bolğar, Bulghar) is an extinct language which was spoken by the Bulgars.

The name is derived from the Bulgars, a tribal association which established the Bulgar state, known as Old Great Bulgaria in the mid-7th century, giving rise to the Danubian Bulgaria by the 680s.^[2][3][4] While the language was extinct in Danubian Bulgaria (in favour of the Slavic Bulgarian language), it persisted in Volga Bulgaria, eventually giving rise to the modern Chuvash language.^[5][6][7]

Affiliation

Mainstream scholarship place the Bulgar language among the "Lir" branch of Turkic languages referred to as Oghur-Turkic, Lir-Turkic, or, indeed, "Bulgar Turkic" as opposed to the "Shaz"-type of Common Turkic. The "Lir" branch is characterized by sound correspondences such as Oghuric r versus Common Turkic (or Shaz-Turkic) z and Oghuric l versus Common Turkic (Shaz-Turkic) š.^[2][4][8] As was stated by Al-Istakhri "the language of Bulgars resembles the language of Khazars".^[9] The only surviving language from this linguistic group is the Chuvash. Omeljan Pritsak in his notable study "The Hunnic Language of the Attila Clan" (1982) ^[10] concluded that the language of the Bulgars was from the family of the Hunnic languages, as he calls the Oghur languages.^[11] According to the Bulgarian Antoaneta Granberg "the Hunno-Bulgarian language was formed on the Northern and Western borders of China in the 3rd-5th c. BC."^[12] The analysis of the loan-words in Slavonic language shows the presence of direct influences of various language-families:^[13] Turkic, Mongolian, Chinese and Iranian.

On the other hand, some Bulgarian historians, especially modern ones, link the Bulgar language to the Iranian language group instead (more specifically, the Pamir languages are frequently mentioned), noting the presence of Iranian words in the modern Bulgarian language.^{[14][15][16][17]} According to Prof. Raymond Detrez, who is a specialist in Bulgarian history and language,^[18] such views are based on anti-Turkish sentiments, and the presence of Iranian words in the modern Bulgarian is result of Ottoman Turkish linguistic influence.^[19] Indeed, other Bulgarian historians, especially older ones, only point out certain signs of Iranian influence in the Turkic base,^[20] or indeed support the Turkic theory.^{[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]}

Danube Bolgar

The language of the Danube Bulgars (or Danube Bulgar) is recorded in a small number of inscriptions, which are found in Pliska, the first capital of Danube Bulgaria and in the rock churches near the village of Murfatlar, present-day Romania. Some of these inscriptions are written with Greek characters, others with runes similar to the Orkhon script. Most of them appear to have a private character (oaths, dedications, inscriptions on grave stones) and some were court inventories. Although attempts at decipherment have been made, none of them has gained wide acceptance. These inscriptions in Danube-Bulgar are found along with other official ones written in Greek. Greek was used as the official state language of Danube Bulgaria until the 9th century, when it was replaced by Old Bulgarian (Slavonic).^[29]

The language of the Danube Bulgars is also known from a small number of loanwords in the Old Bulgarian language, as well as terms occurring in Bulgar Greek-language inscriptions, contemporary Byzantine texts, and later Slavonic Old Bulgarian texts. Most of these words designate titles and other concepts concerning the affairs of state, including the official 12-year cyclic calendar (as used e.g. in the Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans). The language became extinct in Danubian Bulgaria in the 9th century as the Bulgar nobility became gradually Slavicized after the Old Bulgarian was declared as official in 893.

Volga Bulgar

The language spoken by the population of Volga Bulgaria is known as Volga-Bulgar. There are a number of surviving inscriptions in Volga-Bulgar, some of which are written with Arabic letters, alongside the continuing use of Turkic runes. These are all largely decipherable. That language persisted until the 13th or the 14th century. In that region, it may have ultimately given rise to the Chuvash language, which is most closely related to it^[30] and which is classified as the only surviving member of a separate "Oghur-Turkic" (or Lir-Turkic) branch of the Turkic languages, to which Bulgar is also considered to have belonged (see above).^[2][3][31] Still, the precise position of Chuvash within the Oghur family of languages is a matter of dispute among linguists. Since the comparative material attributable to the extinct members of Oghuric (Khazar and Bulgar) is scant, little is known about any precise interrelation of these languages and it is a matter of dispute whether Chuvash, the only "Lir"-type language with sufficient extant linguistic material, might be the daughter language of any of these or just a sister branch.^[8]

Notes

External links

Look up Bulgar in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Bulgar language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

For a list of words relating to Bulgar language, see the Bulgar language category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Britannica Online - The article describes the position of Bulgar and Chuvash in the classification of the Turkic languages.
• "Sergei Starostin's Tower of Babel" (PDF).  - A Russian Turkologist's take on Danube Bulgar inscriptions and the Bulgar calendar, in Russian. The article contains a tentative decipherment of inscriptions based on the Turkic hypothesis. (350 KiB)
• Rashev, Rasho. 1992. On the origin of the Proto-Bulgarians. p. 23-33 in: Studia protobulgarica et mediaevalia europensia. In honour of Prof. V. Beshevliev, Veliko Tarnovo - A Bulgarian archeologist's proposal. The author concedes that the ruling elite of the Bulgars was Turkic-speaking as evidenced by the inscriptions etc., but stipulates that the bulk of the population was Iranian.