Chuvash Historical Phonetics. An areal linguistic study. With an Appendix on the Role of Proto-Mari in the History of Chuvash Vocalism

Abstract

Hungarian Turkology has traditionally focused on the languages of the Middle Volga region. Chuvash is the only surviving representative of the western branch of the Turkic languages and dialects, and the Old Turkic loanwords in Hungarian prior to the conquest of the Carpathian Basin in 895 are an important source for reconstructing the language history of this group of Turkic languages in the period between the fifth and ninth centuries. The reconstruction of the history of Chuvash rests on Turkic loanwords in neighbouring Finno-Ugric and Slavic languages, as well as on Finno-Ugric and Slavic loanwords in Chuvash, combined with the historical reconstruction of Chuvash. Kl ara Agyag asi studied Turkology under Andr as R ona-Tas and specialized in Chuvash studies, although she did work on Tatar as well. Further, Agyag asi was trained in Slavic studies and wrote an important monograph on the Old Russian loanwords in the Turkic languages of the Volga–Kama region (Adjagaši 2005). She worked with G abor Bereczki to write an etymological dictionary of Cheremis (Bereczki 2013) and is an expert in Finno-Ugric studies. Agyag asi’s expertise allowed her to determine the chronology of the history of the Chuvash language using novel linguistic methods and to establish the historical consequences of her linguistic conclusions. Agyag asi accepts the term West Old Turkic (WOT), following the work of R ona-Tas and Berta, who indicate that the only survivor of this branch of the Turkic languages is Chuvash. WOT relates to the period of the fifth to thirteenth centuries for these languages. Several other terms relate to this group, such as Bulgar–Turkic, as introduced by Ašmarin, who identified Chuvash with the language spoken by the Volga Bulgars (tenth to thirteenth centuries), extending this further back to the Bulgars of the Eastern European steppe (the fifth to the