Linguo-ethnic features of the Volga Bulgars - the main ethnic root of the Tatars

§ 1. On the two meanings of the ethnonym Bulgars, the need to study the linguo-ethnic essence of the Bulgars.

Of all the ethnic roots of the Tatars, the most powerful root, close to the trunk of the family tree of the Tatars, is the Bulgars. Therefore, we have no right to leave aside the contradictions created by scientists of different generations, tendentious confusion and confusion, which now characterize the views of various historians on the linguo-ethnic features of the Bulgars.

Ethnonym Bulgar is the Russian version of the Tatar word Bulgarian In contrast to the polysemantic ethnonym Bulgarians (Bulgarians of Great Bulgaria Kubrat, Danube Bulgarians, Caucasian Bulgarians/Balkars, etc.) ethnonym Bulgar is used in two meanings: 1) in a narrow sense, it is called the Bulgar tribes, who took at the end of the 8th century. the Bilyars-Biars had power together with their capital Bilyar and created the Bulgar state; 2) in a broad sense, an ethnonym Bulgar means the population of the Bulgar state as a whole with the inclusion in this concept of the ancestors of the speakers of all three dialects of the Tatar language.

Here we will talk about the Bulgars in the broadest sense of the word, i.e. about the Turkic-speaking population of the Bulgar state in general.

As already mentioned, there is still a discussion in Turkology about the ethnolinguistic features of the Volga Bulgars, so there is a need for a special consideration of this issue. Part of Russian and Western European Turkologists, based on the fact that modern Tatars and Mongol-Tatars have the same ethnonym Tatars, modern Tatars continue to be considered the direct descendants of the Mongol-Tatar conquerors, and the Chuvash are recognized as the descendants of the Volga Bulgars. This Bulgaro-Chuvash concept (theory), Referring to various linguistic arguments, some Chuvash scholars, as well as Tatar Tatar-Tatarists, support it, trying to turn it into an axiom. Bulgaro-Tatar concept, which considers the Volga Bulgars the ancestors of modern Tatars, in turn, is supported by the main Tatar linguists and historians, proving its adequacy not only by linguistic, but also by ethnogenetic data.

Since the issue continues to be debatable, let's try to understand the complexities of the Bulgaro-Chuvash and Bulgaro-Tatar concepts.

It must be borne in mind that the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept is based solely on linguistic data. It is generally recognized, but not indisputable, that the Volga Bulgars spoke not the usual Turkic language, but the ancient Chuvash. Since the language is one of the main indicators of the national identity of people, the Chuvash are considered to be the descendants of the Bulgars.

From a tendentious analysis of linguistic data, many domestic and foreign Turkologists, including N.A. Baskakov, conclude that the Chuvash are “one of the branches of the ancient Bulgar people”, who have preserved “to this day the features of this language, characterized by Bulgar features” . In accordance with this conclusion, and in the classification of the Turkic languages, Chuvash is included in the "Bulgarian group of languages", which, according to Baskakov, "includes the ancient languages - Bulgar and Khazar - and the modern Chuvash language"[1]. The same opinion is shared by the Hungarian scientist A. Rona-Tash, the Turkish linguist T. Tekin and many others.

However, in the light of such conclusions, perplexing questions involuntarily arise. First, why don't facts based on linguistic data find their confirmation in the field of anthropology, archeology or ethnology? How to explain such a striking contradiction between the data of various sciences? Unfortunately, the answers to these questions, although they exist, have not yet become the property of general Turkic studies.

So, the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept was subjected to reasonable criticism by us for the first time in 1977.[2]. Some Chuvash linguists responded very harshly to our criticism, accusing the author of not having sufficient knowledge of the Chuvash language and other Chuvash materials, and therefore did not accept the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept. But there were also Chuvash scholars, Chuvash by nationality, who agreed with our criticism and even offered to write a joint work criticizing the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept. This work was created and published in 1993. Our co-author was Yakov Fedorovich Kuzmin-Yumanadi, a Chuvash by nationality, an excellent connoisseur of Chuvash material. The work is called "Volga Bulgars and their descendants"[3]

This issue has become the subject of careful study in other works of M. Zakiyev[4]. In these works and in the works of other supporters of the Bulgaro-Tatar concept, the failure of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept is clearly shown, i.e. theories that the Chuvash are allegedly the direct descendants of the Bulgars, i.e. population of the Volga-Bulgarian state.

§ 2. From the history of the study of the Volga Bulgars

If we take a general look at the history of the study of the Volga Bulgars, we can come to the conclusion that in the Volga region in ancient times there was a very large state of the Bulgars with a hardworking population and a highly developed medieval culture. Then this state ceased to exist, and its population, as it were, disappeared from the face of the earth, was forgotten and lost somewhere among other peoples. If we take into account that peoples do not disappear in history, but only their tribal names and state formations disappear, then it should be assumed that the Bulgar people also did not disappear from the face of the earth, that their descendants still live and work among us in the common family of peoples. But who are they now? What nationality is now the successor of the Bulgars? Science has not yet given definitive answers to these questions, there are different points of view that contradict one another.

For example, Russian historians Yu. Venelin (1829), D. Ilovaisky (1881) and F. Florinsky at one time argued that the Bulgars were Slavs and, therefore, the current Russian population should be considered the heirs of the Bulgars. D. Ilovaisky argued this opinion by the fact that the Danube Bulgarians are Slavs, therefore, the Volga Bulgars related to them should have been Slavs (Ilovaisky D.I., Research on the beginning of Rus'., M., 1881). The well-known European orientalist Tunmann considered the Bulgars to be Finno-Ugrians, related to the Mordovians, Udmurts and Maris, as well as to the ancestors of the current Hungarians, since in the appearance of the Hungarians he found many eastern features that reminded him of the Bulgars[5]. Another European orientalist Klaproth considered the Bulgars to be a mixture of three different peoples - Slavs, Finns and Turks - and, accordingly, he considered their descendants to be representatives of various peoples now living in the Volga region.[6].

S.M. Shpilevsky, I. Berezin, Sh. Marjani, G. Akhmerov and a number of their later followers considered and consider the Bulgars to be the ancestors of the present Tatars.

And such scientists as N.I. Ilminsky, A.A. Kunik, N.I. Ashmarin, M.P. Petrov, N.N. Poppe, N.A. Baskakov, Z. Gombots, J. Benzing, K Thomsen recognized and recognize the Bulgars as the ancestors of the current Chuvash, and this theory also found many adherents.

Famous Soviet scientists M.N. Tikhomirov, P.N. Tretyakov, A.P. Smirnov and many others claim that the descendants Bulgar are at the same time Tatars, and Chuvash, that de, the former Bulgars subsequently split into two independent nationalities. One of the modern scientists - Kh.I. Khadzhilayev - claims that the descendants of the Bulgars are three Turkic-speaking peoples of the Volga region, namely: Bashkirs, Tatars and Chuvashs[7].

In order to understand this discordance of opinions and reveal the truth, the Academy of Sciences of Tsarist Russia, and then the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, more than once undertook special studies on this problem, sent multiple scientific expeditions to the Volga region, held special scientific sessions, but the issue remained unresolved. At the last two sessions of the Department of History and Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences, held, in particular, in 1946 in Moscow on the issue of the ethnogenesis of the Kazan Tatars and in 1950 in Cheboksary on the issue of the ethnogenesis of the Chuvash, a recommendation was made to consider the descendants of the Bulgars both Tatars and Chuvashs. But since each of these peoples has an independent thousand-year history, and according to their ethnic characteristics, they cannot be derived from one common Bulgar ancestor, neither the Tatar nor the Chuvash local scientists accepted this recommendation and continue to interpret this issue each in their own way. In particular, Tatar historians claim that Bulgars later turned into Kazan Tatars, and Chuvash historians insist that the Bulgars turned into Chuvash. In the Tatar textbooks they write that the Tatars are descended from the Bulgars, and in the Chuvash textbooks they assert that the origin of the Chuvash is identical to the Tatar. The Tatar population is told that it is the heir of the Bulgars, and the Chuvash population is also told that they alone are the heir of the Bulgars. And these contradictions cause, unfortunately, not quite a healthy rivalry between Tatars and Chuvashs for owning the past cultural and historical heritage of the Bulgars.

Such rivalry did not arise today or yesterday, but has existed for a relatively long time. In 1862, a circle of Tatar intelligentsia was formed in Kazan, who considered themselves descendants of the Bulgars and set as their goal the revival of the former name of their nationality, since the ethnonym Tatars they considered it alien, "stuck" to them due to a misunderstanding. But for some reason, local reactionaries and officials of the tsarist autocracy did not like this idea, and they decided to prevent its implementation. In 1865, the professor of the Kazan Theological Academy N.I. Ilminsky published a special article, where, referring to the materials of the Bulgar epigraphy, he argued that not the Tatars, but their neighbors, the Chuvash, should be considered the descendants of the Bulgars.[8]. But the Tatar scientists, especially Shigabutdin Marjani, ignored this speech by Ilminsky and continued to assert that the Tatars were the descendants of the Bulgars.[9]. Then the tsarist press censor of the Kazan province N.I. Ashmarin opposed the Tatar Bulgarists, who in 1902 published his pseudo-scientific work entitled “Bulgarians and Chuvashs”, in which he denied the connection of the Tatars with the Bulgars and, based solely on his subjective judgments, proved the origin of the Chuvash from the Bulgars. But even this publication was ignored by Tatar scholars: in 1909, Gainetdin Akhmerov published his work of completely opposite content - “History of Bulgaria”, where he proved on concrete material that the former Bulgars are, in fact, Kazan Tatars, but, given the then political situation , did not criticize Ashmarin and his supporters[10].

Only after the February Revolution of 1917 did the Tatar Bulgarists speak more boldly and openly. Already in the summer of 1917 in Kazan, the “party of deliverance” of the Bulgars was formed, which called its movement “Soviet Volgobulgarmus” and set as its goal the deliverance from oppression and the national revival of the Bulgar nation. The well-known figure S.G. Vaisov became the leader of the party. At its three congresses held in the first years of Soviet power, this party developed its national and political program.

But simultaneously with the activities of this party in the Chuvash ASSR, the Chuvash Bulgarists launched similar activities. They also set as their goal the revival of the Bulgar nation, but already in the face of the Chuvash people. In Cheboksary, this movement was headed by M.P. Petrov, then secretary of the Chuvash Regional Committee of the Communist Party, who published his book “On the Origin of the Chuvash” (Cheboksary, 1925) and launched organizational work to rally his supporters. N.I. Ashmarin, who now specialized in Chuvash linguistics, became an unofficial consultant and inspirer for the Chuvash Bulgarists. The most active Chuvash Bulgarists set as their first task the renaming of the Chuvash Republic into the "Bulgarian Republic" in order to get ahead of their Tatar rivals in this matter. Unfortunately, both the Tatar and the Chuvash Bulgarists then acted extremely closed. The lack of information rotation prevented them from developing a creative discussion and coming to a common and mutually acceptable conclusion. This was also prevented by the then onset of the Stalinist political reaction, which opposed freedom in general. In the 1930s, both Tatar and Chuvash Bulgarists were declared "bourgeois nationalists", and their leaders and activists were arrested and shot as "enemies of the people". Since then, even a mere mention of them has been under the strictest ban for almost half a century.

At the end of the 80s of the twentieth century. in connection with the onset of a new political thaw in the country, both Tatar and Chuvash Bulgarists again intensified their activities. The Tatar Bulgarists organized their own party, the Bulgar National Congress with the propaganda center "Bulgar al-Jadid", which pursues basically the same goals as the former Bulgar Revival Party, namely: renaming the Tatars into Bulgars, although the Tatar Tatar-Tatarists also oppose the renaming, essentially denying the Bulgaro-Tatar theory.

The Chuvash Bulgarists also became more active, although they had not yet formally unified their ranks. The latter deny the right of their Tatar rivals to be called Bulgars, since they see in them the descendants of only newcomer Mongol-Tatars who usurped the local Bulgaro-Chuvash and seized their ancestral lands.

According to the supporters of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept, there is a lot of evidence that the Bulgars spoke the Chuvash language. First of all, Chuvash words and expressions are preserved in the texts of the Bulgar epitaphs, written by them on stone tombstones. Secondly, the Chuvash words were “discovered” by them in the text of the story about the Bulgars, written by the Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan, who came to Bulgaria in 922. Thirdly, many Chuvash words are found in the Hungarian language, where, as the supporters of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept believe, they were brought by the Hungarians, who allegedly lived once in the Volga region.   Fourth, Chuvash words were allegedly found in the ancient name book of the princes of the Danube Proto-Bulgarians, who, it is believed, also spoke the Chuvash language. Fifth, Chuvash words were also found in the runic writings of the North Caucasian Balkars, who, as relatives of the Bulgars, also allegedly spoke the Old Chuvash language. And finally  At sixth, Chuvash words and expressions are preserved in the languages of the Volga Finno-Ugric peoples: Mari, Mordovians, Udmurts and Komi. All these arguments, taken together, leave, in their opinion, no doubt that the Bulgars allegedly really spoke the Old Chuvash language and that it is the Chuvashs that should be recognized as their descendants.

Below, all these arguments are considered individually by analyzing specific materials.

§ 3. Unsuccessful attempts to "chuvashivat" the language of the Bulgar epitaph.

The main evidence of the so-called Chuvash-linguality of the Volga Bulgars in the broad sense of the word is the texts of the Bulgar madrigals, which began to be studied in detail from the second half of the 19th century. The vast majority of the words of the epitaph were easily explained through the Tatar language. However, the expression could not be explained and deciphered, ?mupbîu  җiaty җөR. After much thought, G.Yu. Klaproth suggested that in this expression the letters denote numbers, and they allegedly correspond to 623 Hijri, i.e. 1226 of the Christian chronology. This date is close to the time of the invasion of the Mongol-Tatar conquerors, so the expression was translated as "the year of the advent of oppression." I.N. Berezin agreed with this opinion.[11].

However, in 1863, Khusain Feyzhanov, a lecturer at St. Petersburg University, opposed such an explanation and read this expression җiaty җurexplaining ziats like Tatar uite 'seven', җur - like Chuvash ser 'one hundred'[12]. Thus, Kh. Feyzhanov gave science the Chuvash key to deciphering the Bulgar epigraphy.

After finding the Chuvash words in the Bulgarian epigraphy, Kh. Feizkhanov himself came to the conclusion about the impact Chuvash language into the language of epitaphs of the Volga Bulgars.

Having familiarized himself with the publication of H. Feizkhanov, the professor of the Kazan Theological Academy, missionary N.I. Ilminsky decided to also take part in this important discovery. Without bothering to study the tombstones themselves and their language, he immediately published his judgments in the next issue of the said edition.[13]. The meaning of his article boiled down to the fact that since Chuvash words were found on the Bulgar monuments, it means that the Bulgars spoke the Chuvash language. Although Feizkhanov's publication spoke of his deciphering three tomb epitaphs, of which only two contained Chuvash words, and the third was written in ordinary Turkic without Chuvashisms, Ilminsky spoke only about Chuvash-language monuments, as if there were no others. This misinformation misled many historians and linguists, who, not being able to personally get acquainted with the source materials of epigraphy, took Ilminsky at his word and began to rely on his conclusions in their future work. The fact that Ilminsky zealously took up the Bulgaro-Chuvash theory is explained by his official missionary desire to show the Chuvash, Mari, Udmurts and others that the Tatars are not indigenous, but newcomers, conquerors of the region. The ultimate goal of N.I. Ilminsky was that these peoples quickly abandoned the historical orientation towards Islam of the Tatars, and adopted Christianity.

The main developer of the now widespread Bulgaro-Chuvash concept, following Ilminsky, was his successor N.I. Ashmarin, who published the work “Bulgarians and Chuvashs” in 1902 and then devoted his whole life to developing Chuvash linguistics in relation to Ilminsky’s statements. If Ilminsky put forward his theses as a guess, then Ashmarin developed a whole concept that develops his ideas. Like Ilminsky, Ashmarin knew perfectly well that there were not only Chuvash-lingual, but also ordinary Türkic-speaking epitaphs, but stubbornly continued to assert only about the Chuvash-speaking Bulgar epigraphy. Since this statement does not agree with the real data of epigraphy, he tacked and changed many times throughout his life, correcting this concept, trying to keep it from being exposed. At first he claimed that the Bulgars owned the usual Türkic-language epitaphs, and the Chuvash-language epitaphs were written by their allies, the Suvars. But when he was convinced that it was on the usual Türkic monuments that tahallus “al-Suvari” were found, he began to assert that the two types of epitaphs were different in time, that those Chuvash-language monuments were written by the Bulgaro-Suvars earlier, when they still spoke the Chuvash language, and the ordinary Türkic ones were written later, when the Bulgars adopted the usual Türkic language. Then it turned out that such an explanation is also impossible, because the dating of the monuments themselves show that some Türkic epitaphs were written even earlier than the Chuvash-speaking ones; then Ashmarin began to assert that both types of tombstones were created in the same era, but they were written in different languages: Turkic-speaking - in the spoken language of the Bulgars, and Chuvash-speaking - in the literary or "cult" language of the Bulgars[14]. Then Ashmarin abandoned both interpretations, because. Both types of monuments belong to the paraphernalia of the cult and, therefore, cannot be distinguished according to this principle, especially since the cult language of the Bulgars was Arabic. He began to assert that the Turkic-language monuments belonged not to the Bulgars at all, but to the Chagatai and were written in the Chagatai language.[15], although this can be questioned. In addition, Ashmarin, until the end of his life, could not explain why the Chuvash-language monuments appeared only after the Mongol invasion and soon disappeared, why they were not distributed throughout the entire territory of the former Bulgaria, for what reason such a number of monuments were created in a short period of time, etc. .d.

Despite all these shortcomings, Ashmarin's concept was still not rejected at that time, since the problem of epigraphy itself remained poorly studied. For the same reason, this concept was accepted without proper criticism by such world-famous Orientalists as Z. Gombots, K. Thomsen, O. Pritsak, J. Benzing, A. Rona-Tash and S. Fodor (Hungary), K. Menges and P Golden (USA) and others. Our domestic scientists S.E. Malov, B.A. Serebrennikov, M.R. Fedotov, V.P. Denisov, V.F. Kakhovsky, V.D. Dimitriev especially warmly supported Ashmarin and many others.

After a thorough study of the Bulgar epigraphy, it became clear that the efforts and zeal of the Bulgaro-Chuvashists to sensitize the Bulgar epigraphy at all costs turned out to be only unsuccessful attempts. Unfortunately, there were many such unsuccessful attempts from different sides. Let's consider them briefly.

§ 4. Unsuccessful attempts by A.P. Kovalevsky to find Chuvashisms in the work of Ibn Fadlan.

Another argument proving the Chuvash-linguality of the Bulgars in the broadest sense of the word is the "Chuvash" words preserved in the ancient notes of Ibn Fadlan about his trip to Bulgaria. This author, who traveled from Baghdad to Bulgaria in 921-922 as part of an Arab embassy, during his trip wrote down toponyms, ethnonyms and personal names he met on the way, including Bulgar names, among which some researchers find Chuvash words . Of the thirty-two local names and names recorded by him in Bulgaria, six words are considered Chuvash by supporters of the Bulgaro-Chuvash theory, namely: Helleche (name of a group of lakes), Gausherma (name of the river) Atal (name of the Volga), sadjuv (name of honey drink), Savaz (tribe name) and Vyrach (personal name of the leader of the Suvar tribe).

These Chuvash words, according to the researcher, prove the origin of the Chuvash from the Bulgars. They were discovered by the translator of the book of Ibn Fadlan into Russian, the Arabist A.P. Kovalevsky, with the assistance of the Chuvash linguists of the Ashmarinist persuasion, and, moreover, he did not find it immediately, but more than twenty years after the publication of the first edition of this book.

As is known, A.P. Kovalevsky translated these notes into Russian twice: once in the 1930s, the other - in the 1950s - and both times according to the Meshkhed list of notes by Ibn Fadlan received from the Iranian Shah. The first translation was made by him under the guidance of academician I.Yu. Krachkovsky and was published under his own editorship in 1939 in Moscow, but there were no Chuvashisms in the publication yet. This circumstance greatly surprised the Ashmarinists, who were convinced that the Bulgars were the ancestors of the Chuvash, because there was not a single Chuvash word about them in Ibn Fadlan's reports. With this question, the Chuvash linguists P.G. Grigoriev and N.R. Romanov turned to the translator of the book, Kovalevsky, who worked in the 1950s on a new translation of the same book.

Finding the questions of the Ashmarinists quite reasonable, Kovalevsky considered it possible to revise the transcriptions of some Bulgarian names written in Arabic script without strict vowels, and with the assistance of the same Chuvash linguists, he corrected the spelling of a number of words in the Chuvash manner. This is how the above-mentioned six Chuvash words appeared in the second edition of Ibn Fadlan's book: Helleche, Gausherma, Atal, Sajuv, Savas and Vyrakh[16]. In order to strengthen the evidence base for the corrections made to the second edition of the book, in 1954 Kovalevsky published a special brochure, where he did not interpret the content of Ibn Fadlan's book in the most successful way already from the Ashmarinist positions, and likened a number of terms to Chuvash words[17].

Why did Kovalevsky need to so carelessly falsify the book of Ibn Fadlan he is translating, especially since, according to the Arabists, the quality of his secondary translation did not win at all, but, on the contrary, lost compared to the quality of the first translation of the 1930s?[18]. Didn't Kovalevsky know that the first duty of any conscientious translator is the most accurate reproduction of the translated text?

To answer this question, obviously, one must take into account how much love this person had for the object of his translation and, at the same time, for the author of the book himself. Transforming the Old Bulgarian words in the Chuvash manner, he, of course, did not have any bad intentions at all, but did it with the aim of improving the translated work in order to make Ibn Fadlan's book more adapted to the requirements of the modern reader.

In addition, A.P. Kovalevsky wanted to somehow protect Ibn Fadlan himself from the unfair accusations of critics.

To this end, he worked for a very long time on compiling extensive comments on the text of the translations, and for the same purposes, in the 1950s, he undertook a secondary translation of the book. Hearing from the Ashmarinists that the current Chuvash are considered descendants of the Volga Bulgars, Kovalevsky took this into account and began to seriously study the Chuvash culture in order to find historical continuity between these peoples. Therefore, it is not surprising that he tried to change some of the Bulgarian names into the Chuvash manner.

Kovalevsky's mistake here consisted only in the fact that he should not have been carried away by the arguments of the Ashmarinists and not try to correct what Ibn Fadlan wrote, no matter how imperfect it seemed to him. It was necessary to remember that the messages of Ibn Fadlan do not need anyone's corrections, and the author himself does not need protection either. Everything he wrote was the true truth, the truth that had existed in the mind of man for thousands of years. Therefore, it was not at all necessary to correct his messages, but only to translate them accurately and reproduce the names and terms encountered there as accurately as possible.

§ 5. Unsuccessful attempts to chuvashivanie Bulgarian words from the records of Ibn-Fadlan.

As it was said above, A.P. Kovalevsky subjected to “humanization” of six words from the notes of Ibn Fadlan: Helleche, Gausherma, Atal, syudzhe (sajuv), suaz, Vyrakh.

1. The first of these Bulgarian words isHelleche. “When we arrived at the king, we found him standing by the waterHelleche... "[19], in the Arabic original of the Mashhad manuscript list, this word was originally deciphered as evÜ? Khalja[20]. It is noteworthy that in the first edition of the book in 1939 this word was transcribed in Russian in the form Khalja[21]. But since there is no such word in the Chuvash language, in the second edition of the book Kovalevsky forwarded it to Helleche in order to liken the Chuvash word helle 'winter' and at the same time give this hydronym the meaning of the 'winter camp' of the Bulgar king, as some scholars of the text interpreted it. But this paraphrase was prevented by the ending -ja in a word khalja, which was not explained, based on the Chuvash language, I had to remake it into Chuvash -Che[22], and this led to the emergence of an unusual word xelleche, which in translation means 'it was in winter', but by no means 'winter road'. The tension of this "conjecture" is also visible in the fact that the word Helleche Kovalevsky wrote according to the Chuvash spelling through two "l", and in the Arabic original the letter "lam" is written without a doubling tashdid. So in all respects this is a “chuvashchivaniye” of the hydronym Khalja was illegal. In fact, this hydronym should have been read as Sulcha, for the first letter in the manuscript is not ? (x), a ˜ (c), in addition, a river flows there, which was called and is called FROMөlcа/sulcha[23].
2. Second word -Gausherma, found in the phrase: “The king rode away from the water called Sulcha, to the river called Gausherma ...”, also turned out to be wrongfully distorted. In the Arabic original of the Mashhad list, it was written in one place as ?î?ëbu (causiz), elsewhere as ?î?ëbu (causir) (without dot over zayn)[24]. In the first edition of the book in 1939, it was transcribed according to the second spelling in the form Javashir[25], which was intended to show the existence of the r-language among the Bulgars, but then in the brochure of 1954 Kovalevsky went even further and remade it into Gausherma in order to liken the Chuvash word syrma 'river', because here we are talking about a river. But for this it was necessary to change the entire phonetic composition of the word and arbitrarily add a syllable to its ending -ma, and also replace the initial sound [j] with [g]. As you can see, "conjecture" is also not a good one. Therefore, in 1956, before sending the manuscript for the second edition, Kovalevsky sent this word back to Javshir, but nevertheless the Ashmarinists still continue to interpret it as Gausherma.

The river called Jaushir can be identified with the river Yaushirmа in the Chistopolsky district of Tatarstan. The hydronym seems to consist of two parts: Yaush - the name of a person related to this river, yirma - Turkic word meaning river[26]. There may be another interpretation: Yau - 'army', screen - from the dialectal pronunciation of the same word yerma as җyrma. Chuvash preserved the pronunciation syrma.

3. Third word -Atal[27]- indeed there is in the book of Ibn-Fadlan and coincides with the Chuvash name of the river Volga — Atal. But this does not mean that the Bulgars spoke the Chuvash language. Some Turks and Arabs use this word with the anlaut [e] (Ethyl, Edil), and the Tatars and Bashkirs - with the initial [and] (idil), but in Arabic writing all these vowels are denoted by the same letter alif, supplied with additional diacritics.

Ashmarinists were interested in the fact that in the book of Ibn Fadlan there is a spelling of this word in the Chuvash form Atal. But that still doesn't prove anything. In the Mashhad list, this word is repeated five times and, moreover, it is written three times with the initial alif with fatha (Ýme Atl) and written twice without diacritics (ema). which can be read as Ethel or even Itel. Therefore, the question here remains controversial: it can be assumed that the Bulgars called the Volga in Chuvash Atal, but could also be called in Bulgarian Itil. The original manuscript of Ibn Fadlan has not survived to this day. Perhaps the Volga was named in it Itil, and the Iranian-language copyist of the Mashhad list copied it correctly in two places, but in three places he mechanically wrote in his own way in the form Atel.

If you pay attention to the etymology of this hydronym, it is easy to see that it consists of two parts: Turk. go — idea 'great, big, god' and ate (the oldest form of the hydronym elga 'river'). Turkic ate borrowed by the Mari language to designate the Volga itself. In this way, Go + eat (Idel) was used and is now used in the meaning of 'big river, great river'. If so, then the most ancient form of this hydronym is not Atal, Ethyl or Itil, and Idel (Idi-ate). Based on the foregoing, it is clear that the Arabic style of this hydronym should be transliterated as Itil, Itel or Idel.

4. Fourth word -syudzhe(drink) in the Mashhad list was written as ìv?Ûa (al-sacu or, more precisely, as-scu) and was also transcribed in the first edition of the book in 1939 as as-sujuv, but then in a specially published brochure in 1954, Kovalevsky remade it into sadjuv in order to liken the Chuvash word shu, shiv (water). But since the Chuvash do not call the honey drink sadjuv, a simpul or karchama, then this conjecture also turned out to be unsuccessful, in connection with which in 1956 Kovalevsky sent him back to "sujuv"[28]. According to Fleischer and Fren, saju was not the Chuvash, but the ancient Turkic name of the intoxicating drink, and according to A.P. Smirnov, it was a borrowing from Russian full, sychevka.

In reality syudzhe (withҩҗf~sүҗe) is a sweet drink that was common among the Turks of various regions. In the Azerbaijani language, it has survived to this day. Word Withҩҗe in the Tatar literary language is used in the form tөChe, in Tatar dialects as WithөChe (sweet, cloying) and acts as an antonym of the word achy (sour).

5. Fifth word -suaz(the name of the tribe) is also subjected to unreasonable distortion. In the Arabic original of the Mashhad list, it is used only once and in the form æaì? (suan). In the first edition of the book in 1939, Kovalevsky transcribed it in the form shroud, because in the manuscript the last letter ?  h was depicted as æ n. But in the subsequent edition of his book, he already conveys this word as suvaz. By this Kovalevsky wanted to emphasize that the word suvaz then it was used as Chuvash and denoted the ancestors of the Chuvash. Consequently, in his opinion, the Suvaz Bulgars were Chuvash-speaking.

More accurate research[29] show that the word suaz ~ suas was Bulgarian and came from two Turkic words: su 'water' and ace (name of the tribe). Mari Tatars are called an ethnonym suas / suas, and Chuvash - suaslamari.

6. The sixth wordVyrach(the name of the Suvar prince), apparently, was also distorted by the translator. In the Arabic original of the Mashhad list, it is written as K?n wirg / wirg[30]. Kovalevsky himself, in the first edition of the book in 1939, transcribed it as Virag. But since there is no such word in the Chuvash language, he later tried to somehow “chuvash” it, having forwarded it in the second edition of the book to Vyrag[31], and in the brochure of 1954 - in Vyrach[32]. But all these "conjectures" were in vain, because in the Chuvash language there were no words similar to Ext/Ext. From the point of view of common Turkic etymology, this word has not been studied.

Thus, all six words, likened by Kovalevsky to Chuvash lexemes, cannot testify to the existence of the Chuvash type of p-language among the Bulgars. But despite this, the Ashmarinists persistently continue to use this "discovery" as proof of the correctness of their Bulgaro-Chuvash concept. For these purposes, many works and articles by such authors as P.G. Grigoriev, N.R. Romanov, N. Danilov, V.G. Egorov, V.F. Bulgar origin of the Chuvash.

§ 6. Unsuccessful attempts to find Chuvash words in the Slavic-Bulgarian Name Book.

Let us now consider the following argument of the supporters of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept - the Chuvash words in the so-called "Slavic-Bulgarian name book". If this personal name contains Turkic-Bulgarian words, then, according to the supporters of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept, they should be characterized by Chuvash features.

It is known that in 1866 Professor A. Popov discovered and published a written monument written by an unknown author in the 16th century and kept in the library of the Holy Synod along with the handwritten book “The Hellenic and Roman Chronicler”[33].

Here is the full text of this name.

The point here is not at all about the authenticity or unreliability of the document itself.[35], but in the mysteriousness of those postscripts that are given after each of the thirteen names that have gained fame in the literature as "non-Slavic vocables of the name." There are 26 such incomprehensible words, but some of them are repeated two or three times, so that in the end 15 vocables remain mysterious: dilom, shekhtem, tvirem, dokhs, shegor, vechem, veri, alem, tekou, chetem, dvan, tokh, altom, somor, tout.

Scientists tried to decipher these words on the basis of various languages. So, Academician A.Kunik, relying on the materials of the recently published article by N.I.Ilminsky about the Chuvash words in the Bulgar language, decided to explain the vocabularies of the nomenclature on the material of the Chuvash language, since, he thought, the language of the Danube Proto-Bulgarians should be related to the language of the Volga Bulgars. Kunik himself, not knowing the Chuvash language, could not do this on his own and turned to the Turkologist V.V. Radlov for help, asking the latter to decipher the name on the material of the Chuvash language[36].

Young Radlov, who was then on an internship in Barnaul, did not refuse the request of the well-known metropolitan academician and sent him a somewhat vague answer about some possibilities of identifying vocables with Chuvash numerals. For example, the vocable somor he raised to the Chuvash ikke 'two', four - to Chuvash Sice 'seven', and also to Sitmel 'seventy', dohs and tekou both raised to vătăr 'thirty', shekhtem - to săkăr-vunnă 'eighty', mulberries - to xerex 'forty', and the endings of the vocables on -ohm and -eat interpreted as a numeral vunna 'ten'. As a result of such an arbitrary interpretation, Radlov deduced numerals that do not exist in the Chuvash language; eg, dilom tvirem interpreted as 'five twenty', 'shegor vechem' — as 'eight thirty', Tekow four — as 'nine seventy', dvan shekhtem - 'four eighty', etc. But what these incoherent words mean, he himself could not explain.[37], since the units in its two-digit numbers were ahead of the tens. Such a reverse sequence in the structure of complex numerals is alien not only to Chuvash, but also to most other Turkic languages; something similar can be found only in the Saryk-Yugur language and in the ancient Orkhon-Yenisei writings, where some complex numerals have a different structure and quantitative meaning[38].

If Radlov had not been connected with the request of the influential academician Kunik at that time and had reacted more objectively to the deciphering of the personal name, he would certainly have come to the conclusion not in favor of Kunik's hypothesis, but rather in favor of the statement of Geza Kuun, who considered vocables to be Turkish lexemes. Indeed, many vocables are much closer to common Turkic numerals than to Chuvash ones. For example, vocable veri more consonant with Turkic berence 'first' than with Chuvash pErrEmEs; vocable dohs more consonant with Turkic togyz 'nine' than with Chuvash tăxăr; vechem also more like a Turk. ucon 'thirty' than in Chuv. vătăr; cheat and shekhtem are also more consonant with the Turkic citen and sixsenthan with the Chuvash Sitmel 'seventy' and sakărvunnă 'eighty'. Second vocable endings -ohm and -eat much better comparable to Turkic on 'ten' than with Chuvash vunna.

In addition, the names of the eight princes in the name list directly say “the family of emou Doulo”, and the Dulo family, as you know, was not actually Bulgarian, but was Western Turkic, who usurped the Bulgarians in the 7th century, which also indicates a greater likelihood of using the common Turkic name in the name book. s-language. However, young Radlov neglected these data and wrote to Kunik that this "adverb is very close to Chuvash". But in the same letter, he unequivocally made a reservation: “According to your desire ... I came to the conclusions set out above,” but “I myself feel all dissatisfaction… of their research.”

However, this recognition of Radlov did not stop Kunik, who intended to publish his hypothesis. In 1878, he supplemented Radlov’s response letter with his own judgments, outlined the history of the problematics and, having provided all this with a catchy heading “On the relationship of the Khagano-Bulgarians with the Chuvashs according to the Slavonic-Bulgarian personal name”, published in the appendix to the 32nd volume of the “Notes of the Russian Academy of Sciences” . This is how this version about the “kinship of the Khagano-Bulgarians with the Chuvashs” was born, and at the same time about the imaginary relationship of the Proto-Bulgarian language with the Chuvash.

At the beginning of our century, Kunik-Radlov's version was finally rejected, and a completely new version was proposed instead, considering vocables as the names of dates of the ancient Turkic "animal" calendar.

The Finnish linguist I. Mikkola is considered to be the founder of this new version, although this idea was first expressed by Bury. Rejecting the opinion of Kunik, Radlov, Zlatarsky and other authors who considered vocables as numerals, Mikkola proposed to consider them as the names of the years and months of the eastern "animal" calendar, which also existed among the medieval Turks. In his opinion, in each pair of vocabularies of the nomenclature, the first words are the names of animals, denoting years, and the second are numerals, denoting the ordinal numbers of months in a year. Moreover, the names of animals, in his opinion, were taken from different Turkic and non-Turkic languages. For example, the vocable shegor he raised to the Turkic sygyr 'cow', denoting, in his opinion, the year of the bull; vocabulary somor elevated to Mongolian Morin 'horse', dvan - to the Oghuz davśan 'hare', dilom - to the common Turkic jylan 'snake', tox - to Jaghatai tauk 'hen', dohs - to Turkic tonguz 'pig', tekou - to the Oghuz koć 'ram', veri - to Chuvash saver 'groundhog', etc. The second vocables in each pair (tvirem, vechem, alem, chetem, shekhtem, altom, tout) Mikkola considered numerals, meaning the ordinal numbers of months in a year. Since there are no more than thirteen lunar months in a year, and in the name book there are numerals even "fifty" (alem), then Mikkola had to assign other numerical and even non-numerical values to such vocables. For example, the vocable alem he elevated to Chagatai ilag 'before', giving it the meaning of 'first month of the year'; vocabulary tvirem, considered Chuvash Sirem 'twenty', elevated to Chuv. măxxăr 'nine', and to explain the vocable tekou I had to attribute a non-existent word to the Chuvash language koč "ram", etc.[39].

Since the version of Mikkola turned out to be unconvincing in all respects, and most importantly, it did not bring the vocabularies of the personal name closer to the Chuvash language, supporters of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept more than once made attempts to “improve” it, making various amendments and additions. Ashmarin himself, who previously relied on the numerical version of Kunik-Radlov, in 1917-1923 completely renounced it and made an attempt to "feel" the new version of Mikkola. For example, the vocable somor, erected by Mikkola to Mongolian Morin 'horse', he proposed to build to the Chuvash ămărt 'eagle', veri raised to Chuv. paran 'young sheep', tekou - to Chuv. căxă 'hen', tvirem - to Chuv. tEpEr 'other, different', dilom - to Chuv. sělěn 'snake', alem - to Chuv. ulěm 'later, in the future', shekhtem - to Chuv. sicc 'seven', and for the rest of the vocables (toh, dohs, dwan, four etc.) Ashmarin did not find consonant words, but nevertheless argued that such words could exist in the Chuvash language sometime in the past[40].

O. Pritsak, finding Ashmarin's amendments unsuccessful, proposed to leave Mikkola's comparisons in relation to vocabularies in force Dilom, Tvirem, Shegor, vechem, toh, dohs, and the vocable veri offered to build to the Turk. storm 'wolf' and interpreted as 'the year of the wolf', although there is no such name of the month in the Eastern calendars. Finding inappropriate juxtaposition of vocables somor with the Mongolian 'horse', Pritsak proposed for the horse to select the first syllable from the continuous vocable imache golem, that is ima-, and interpret it as the name of a horse in the supposed Proto-Bulgarian language[41].

After Pritsak, attempts were made more than once to improve Mikkola's version. For example, V.F.Kakhovsky offers the vocable tekou, erected by Ashmarin to the Chuv. căxă 'chicken', to erect to Chuv. taka 'ram', but the vocabulary somor back to hypothetical samăr 'horse', although there is no such word either and did not exist in the Chuvash language, as well as in other Turkic languages[42].

Many other proposals were made to decipher this name.[43]. But all of them are only subjective fortune-telling or, in the words of Ashmarin himself, "guessing guesses." Will the Name Book ever be deciphered? Many scientists doubt this. But if the mentioned words of the "Imennik" are reliably deciphered, they will still not be able to confirm the correctness of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept. This was noticed back in 1900 by the Bulgarian scientist I.D. Shishmanov. He wrote that in the Name Book there are words with initial d, d, b, which contradicts the Chuvash phonetics. For example, doulo, dilom, doxs, Gostun, goralem, Bezmer. The ethnonym itself contradicts Chuvash phonetics Bulgar. If the Bulgars spoke a Chuvash-like language, then they would spread the ethnonym not Bulgar, a palgar/palhar or murgar. Based on this, I.D. Shishmanov concludes that the Proto-Bulgarian language has no resemblance to the Chuvash language, it was close to the Chagatai language[44].

The most reliable and accessible source for identifying the features of the Proto-Bulgarian language is, undoubtedly, the living Slavic-Bulgarian language itself with its ancient Proto-Bulgarian substrata. If the Proto-Bulgarian Türks were a Chuvash-type r-language, then elements of the Chuvash type of r-language would have been preserved among the substrate Türkisms. But they are not in the Bulgarian language. On this occasion, K.G. Menges rightly writes: “when it is announced in print that in the modern Bulgarian language there are many words in common with Chuvash words like dost (Bulgarian) - tus (Chuv.), darling (Bulgarian) - carcasses (Chuv.), champ (Bulgarian) - champ (Chuv.) and others, then their authors make a gross mistake, since here we are talking about Turkish borrowings in the Bulgarian language, which in their phonetic appearance do not differ in any way from Kypchak borrowings in the Chuvash language "[45].

There were no Türkisms of the Chuvash type in the Proto-Bulgarian Türks either - this language was just as zetacious as the language of the Volga Bulgars was. In any case, neither in the ancient written monuments, nor in the living Bulgarian language, nor in the Slavic-Bulgarian name-list are signs of the Chuvash type of p-language found.

§ 7. Unsuccessful attempts to find Chuvashisms in ancient Balkar runic inscriptions.

The next pseudo-proof of the existence of the r-language among the Volga Bulgars is considered to be the alleged Chuvashisms found in the rock runic inscriptions of the North Caucasian Balkars. Since the Balkars are considered historical relatives of the Volga Bulgars, the presence of Chuvashisms in their language, naturally, should indicate the r-linguality of the Volga Bulgars. Therefore, supporters of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept more than once turned their attention to the nature of this North Caucasian language, but neither in the Balkar language itself, nor in its dialects did they find any signs of rotacism and Lamdaism, since all ethnic groups of the Balkars speak the usual Turkic language of the Kypchak group. In this regard, assumptions were made about the existence of the r-language among the ancient Balkars, believing that once these people spoke the r-language, and then with the arrival of the Kypchaks in Ciscaucasia, they adopted the Kypchak language. But it was not possible to confirm this hypothesis due to the lack of ancient written monuments of the Balkar language.

And finally, in the 1970s, such written monuments were found in the mountain gorges of the North Caucasus, along with the ancient rock burials of the highlanders, in connection with which the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept of the Ashmarinists received new confirmation. But before turning to the consideration of these written monuments, let us briefly recall the circumstances under which this unusual find appeared.

In fact, the existence of strange inscriptions and rock burials in the mountains of the North Caucasus has long been known. The attention of researchers was attracted by the fact that in the gorges around Elbrus there are often rock burials made in small caves carved into the rocks with a quadrangular and sometimes a round inlet. The attention of researchers was attracted by the inscriptions around these burials.

These writings are rather diverse figures, similar to hieroglyphs, cut into stone or painted with brown-red ocher. They are located in groups: sometimes above the entrance to the cave, in other cases next to it, and sometimes in the depths of the cave, somewhere on a smooth surface. The number of signs near each cave varies from one to several dozen. If you look closely at them, you can divide them into four types: 1) ordinary pictograms, 2) personal tamgas, 3) runic signs, and 4) letters of the Uighur script. They are located together, interspersed, without any distinctions.

There are different points of view regarding the ethnicity of these rock monuments. Some researchers attribute them to the ancient Caucasian highlanders, others to the medieval Turkic-speaking, even “Iranian-speaking” Alans, others, like, for example, G.F. Turchaninov, to the North Caucasian Kasogs, fourth to the Khazars, etc.[46]. But most researchers are still inclined to attribute them to the mountain Alans. So, for example, T.M. Minaeva, who devoted special research to these monuments, considers them the creation of the Alans who came to the Elbrus region in the 6th century AD. under the onslaught of nomadic Turks and forced here for lack of free land to bury their dead in the rocks[47]. A.P. Runich also ascribes the monuments to the Alans, believing that, being pinned down in the mountains, the Alans transformed their traditional burial catacombs into rock caves. Researchers G.F. Turchaninov, M.A. Khabichev, V.A. Kuznetsov and many others also agree with this opinion. But it must be borne in mind that some authors understand the ancestors of the Iranian-speaking Ossetians as Alans, while others understand the ancestors of the Turkic-speaking Balkars and Karachays.

Another Karachai scientist S.Ya. Baichorov in the 1970s put forward a completely different point of view. In his opinion, these monuments did not belong to the Alans.[48], but to the North Caucasian Proto-Bulgarians, that is, the ancestors of the current Balkars and Karachays, who allegedly used to speak a language of the Chuvash type. “An analysis of the language of the runic monuments of the Elbrus region showed,” he writes, “that in terms of its grapho-phonetic features it is Proto-Bulgarian, having d- and j-dialects that are characterized by rotacism"[49].

These conclusions of Baychorov were the same unexpected sensation as the publications of N.I. Ilminsky in the last century regarding the Volga-Bulgarian language and A.A. Kunik in relation to the Khagano-Bulgarian language of the Danube Proto-Bulgarians. In both cases, the same idea was defended that the ancient Proto-Bulgarian language, whether it was on the Danube, in the Volga region or in the North Caucasus, was everywhere characterized by the same features of the Chuvash type. R-language.

Since this idea looks quite logical and at first glance seems to be sufficiently substantiated, the works of Baichorov, as well as the works of Kunik and Ilminsky in the last century, found a lot of ardent supporters. For example, archaeologists V.B.Kovalevskaya, Kh.Kh.Bidzhiev and M.P.Abramova spoke positively about them, and Ashmarinists were especially enthusiastic about them, delighted that a new confirmation of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept they defended was found. For example, the Honored Scientist of the Chuvash Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic V.D. Dimitriev, not without enthusiasm, wrote: “Baychorov identified and studied the monuments of the North Caucasian Bulgarian runic writing with rotacism characteristic of their language”[50]. In unison with him, some Kazan scientists were also enthusiastic. In particular, D.G. Mukhametshin and F.S. Khakimzyanov wrote: “Consequently, the Proto-Bulgarians (of the Elbrus region), based on natural conditions, built memorial houses in honor of the buried and made inscriptions” in the Old Bulgarian language, bearing in mind that that, in their opinion, the ancient Bulgarian language was characterized by Chuvash features[51].

But the texts read by Baychorov in runic writings are very doubtful and exist, most likely, in the imagination of their reader, rather than in reality. Having set himself the task in advance of discovering Chuvash-like Turkisms in the writings, at different stages of working with the text he gradually transforms it in the right direction and ultimately gets what he needed. Already at the stage of copying and removing estampages from rock art, he gradually restores the erased places and thereby distorts the inherent semantics.

Then, in the second stage of the work, singling out runic signs from the general heap of inscriptions, he includes not only actual runes, but also hypothetical signs that, in his opinion, could exist in Proto-Bulgarian writing. For example, he reads the image of a ladder, which is often found in rock inscriptions, as the letter "d" or "d", although such a rune does not exist in the Turkic runic alphabet. Then, at the stage of reading runes, it also allows arbitrary actions, reading them from right to left, then from left to right, then from top to bottom, then from bottom to top, then finding one rune inside another, etc. - if only it led to the formation of the necessary Turkism.

This is how, from beginning to end, at all stages of deciphering the writings, Baychorov invariably transforms them at his own discretion and ultimately gives out “Proto-Bulgarian texts”. With this deciphering method, the same runic signs can be read not only in Proto-Bulgarian, but also in any other language of the world.

Baichorov considers the word beleg, belugas (sign, monument), read by him in rock paintings and identified with the Volga-Bulgarian baluk 'sign, monument'. He believes that this word was inherent only in r-languages and therefore testifies to the rotacism of the Elbrus language as well. But this view is erroneous, because belyuk / belyug is a common Turkic word formed from the ancient Turkic verb stem Bel "to know", and is inherent in all Turkic languages without exception. In the Volga Bulgaria, it was equally often used in epitaphs of both the 1st and 2nd styles. Therefore, its presence in the Elbrus language also cannot indicate its rotacism.

And finally, the word found in it is considered direct and immediate evidence of the rotacism of the Elbrus language chur (hundred), allegedly used instead of the common Turkic zetating form thөh (one hundred). In Baichorov's materials cited above, this word occurs only once and, moreover, in the same incoherent sentence "Jgutur uchme menchur elinche ur biti eshgen". Word chur here artificially formed from an incomprehensible lexeme menchure by splitting it into two syllables (men+chur) and subsequent arbitrary semantization. Therefore, to argue with this far-fetched word the presence of rotacism in the Proto-Bulgarian language would not be serious, especially since no other similar examples were found in Baichorov's lexical material.

Thus, even if we assume that the language of the runic monuments of the Elbrus region was indeed Proto-Bulgarian, then there is still nothing in Baichorov's lexical materials that would reliably testify to the rotating nature of this language. It must be assumed that the truly Proto-Bulgarian language of the North Caucasus was just as zetacious as its current successors - the Balkar and Karachay languages, as well as the language of the Bulgaro-Tatars, which is the successor of the Volga-Bulgarian, because they all belong to one common group of Turkic h-languages.

§ 8. Unsuccessful attempts to find Chuvashisms in the Hungarian language.

Supporters of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept to prove the Chuvash-speaking of the Volga Bulgars came up with another argument. They suggested that since the Hungarians allegedly lived for more than 100 years on the Middle Volga - in the "Great Hungary" next to the Bulgars, then in the Hungarian language there should be borrowings of Chuvash-like words, i.e. the so-called Chuvashisms, proving the Chuvash-linguality of the Bulgars.

Based on this assumption, in 1894 the Hungarian scholar B. Munkachi began to look for Chuvashisms among the Turkic borrowings in the Hungarian language. Another Hungarian scientist Zoltan Gombots published a special book in 1912, where out of 800 Turkic borrowings in the Hungarian language he singled out 227 words with Chuvash features.[52].

After the publication of this work by Z. Gombots, for Hungarian scientists, as well as for some foreign and Russian Turkologists, the idea of the identity of the Bulgar and Chuvash languages, i.e. the Bulgaro-Chuvash theory has become a position that does not require proof. Therefore, these materials have not been verified by anyone. Meanwhile, the very first acquaintance with the book makes it possible to establish the following objective picture.

1. Of the 227 borrowings, 87 words are so adapted to the Hungarian pronunciation norms that it is difficult to bring them closer to both the Chuvash and Tatar languages without careful phonetic analysis, for example,artany'cleanse', baj 'witchcraft', beko 'horseshoe', bika 'stubborn', boglya 'mop', bu 'conjure', gyur 'press, tie', koporso 'coffin, box', tomeny 'countless', zerge 'goat', etc. Here we also included such borrowings that are phonetically far from the Chuvash and Tatar words, but are more reminiscent of the Tatar variants. For example, in Hungarian boglya, in Tatar mangol 'mop, haystack'; in Hungarian artany, in Tatar arynu 'to be cleansed, to be freed'; in Hungarian tomeny, in Old Tatar toman 'countless, ten thousand' etc.
2. 44 words coincide with both Tatar and Chuvash equivalents almost to the same extent. For example,sorke'nit' - i.e. serke, h sharka; szakal 'beard' - i.e. sakal, h dried up etc.

Thus, from the two previous paragraphs, 131 words, i.e. 58% cannot be the basis for proving which language these borrowings are close to: Chuvash-Turkic or Kypchak-Turkic.

3. 43 borrowings find equivalents in the Tatar language. For example,balta'axe' - Balta; beka 'frog' - tank; beke 'closed' — bөke; cziczkany 'mouse' - sychkan; gozu'rat' - touse; gyalom 'hook, seine' — җylym; guard 'make, make' yaratu; gyoplo 'bundle' — җәplаү; ildomos 'wise' - җyildam; kesik 'late' - kichegu; kobak 'pumpkin' - tavern; kedek 'navel' - kendek; sopro 'yeast' - huetcа; szan 'reckon' — sanau; szirt 'ridge' — syrt; szongor 'eagle' - shonkar; tacker 'twist' — tаtoаrmаh; tur 'fold' — tөR; tyuk 'chicken' - tauk etc.
4. 38 borrowings are found both in the Tatar language and in Chuvash, but with the features of the Tatar language, for example,al'to deceive' — tat. aldau, Chuv. ultala; Alma 'apple' or 'potato' - Tat. alma, Chuv. ulma; arpa 'barley' - Tat. arpa, Chuv. urpa; bator 'brave' - Tat. batyr, Chuv. pattar; bors 'pepper' - tat. borych, Chuv. paras; kender 'hemp' - tat. kinder, Chuv. cantar; korom 'soot' - Tat. korym, Chuv. haram and etc.

Therefore, from the two previous paragraphs, 81 words, i.e. 35,5% are borrowed by the Hungarian language from the Kypchak-Turkic.

5. Only 15 borrowings, ie. 6,5% can be found in the Chuvash language and with the so-called Chuvash features:borji'calf', borso 'peas', gyom 'grass', gyuru 'ring', iker 'Twins', ir 'write', koris 'ash', or 'grind, crush', okor 'bull', sar 'mud, swamp', sarlo 'sickle', gyuru 'ring', szucs 'furrier', tukor 'mirror', unö 'cow'.

Thus, if the Tatar language is also included in the area of objects of comparison by Z. Gombots, then only 6.5% of the material collected by him can confirm the theory of the closeness of the Bulgar and Chuvash languages, everything else, i.e. the vast majority, proves the inconsistency of this theory.

A natural question arises: how to explain the presence among these borrowings of several words with Chuvash features? We cannot explain this by the fact that the Bulgars are the ancestors of the Chuvashs, because neither linguistic, nor ethnographic, nor anthropological data confirm such a situation. Obviously, the point here is in the patterns of the process of borrowing: both during the formation of the Chuvash language and during the borrowing by the Hungarians, Turkic words were assimilated by the Finno-Ugric peoples. Consequently, in both cases the conditions were the same: the Turkic words were perceived by the ear accustomed to the Finno-Ugric speech, they were reproduced by the lips accustomed to the Finno-Ugric articulation. Therefore, both in the Chuvash and in the Hungarian languages, one can find some common, equally phonetically modified ordinary Turkic words. But they appeared in both languages not through mutual influence, but completely independently. This is also confirmed by the fact that in the materials of Zoltan Gombots there are several words with rotacism that are absent in the Chuvash language or are present in it without rotacism. For example, goreny 'ferret' - Tat. goatsаn (sasy goatsаn), Chuv. passara; caro 'kol' - tat. Cossack, Chuv. shalsa; tar 'bald patch' - tat. pelvis, Chuv. kuksha or tasa in the sense of 'pure'; tenger 'sea' - Tat. dingez, Chuv. tines; tor 'loop' - tat. tozak, Chuv. yala (cepěnE); tur 'suffer, endure' - tat. tuh, Chuv. tus.

Later, Zoltan Gombots himself, apparently, realized the bias of his comparative historical research and found the strength to abandon his beliefs about the penetration of Bulgar words into the Hungarian language. Otherwise, the Hungarian scientist J. Nemeth would not have written with regret: “Gombots should not have abandoned his old theory about the contact of the Volga Bulgars with the Hungarians”[53]. Thus, the Hungarians did not directly come into contact with the Volga Bulgars and the Chuvashs. Therefore, the invented "Chuvashisms" in the Hungarian language could not serve as proof of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept.

It was not on the Middle Volga and Great Hungary. If the Hungarians once lived here, then not only in the Hungarian language there should have been Bulgar and Chuvash borrowings, but also in the Bulgar and Chuvash there should have been a lot of Hungarian words. They are not here. Stating this phenomenon, V.D. Arakin wrote that, contrary to any expectation, there are no Magyarisms in the Chuvash language at all, that it contains only Finnisms, which can be mistaken for Magyarisms, but they are all borrowed from the Volga Finns, not from the Hungarians[54].

Consequently, to prove the adequacy of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept, the fact of Chuvash borrowings in the Hungarian language was invented unsuccessfully.

§ 9. Unsuccessful attempts to attribute Chuvashisms in the Finno-Ugric languages to the Bulgar language.

Hungarian scientists, based on the assertion that once Hungarians and Bulgars lived near the Volga and the Urals, tried to find Bulgarisms (in their opinion, necessarily with Chuvash features) not only in the Hungarian language, but also in the Finno-Ugric languages of the Ural-Volga region : in Udmurt, Mari, Mordovian and Komi-Permyak. At the end of the XIX century. the Hungarian scientist B. Munkachi outlined the study of three, which later became traditional, Udmurt-foreign language contacts: the Udmurt-Bulgarian[55], Udmurt-Tatar and Udmurt-Russian. According to B. Munkachi, Chuvash-like Bulgarisms began to enter the Udmurt language from the first half of the 8th century, when the Bulgars appeared in the Middle Volga region[56].

At the very beginning of the twentieth century. Finnish scientist J. Wichmann in his work operates with more than 150 Chuvash borrowings, calling them Bulgar[57]. Later, the Hungarian scientists K. Redei and A. Rona-Tash paid attention to this problem. In Soviet times, Chuvash (according to the authors, Bulgar) borrowings in the Udmurt language were studied by Udmurt scholar I.V. Tarakanov, Chuvash scholar M.R. Fedotov. The first counted 190 Bulgar (Chuvash) in Udmurt, and the second - 438 borrowings.

From the point of view of the influence of the Bulgar language (read: the Chuvash language), other Finno-Ugric languages of the Volga region were also studied: especially Mari. “The existence of unproductive and productive Chuvash morphemes in the Mari language,” writes M.R. Fedotov, “speaks of the deep antiquity of Turkic borrowings with a thousand-year history, of the strength of the Turkic influence that permeated the entire morphology of the Mari language”[58].

As is known, M.R. Fedotov under Chuvash means the Bulgar language.

Indeed, in the languages of the Mari, Mordovians, Udmurts and Komi, a large number of Turkisms are recorded, among which there are R-lingual and other lexical borrowings characterized by Chuvash features. Among them there are economic terms, terms of kinship relations, domestic life, but especially a lot of terms related to agriculture and livestock breeding. For example: Chuv. śăkkăr 'bread', muzzle. Sukro 'bread', Mari. sykyr 'bread', sukyr 'bread loaf'; Chuv. Sarak 'turnip', Udmurt. Sarci 'repa', Komi serkni 'turnip' etc. In addition, some Finno-Ugric languages have the same grammatical forms as Chuvash, for example, the Chuvash form of the participle in -sa (cf. Chuv. tarsa 'standing', Udmurt. puktysa 'standing', Komi suvtsa 'standing'); or the Chuvash form of the relic verb in -ni (Chuv. sutni 'shine, glow', Udmurt. sotyny 'shine' (in the expression jugyt sotyny 'sanctify', cf. Hungarian. sutni 'shine', etc.).

It is well known that the Turkic-Ugric-Finnish language union has been developing in the Volga and Ural regions since ancient times. As a result of the mutual influence of these peoples, Turkisms are noted in the Finno-Ugric and Finno-Ugric languages in the Turkic languages. Some Turkic borrowings in the Finno-Ugric languages are indeed characterized by Chuvash features, and they are Chuvash borrowings. Starting from the end of the 19th century, especially after the publication of N.I. Ilminsky’s article “On phonetic relations between the Chuvash and Turkic languages” (1865), many scientists, relying on N.I. Ilminsky’s reasoning about the Chuvash-likeness of the Bulgar language, all Chuvash borrowings in the Finno-Ugric languages automatically began to be considered Bulgar. As we have proved so far and will continue to prove, the Bulgar language in the narrow sense of the word was characterized by the features of the Western - Mishar dialect of the Tatar language, in the broad sense of the word it was characterized by the features of the language of the Turkic-speaking population of the Volga Bulgaria, which was close to the modern Tatar language. Therefore, attempts to attribute Chuvashisms in the Finno-Ugric languages to the Bulgar language also turned out to be unsuccessful.

§ 10. Unsuccessful attempts to identify Bulgaro-Chuvash borrowings in Russian.

The Bulgaro-Chuvash concept reached the Russianists. Believing in its correctness, some Russianists began to look for Chuvashisms among the Bulgarian borrowings in the Russian language. So, in 1918, A.A. Shakhmatov and the Turkologist A.N. Samoilovich published their articles in the same collection, devoted to proving the correctness of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept. They both pay attention to the word turun 'great-great-grandson', 'manager', which is found in Russian chronicles and which, in their opinion, is transformed from the word tudun 'manager', where [d] alternates with the sound [p], therefore, they say, here we have the phenomenon of rotacism, i.e. feature of the Chuvash type.

Ancient Turkic word tudun although it is used as 'manager', but its main original meaning was 'relative'. It must be assumed that the relatives of the beks, khans, etc. were the administrators. What turun is not a simple Chuvashized version of the word tudun, is proved by the presence of such dialect words as tudyka - cousins or sisters tumachi - third cousins torachi - the fourth degree of relationship. Torachi and turun go back to the word tuRаү 'to give birth', which is noted in the Temnikov dialect of the western dialect and on the territory of the Penza region[59]. Thus the words tudun and turun already at the level of the root-verb coincide (tuu, tuRаү 'to give birth'), so consider that turun comes from the word tudun by rotacism, there is no reason.

Pre-Mongol Bulgar borrowings in Russian have been studied in detail by I.I. Nazarov. Among these borrowings there is not a single word with Chuvash features, i.e. with signs of rotacism. After analyzing the pre-Mongolian Turkic borrowings in Russian, I.I. Nazarov comes to the conclusion that the Bulgar, Khazar and Kypchak languages are close. He also concludes that the Bulgars and Kazanians spoke the same language.[60]. To prove this point, the author gives the following examples.

1. Names of persons according to their place in society:atalyk, alpaut, amin, baskak, buralozhnik(from the word boer 'order'), bash, imildeshi (relatives fed by one mother's breast), kushtan, kalga, kilichi (ambassador), Karachi (higher nobility), sunch, seunchui, senunschik (ambassador, messenger) tafeynik (manufacturer of taffia - headdress), uhlan, ulubey (great), yasaul, cheush (orderly), chaga (child)[61].
2. Terms of trade: altyn, asmachey, shoe, batman, money, kuman, kaptorga (clasp), braid, tagan, hut
3. Military terms:batyrlyk, ertaul(squad in reconnaissance), sidak, sagadak, mattress.
4. Construction terms:sal, kosh, tents, chechen(wattle), lumber room.
5. Names associated with the horse: argamak, igrenka, igren, chik, buckwheat, brown, roan, tebenek.
6. Names related to animals and plants:korsak, leopard, zilan, raisins, kichiri(carrot), Sarana.
7. Types of clothes:caftan, cap, sash, chichak(girls headdress) Japanese (from the word yapma 'cover').
8. Words related to religion: amir, basma, kafirs, bayram, bagram, deni (faith), kurban, kuran (koran), mosque, prayer, Muslim, Besermen.

As can be seen, the Bulgar language, which influenced Russian, was a common Turkic language.

In 1976, E.N. Shipova published the “Dictionary of Turkisms in Russian”, which contains about two thousand Turkic borrowings taken from the Avar, Khazar, Bulgar and other languages. Of these, she identifies 15-20 words borrowed from the Chuvash language: keremet 'spirit of evil', 'goddess', planter 'Chuv. women', nashmak 'headdress', earring 'ring', khirka 'girl', chuklet 'to sacrifice', sharcoma 'women's adornment', sharpan 'narrow Chuv. canvas', shirtan 'chuv. food', shura 'viscous pure clay', yashka 'chuv. soup'. Here we draw attention to the fact that among the examples given there is no phenomenon of rotacism.

The dictionary of E.N. Shipova once again proves that Turkic tribes lived around the Russians, speaking the usual Turkic language. If the Bulgars spoke a Chuvash-like language, then in Russian there would certainly be many Chuvash-like borrowings.

§ 11. Beginning of systematic study of the Bulgar epigraphy.

The identification of the fallacy of the Ashmarin concept became possible later, thanks to the studies of epigraphists N.F. Kalinin, G.V. Yusupov and others. In particular, prof. Kalinin is credited with collecting and systematizing a large number of Bulgaro-Tatar tombstones, which he clearly divided into two groups: he called the Turkic-language epitaphs "monuments of the 1st style", and the Chuvash-language ones - "monuments of the 2nd style". N.F. Kalinin, on the other hand, is credited with compiling the first ever catalog of Bulgaro-Tatar epitaphs[62]. G.V. Yusupov, in turn, compiled and published the first work in the history of a capital monograph on the Bulgaro-Tatar epigraphy[63].

N.I. Vorobyov, S.E. Malov, A.B. Bulatov, A. Rona-Tash, S. Fodor, O. Pritsak, F.S. Khakimzyanov also made a great contribution to the study of the language of the tombstones of the Volga Bulgars (1987), D.G. Mukhametshin (1987), T.Tekin, M.Z.Zakiev (1977) and others. In the works of these authors we find different interpretations of the lexical units of monuments of both the 1st and 2nd style and various attitudes towards the Bulgaro-Tatar and Bulgaro-Chuvash theories.

In the 60s of the twentieth century. it finally became clear that there really is no single Bulgarian epigraphy, that there are two types of multilingual Muslim epitaphs, some of which are written in the usual Turkic s-language, and others in the Chuvash-like r-language.

Tombstones of the 1st style are the most well studied and represent typical Muslim tomb steles with rich ornamentation and elegantly designed Arabic inscriptions. The upper edges of these stelae are usually rounded or keel-shaped, as was done in other Muslim countries. The ornaments and inscriptions on them are carved in relief, in the form of ledges, and carefully engraved. The letters are written in intricate handwriting suls and naskh. In total, about 150 specimens of such monuments were discovered. They are distributed mainly on the territory of the Tatar Republic, but some specimens were also found in Bashkortostan, in the Ulyanovsk, Samara and Orenburg regions, i.e. on the vast territory of the former Volga Bulgaria. Judging by their dating, such monuments existed for a very long time. One of the earliest monuments of this style, discovered on the threshold of the church in the village of Yambukhtino, Tatarstan and described by Akhmerov, is dated 1244.[64]. An even earlier monument from Bilyarsk, described by N.P. Rychkov, but not preserved to this day, is dated 1173 and also apparently belonged to the 1st style, since the dates of the tombstones of the 2nd style, written in p -language, until Feyzhanov (1863) were usually not deciphered.

In the era of the Golden Horde, these monuments existed in parallel with the newly appeared monuments of the 2nd style, and then continued to exist in the era of the Kazan Khanate and later.

The inscriptions on these monuments are made in common Turkic. They first give a prayer formula in Arabic, then the name of the buried person follows, indicating his genealogy, titles and earthly merits, and at the end the date of death is given. This information is written in the usual Turkic language. For example: …Fatima-elci binte Äjübibn Mäčkä ibn Junus äl-Bolğari jegermi iki jašindä vafat boldy… hičrätdän jete jüz unberdä… “Fatima-elchi, the daughter of Ayup, the son of Mechke, the son of Yusuf of Bulgar, died at the age of 22… Hijri in 711…” (i.e., in 1311). Here's another example: ...ğalimlearni tärbiä qylğan häm alarny sügän mäsčitlär ğyjmärät qyjlğan…tamğacy Ibrahim as-Suari vafat bulğan, bu — tarih jeti jüz un türtenčedä, cumadi… ajynyŋ un altynčy köni irdi… “... the owner and loving scholars, the builder of mosques, the collector of duties, Ibrahim al-Suari died, it was in the year 714 of history in the month of Jumadi on the fourth day ...” (in 1314).

In these epitaphs we meet the actual Bulgar tahalluses (al—Bulgarians and as-Suari), and the names of the buried, including the names of their fathers and grandfathers, are almost all Muslim. The language of the monuments is usually Turkic, on the basis of which the Bulgaro-Tatar national language was then formed.

Monuments of the 2nd style are small tombstones, approximately 120x60 cm in size, usually having a rough exterior finish and short inscriptions. They are made not in relief, but in letters cut into the stone. In addition, unlike the monuments of the 1st style, these monuments have the shape of a rectangle (without a pointed top), which is reminiscent of the ancient Chuvash pagan tombstones. However, if the Chuvash stone tombstones had only traditional notches and the tamga of the buried person on the front side, then the monuments of the 2nd style are characterized by an Arabic inscription and a simple ornament. In order to give such a rectangular slab the appearance of a Muslim tombstone with a sharp top, a so-called “arch with shoulders” was drawn at its upper edge on the front side, i.e. chamfered at the corners of the slab above an arcuate line drawn, and thus the front plane of the slab acquired a kind of pointed top and the appearance of a mihrab of ancient mosques, although its back side remained rectangular. Below such an arch, a simple ornament in the form of an eight-petalled chamomile flower was cut out, and the text of the epitaph was written under the ornament. The inscriptions were always made in the angular Kufi or semi-Kufi handwriting.

Both in their external form and in the text of the epitaphs, the monuments have no analogues in the rest of the Muslim world, except in Dagestan. They existed for a very short time: in the era of the Bulgar Khanate they did not yet exist, and they appeared after the invasion of the Mongols: the earliest monument is dated 1281 and the latest 1361, after which they suddenly disappeared and did not appear again.

Despite such a short existence, a lot of them were made (more than 200 copies were described), which far exceeds the number of simultaneously made monuments of the 1st style. The largest number of them were made in 1313-1342, i.e. during the reign of the Golden Horde Khan Uzbek.

They are distributed in a small area, within a radius of about 150-200 km around the lower reaches of the Kama, and they have not been found on the far outskirts of Bulgaria and in other uluses of the Golden Horde. As a rule, they are located in Tatar cemeteries or near Tatar villages, but they were not found in Chuvash villages and on the territory of Chuvashia, with the exception of three villages bordering Tatarstan (Baiglychevo, Baiteryakovo, Field Bikshiki).

It is characteristic that they are not territorially isolated from the monuments of the 1st style: in the same villages, in the same cemeteries, monuments of both the 1st and 2nd style were found: there were even cases when a monument of the 1st style, and on the grave of his son - a monument of the 2nd style.

Special mention should be made of the language of these epitaphs. All of them are written in a mixed Arab-Bulgaro-Chuvash-like language: first, some verse from the Koran is given in Arabic, then the name and patronymic of the buried person follow (moreover, the names of the buried, as a rule, are Muslim, and patronymics are often Turkic, i.e. pagan ); there are no Bulgarian tahalluses “al-Bulgari”, “as-Suvari”; at the end of the epitaphs in the Turkic-Chuvash language, the date of death is given. For example: Al-xökmü li-l-lahi-l-galiji-l-kabiri. Iljas auli Ismagil auli Möxämmäd bälukü. Räxmätü-l-lähi galaihi räxmätän vasigätän. Tarix ceti cur altysy cal zu-l-qagidä ajxy išna äči. Čarimsän syvna barsa v(i)lti. “The court of the most high, great God. Monument to Muhammad, son of Ismagil, son of Ilyas. By the grace of the Almighty God, unlimited, according to the chronology in the seven hundred and sixth year, in the month of Zulkagid, it happened. He died going to the Cheremshan River. Moreover, the last phrase "He died, going to the Cheremshan River" is written almost in the Chuvash language and corresponds to the current expression: "Cheremshan shivne pyrsa vilche."

Since such Chuvash-lingual parts of epitaphs are extremely laconic, their lexical composition is not very rich. Among typical Chuvashisms, the words are often repeated: cal 'year', ajx 'month', arna 'a week', arnakon 'Friday', kici-arnakon 'Thursday', hankon 'Wednesday' xys-kon 'Sunday'(?), ärnabas-kon 'Monday' (?), baluk 'monument', syv 'water', jal 'village', isna 'inside', mun 'big', bocok 'little', asli 'senior', acka 'father', kukoca 'maternal grandfather', oil or yul 'a son', xir or hir 'daughter', hirxum 'slave', vec 'three', tuat 'four', bial or Bel 'five', ceti 'seven', sakar 'eight', toxr or toxyr 'nine', von 'ten', ciarm 'twenty', otyr 'thirty', xyryx 'fourty', sakarvon 'eighty', toxyrvon 'ninety', Vur 'one hundred', cet-cur 'seven hundred', tuatm 'fourth', bialm 'fifth', Viarmins 'twentieth', etc. It is already clear from the examples that the language of these epitaphs, like the Chuvash language, was distinguished, firstly, by rotacism, that is, the regular replacement of z - r in auslaut and inlaut (instead of adna used arna 'week' instead of sakiz-sakar 'eight' instead of toguz-toxyr 'nine' instead of Vuz- Vor 'hundred', etc.); and, secondly, it was distinguished by lambdaism, that is, by the substitution of sh - l: instead of bis used Bel 'five' instead of esik used elik 'door' etc. In other words, if the language of epitaphs of the 1st style, like all other Turkic languages, was a z-sh-language (abbreviated as z-language), then the language of epitaphs of the 2nd style, like Chuvash, was a r-l-language (abbreviated - p-language). In addition, the language of epitaphs of the 2nd style, like the Chuvash, had other features of the Mongolian languages. In particular, in it, as in Mongolian, there were no anlaut k, q; so instead of qyryq used xyryx 'forty' instead of kyz used xir 'daughter', etc.

§ 12. Comparative study of the lexical composition of the Bulgar epigraphy of the 2nd style with the Chuvash and Bulgaro-Tatar languages.

As we have already understood, the Turkic language of the epitaph of the 1st style, the Bulgaro-Chuvashists and Tataro-Tatarists refer to the Tatar language, introduced, in their opinion, from the outside by the Mongol-Tatar conquerors, and the Bulgaro-Tatarists - to the Bulgar language, which then grew into modern Tatar language. The Turkic language of the epitaph of the 2nd style is considered by the Bulgaro-Chuvashists and the Tataro-Tatarists to be the Chuvash-like Bulgar language, and the Bulgaro-Tatarists - a mixed Bulgaro-Chuvash language, which was used by the Chuvash, who, due to the adoption of Islam, are at the stage of mastering the Bulgar language instead of their former Chuvash.

Supporters of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept, in order to prove the Chuvash-linguality of the epigraphy of the 2nd style, all the Turkic words available there are compared only with the Chuvash language, while not including the Bulgaro-Tatar language in the orbit of comparison. Therefore, the results of the analysis carried out by them, for example, by the Hungarian linguists A. Rona-Tash and S. Fodor[65], as well as Turkish scientist T. Tekin[66], somewhat one-sided. They come to the conclusion that lies on the surface about the Chuvash language of the Bulgar epigraphy of the 2nd style.

Our analysis of the lexical composition of the epigraphy of the 2nd style below is based on the Turkic words given in the works of A. Ron-Tash and S. Fodor, as well as Talat Tekin. For comparison with the Chuvash and Tatar languages, 50 Turkic words and Arabic borrowings can be distinguished in their works, to one degree or another preserved in the Chuvash and Tatar languages.

Comparison of the Turkic lexical composition with the Tatar and Chuvash languages is presented in the table below.

In order to prove the closeness of the language of the epitaph to the Chuvash language, usually only those epitaphs are taken that may have some relation to the corresponding Chuvash lexemes. In addition, the Tatar (especially colloquial) language, which was formed on the territory of the Bulgar state and is directly related to the language of the Bulgar epitaph, is usually excluded from the sphere of comparison. At best, they include either the ancient Turkic language or the Turkic literary language brought to the Volga region from the Karakhanid state, which could hardly have been directly related to the language of the epitaph. This method of research, introduced at the time by N.I. Ashmarin, is followed by all supporters of the Bulgaro-Chuvash theory. With this in mind, words of the Tatar spoken language are included in the table for comparison. In addition, we have given new reading options for some words that coincide with Tatar dialect words. However, in the first variant of the comparative analysis, we included the reading of words generally accepted to this day, correcting only obviously erroneous ones. The first variant of lexical analysis looks like this:

1. 15 words of the epitaph borrowed from the Arabic language entered the vocabulary of the Tatar language, were actively used in the Old Tatar and are used in the modern Tatar language, even penetrated into the spoken language. If the Chuvash language were a continuation of the Bulgar language, then at least one of these borrowings would have been preserved in it.
2. All other words of the Turkic root in one form or another can be found both in the Tatar and Chuvash languages, except, perhaps, two:bleҗe(fifth), tuatm (fourth). There are no such roots in this meaning in the Tatar language. Root of the word bleҗe preserved in the word whiteаto (hand). second word root tuatm probably goes back to durt, which received a significant change in non-written dialect speech. Be that as it may, these two words are preserved more distinctly in the Chuvash language.
3. 22 words, preserved both in the Tatar and Chuvash languages, are much closer in phonetic appearance to their Tatar colloquial counterparts:Alty, Altysh, Uly, Byltyy (Buldy Iye), Battyy, Belue ki, beru, takeҗe, ike, ikeshe, ite (andҗe/iye),җal (җyl), җierme, җyermeshe, җyete, җyesesh, touchdeye, toөn, tyndyy, uyn, uynim, үҗeat (өhow).
4. 11 words that have been preserved both in the Chuvash and Tatar languages are much closer in phonetic appearance to their Chuvash equivalents:aihy, biel, elu, hyryh,hirkhum, seqr, tuhr, җur, utyr, irne, hir.

Thus, the first variant of the lexical analysis of the given words gives the following picture. Preserved only in the Tatar language - 30 percent, only in the Chuvash - 4 percent of the words. The remaining 66 percent of the words are observed in both languages, but 2/3 of them are much closer to the Tatar language. As a result, out of 50 words, epitaphs gravitate towards the Tatar language - 74 percent, i.e. three quarters, to Chuvash - 26 percent, i.e. just a quarter. This is natural: the analysis of any ancient Turkic text can give a similar picture, because the Tatar and Chuvash languages are Turkic. Therefore, from the analysis, a conclusion should be drawn about the proximity of the language of the epitaph of this group (2nd style) and the Tatar common people (usually Turkic) language, and Chuvash. We can only talk about the influence of the language of the Chuvash type on the language of the epitaph (2nd style). Such influence became possible, apparently, only due to the fact that the Chuvash (Suaslamari) served as master-makers of tombstones, who, being Muslims, then assimilated among the ordinary Turkic-speaking Bulgars.

The final assimilation of the Muslim Chuvash took place somewhere in the 60s of the XIV century, since the most recent monument written in a Chuvash-like language dates back to 1361. Moreover, this type of monuments disappeared very suddenly, which is difficult to explain only by assimilation processes, since linguistic processes in society do not occur instantly. In 1361, the Bulgar ulus was completely destroyed by the troops of the Golden Horde prince Bulat-Timur, which, apparently, was the direct cause of the disappearance of the traditions of the orthodox. It was then that the production of stone tombstones of both the first and second styles ceased. After that, only twenty years later, that is, in the 1380s, stone steles began to appear again, but of a mixed type and without Chuvashisms. Obviously, by that time the new generation of craftsmen had completely lost their Chuvash language. Although individual representatives of the Chuvash people converted to Islam even after that, they did this not as whole communities, but only one by one and, moreover, knowing the Bulgaro-Tatar language. Therefore, later epitaphs were written exclusively in Bulgaro-Tatar or Arabic.

Thus, the analysis of the language of the Bulgar epitaphs proves that this epigraphy cannot prove the adequacy of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept.

§ 13. Unsuccessful attempts to approve the Bulgaro-Chuvash studies of A.Ron-Tash by some Tatar historians.

As mentioned above, the Hungarian scholar considers only epitaphs of the 2nd style to be Bulgar, and the language refers them to the Chuvash language. Based on this, he recognizes the Chuvash as the direct descendants of the Bulgars, and the Tatars as the direct descendants of the Mongol-Tatar conquerors. In 1999, A. Rona-Tash published a large monograph in English "Hungarians and Europa in the Early Middle Ages: An Introduction to Hungarian History"[67]. This work deserves an objective assessment.

In the book of M. Usmanov "Gasyrdan-gasyrga"[68] I found a review of this work by A. Rona-Tash, written by M. Usmanov and A. Arslanova: “Ber gyybrätle tarihi hezmät hakynda”[69], where the authors try to evaluate the point of view of A. Rona-Tash regarding the Chuvash language of the Bulgar epigraphy and the identification of the Bulgars with the Chuvashs. Since the reviewers have never dealt with these problems, the point of view of A. Ron-Tash and his opponent (M. Zakiev) is described in a very confusing and tendentious way. Here is a whole paragraph from the review of M. Usmanov and A. Arslanova.

Sүz uңaenda tagyn ber mәsәlәgә tuktalyp uzyk. A.Rona-Tashnyn Bulgarian tele үzenchәleklәrenә karata elek tә әytkәn әlege fikerlәre kayber tel belgechlәrenenң (mәсәlән М.Z.Zәkievneң) kisken rәveshtә karshi chiguyna ochragan ide. Fiker belәn kileshergә telәmәү ber nәrsә, lakin Bulgarian epitafiyalәrenenң ber өleshendәge chuashchaga yakynrak elemental reallege bөtenlәй ikenche nәrsә. Mondy syyfatlarny bernindi "Yugarydan toshkәn" kүrsәtmәlәr yaisә tөrleę tartyp-suzular belәn dә үzgәrtep bulmady hәzergә һәm bulmas ta kebek. Zamanynda Tatar keshese Khösän Fäyzhanov tarafynnan achylgan, sonrak kүpchelek competent linguistlar tarafynnan kabul itelgәn karash kilәchәktә da aerim shәheslәrneң ikhtyyarlaryn (telәү-telәmәүbuysyrenә) Bulgarian ber bәlase, fikerebezchә, Bolgar dәүlәtendәge halyklarnyң һәmmәse dә ber genә dialectta sөylәshkәn kavemnәn bulgan dip, tar karashly position torulary belәn anlatylsa kirk. А.Рона-Таш исә, күргәнебезчә, реаль чынбарлыкка төртеп күрсәтә торган конкрет фактлар нигезендә мәсьәләгә киңрәк карап фикер йөртә — бер дәүләт эчендә төрле диалектларда сөйләшкән кардәш кавемнәр булу идеясен алга сөрә… Ниһаять, шуны да өстәргә кирәк: язма чыганаклар да, археологик истәлекләр дә , anthropological materiallar da achyk kүrsәtkәnchә, Idel-Kama Bolgar dәүlәte kүp ethnosls, yagni, khazergechә әytsәk, kүpmillatle dәүlәt bulgan. Shuna kүrә "Bulgarians mirasy" ochen talashyp, yzgyshyp yatunyң magnase bik chamali. Chyn gyilmi bakhәs isә reallege raslangan faktlar nigezendә bulyrga tiesh…[70].

It must be said directly that M. Usmanov's style is felt here, which is closer to artistic than to scientific. And in other articles, he first invents opponents for himself, unfortunately, without naming them or pointing to the sources of their opinions. In very rare cases, he gives the name of his opponent without indicating the source, distorts his thoughts, then, with a serious look, begins to set forth his supposedly well-founded thoughts against the fictitious opinions of his opponents. Although such a style is sometimes allowed for liveliness of presentation in works of art, it is completely unacceptable in a scientific text. In the above excerpt from the review by M. Usmanov and A. Arslanova, we see this very clearly.

Here, at first, we are talking about the fact that even earlier M.Zakiev sharply criticized the opinion of A.Ron-Tash about the features of the Bulgar language. In the language of some part of the Bulgarian epigraphy, A. Rona-Tash discovered Chuvash elements, and M. Zakiev, as it were, denied their presence in these monuments. In which work M.Zakiev spoke about this, the review does not indicate. In fact, M.Zakiev even enumerated Chuvash words in his works, derived their percentages from the total mass of lexical units of the Bulgar epigraphy. The presence or absence of Chuvash words in the Bulgarian epigraphy has never been a subject of dispute between A. Rona-Tash and M. Zakiev. This is a delusion of the reviewers.

The next invention of M. Usmanov and A. Arslanova is that A. Rona-Tash, finding Chuvash elements in the Bulgarian epigraphy, wanted to prove the alleged multi-dialect nature of the people of the Bulgar state, i.e. allegedly, along with the usual Bulgaro-Turkic, he recognized the presence of the Chuvash-speaking dialect. The reviewers simply did not understand A. Ron-Tash. After all, in all his works he believed that the Bulgars did not have the usual Turkic language, that the Bulgars spoke only a Chuvash-like language. In addition, the reviewers had to take into account the fact that the Chuvash language cannot be a dialect of the common Turkic language! These are different languages, not dialects. Reviewers argue that Bulgarists like M. Zakiev, due to the narrowness of their views, represent the people of the Bulgar state as one-dialect, i.e. they deny the multinationality of the Bulgars, but A. Rona-Tash, in their opinion, allegedly did the right thing in this matter.

As already mentioned, A. Rona-Tash never set as his goal to show the multi-dialect nature of the Bulgars, he had one goal: to prove that only monuments of the 2nd style belong to the Bulgars, that they were supposedly written only in a purely Chuvash language, that the Bulgars were single-dialect, i.e. only Chuvash-speaking, that the descendants of the Bulgars are the Chuvash. A. Rona-Tash sets out his erroneous attitude to prove the Chuvash-speaking of the Bulgars not only in his above-mentioned two monographs (published in 1973 and 1999), but also in other works. So, in the article "Periodization and sources of the history of the Chuvash language"[71]. A. Rona-Tash distinguishes four periods in the history of the Chuvash (?) language: Old Bulgarian, Old Bulgarian, Middle Bulgarian and New Bulgarian. In his opinion, the Middle Bulgarian period begins with the collapse of the Volga Bulgaria and is characterized by intense ethnic processes: part of the Bulgars underwent Tatarization, the other part entered into close contacts with the Finno-Ugric peoples. The Novo-Bulgarian period, according to another terminology used by the author, is the Chuvash period. This opinion is probably repeated in his monograph, it is to the liking of M. Usmanov and A. Arslanova. Further, in his several articles published in another collection of scientific papers "Studies in Chuvash etymology"[72], A. Rona-Tash tries to find words of Volga-Bulgarian origin in the Tatar language and explains them with the help of the Chuvash language. In his articles, the idea of identifying the Bulgars with the Chuvashs, and the Tatars with the conquerors of the region, the Mongol-Tatars, runs like a red thread. He expounds this idea in his monographs, including the book reviewed by M. Usmanov and A. Arslanova. We already know that reviewers not only fully agree with the author's opinion, but also diligently defend it from those who disagree with it.

It is necessary to recall that not the Bulgarists, but the Horde people are still trying to show the Bulgars as an insignificant nationality, unworthy of being the predecessor of the "great" Tatars. In their opinion, precisely because the Bulgars were a small one-component nationality, Stalin and the Communist Party imposed them on the Tatars.

M.Zakiev, opposing the modern Tatar Horde like M.Usmanov, proved with numerous data that the Bulgars in the Bulgar state were the titular people, and all those tribes that became part of this state gradually became Bulgarian over three centuries. To such he refers the tribes with the following ethnonyms: as/yas, suas, burtas, ostyak/ishtyak, sөn, cousөN/Kasan, Savir/Sabir, Avar, Ugor, Utrigur, Biger/Bilyar, Kungur, Mishar, Kuruk, Paskart and etc[73]. Some of the Chuvashs, Finno-Ugric peoples, who remained directly in the composition of the Bulgars and converted to Islam, also became Bulgarized.

The reviewers of the work of A. Rona-Tash here deliberately distort the opinions of both A. Rona-Tash and M. Zakiev. Such a deliberate distortion of the opinions of one's opponents and the desire in this way to show one's innocence is usually called the profanity of science.

All Turkologists who are more or less familiar with the problems of Bulgar epigraphy know and do not raise any disputes about the presence of Chuvash elements in the language of Bulgar epigraphy, as well as about the multi-ethnicity of the Bulgar people. It is unlikely that A. Rona-Tash paid attention to these issues in her new book. Therefore, the reviewers, allegedly defending the positions of A. Rona-Tash on these issues, did him only a disservice.

In fact, the essence of the disagreement between A. Rona-Tash and M. Zakiev in assessing the Bulgar epigraphy lies in the fact that A. Rona-Tash, based on the study of the language of only the second style of the Bulgar epigraphy, believes that the Bulgars spoke a Chuvash-like language, the descendants of the Bulgars are Chuvash; and M.Zakiev, based on the study of both styles of Bulgar epigraphy, comes to the conclusion that the language of the first style is Bulgar, and the second style is the language of the Muslim Chuvash themselves, who are at the stage of adopting the Bulgar language instead of their former Chuvash language. This opinion belongs not only to M.Zakiev, V.V.Radlov, G.Akhmerov, N.F.Katanov, G.Gaziz, G.Rakhim, K.Musaev, G.Sattarov, A.Mukhammadiev and others thought so.

The reviewers here criticize M.Zakiev because, in their opinion, he is against the multidialecticity of the Bulgars, while M.Zakiev himself in his works proves the multidialecticity of the Bulgars. So the reviewers, being on the positions of M. Zakiyev, are waging a fierce struggle against his own non-existent views. If they understood the essence of the issue raised by A. Rona-Tash and M. Zakiev, then they would not have to fight with windmills, mistaking them for giants.

The conclusion of the authors of the review is not entirely transparent. In their opinion, since the Bulgar people were multi-ethnic, there is no point in arguing about who owns the "Bulgar heritage". Consequently, the reviewers are not concerned about the fate of the “Bulgarian heritage”, they are satisfied with the teachings of A. Rona-Tash, on the basis of which many Chuvash scientists leave the Bulgarian heritage behind, and consider the Tatars to be the remnants of the Mongol-Tatar conquerors. If this theory is considered justified, as M. Usmanov and A. Arslanova admit, then there is only one thing left: to completely take the position of A. Ron-Tash and to remove the Bulgars from the Tatar history altogether, to transfer everything Bulgarian to the Chuvash ethnos.

For the information of M. Usmanov and A. Arslanova, as well as A. Ron-Tash himself, I repeat: if the tombstones of the second style were written by the Chuvash-speaking Bulgars themselves, if therefore the Chuvash were direct descendants of the Bulgars, then all the ethnic features of the Bulgars would have been preserved by the Chuvash . It is obvious that the latter do not have them, while the Tatars have preserved them. This is not taken into account either by A. Rona-Tashem or by his reviewers. But the Chuvash scientists themselves paid attention to this and refused to recognize the Muslim Bulgars as their ancestors. The Chuvash Encyclopedia concluded that “the Chuvash ethnos was formed on the basis of the agricultural Bulgarian population that did not convert to Islam, settled on the Right Bank of the Volga ..., partially assimilated the Finno-Ugric peoples in the north of Chuvashia”[74]. At the same time, another article notes that “the Chuvash language ... belongs to the Bulgar group of the Turkic language family and is the only living language of this group[75]. Thus, what A. Rona-Tash achieved in his research is fully accepted by the Chuvash scientists and reviewers of A. Rona-Tash's book.

We must not forget that the Chuvash were Finno-Ugrians, called veda. And the missionary congress of 1910 came to the conclusion about the initial relationship of the Chuvash pagans and the Finno-Ugric tribes[76]. The Finno-Ugric-speaking Vedas closely communicated with the Turkic-speaking Suases, adopted from them the Turkic language and ethnonym suas/chuvash. When studying the Chuvash problem, it is also impossible not to take this into account.

Thus, the efforts of M. Usmanov and A. Arslanova at all costs to protect the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept of the scientist A. Ron-Tash from the principled criticism of some Zakiev turned out to be only unsuccessful attempts to understand the essence of the problem of the ethnic relationship of the Bulgars, Tatars and Chuvashs.

§ 14. The usual Türkic-speaking Bulgars are also proved by the fact that the Arabs called the Bulgars a Türkic ethnonymsakaliba.

In 921, the king of the Sakaliba from the Bulgar tribe Almas [77] the son of Shilka asked the Caliph of Baghdad to send an embassy to the country of the Sakaliba for the official adoption of Islam in order to free himself from submission to the Khazars, who had adopted the Jewish religion. In 922, an Arab embassy headed by Susan al-Rasi arrived in the country of Sakaliba - Bulgar. The secretary of the embassy was Ahmed Ibn-Fadlan, who kept detailed travel records and a description of the country and the people of the Sakaliba - the Bulgars. In these records, which are now published under the title "The Book of Ahmed Ibn Fadlan", the country and people are mainly called by the term sakaliba, and the king Almas, the son of Shilka, also appears as the king of the Sakaliba. Only upon arrival, after a personal acquaintance with Almas Shilki and after he learned that even before his arrival Almas had been told a khutba on the minbar: “Oh, Allah! Save the king of Yiltuar[78] — king of the Bulgars! ”, and after Almas Shilki took the Arabic name Jagfar, gave his father the name Abdullah, Ibn Fadlan, finally, himself pronounced the khutba: “Oh, Allah! Keep [in prosperity] your servant Jagfar Ibn-Abdallah, overlord [emir] Bulgars, the client of the ruler of the faithful”[79], only after all these ceremonies Ibn-Fadlan declares Almas Shilka the king of the Bulgars. And further, when describing the country, Ibn Fadlan again uses the expression "king of the Sakaliba."

Ethnonym sakaliba is a common name for the so-called "pre-Turkic" Turks[80]. It is formed according to the Turkic model of secondary and tertiary ethnonyms from parts saka + ly + ba, where saka/sak - the ancient common name of the Turks, -ly - ethnonym-forming affix, ba - a shortened version of the primary Turkic ethnonym buy/pi/bi/back.

For clarity, here we repeat some data about the Türkic primary and secondary ethnonyms.

The Saks in Eurasia were recorded in connection with the description by Herodotus of the events of the 7th-5th centuries. BC. Saks he refers to the Scythians.

Is this ethnonym Turkic saka/sak? Yes, in traditional Turkology and Indo-Iranian studies, the Saks are classified as Iranian-speaking tribes, and the ethnonym saka considered Iranian in the sense of 'horns'. But it was preserved among the Turkic-speaking peoples: sakha - Yakuts, Kazakh<kosak<kusak 'white saki', Khakass <hака+ас <сака+ace, kywsak>kyfsak>kypsak>kypchak 'White Saks', therefore Turkologists consider him to be the primary Turkic ethnonym.

Sakals/sakali - secondary Turkic ethnonym, formed with the help of an ethnonym-forming affix -ly. Sakals - 'tribe with Saks'. Sakals recorded in the records of Herodotus as a common name for many Scythians in the form chipped, where the last sound is [t] to the Karachai-Balkar plural ending -ta(r)/-la(r), the rest how much apparently goes back to sakals. In addition, Ibn-Fadlan notes that among the Bulgars there lives a tribe sklapparently this is sakals, but when the first [a] is reduced, the reduced sound [a-b] inevitably appears before [sk]: compare: spacesuit - tat. pron. suit.

Ethnonym-forming Turkic affix -ly has a phonetic variant -dy, with the help of which, based on the primary ethnonym saka secondary ethnonym formed sacadas/skad, other name Saks. Skad as a result of the transition of the interdental [d-th] to [f], in the Old Russian language they began to pronounce as Scythian. Thus, sakals / sakals - in fact, the Scythians.

But sakals - not just Scythians, but 'rich Scythians', i.e. they sakaliba 'Scythian bais'. Here ba is a truncated version of the primary Turkic ethnonym buy/bi/pi.

It is no coincidence that Herodotus mentions the Saks next to the Caspians and Horasmians. After all, the ethnonym kaspi is a Turkic ethnonym, meaning piev / baev among the rocks (kas), Khorasmians - also Turks huar + as + ym/suar+as+ym 'my aces are Suar'. By the way, ethnonym buy in a truncated form is also presented in ethnonyms tuba 'mountain bais', baraba 'bai bars, i.e. bai having wealth',

Thus, sakaliba - this is the Turkic name of the Turkic-speaking royal Scythians, i.e. 'sakals of bays'. Arabs long before our era. adopted this ethnonym as a common name for the Türkic-speaking peoples, including the common Türkic-speaking Bulgars. Naturally, in various regions and situations, the ethnonym sakaliba used with different meanings.

§ fifteen.Sakaliba- blond people, Bulgars - also.

If you pay attention to the Arabic sources themselves, then the word suclab (in singular) or sakaliba (plural) denotes blond or red-haired people, invariably emphasizing the red (or reddish) hair color or red (reddish) skin coloration of the Sakaliba[81]. In the dictionary Ashraf ibn Sharaf al-Muzakkir Alfarugi, compiled in 1404-1405 in India under the name "Danish-name-yi Kadar Khan"[82], it is noted that Saklab (lyÔ?) is a region in Turkestan, the people there are white[83].

In order to adequately reveal the meaning of the ethnonym sakaliba, used by the Arabs in the general sense of "Turk", meaning white-faced red-haired people, it is necessary to establish a people, people who at that time called themselves and presented themselves to others as white-faced or red-haired and at the same time lived together with known Turkic-speaking peoples in such close contact that the arriving Arabs and Persians considered the Sakaliba and the Turks to be one people, or considered one as part of the other. Such a people then, of course, were Kypchaks/kywsaki 'white saki'. Secondary ethnonyms kywsak and sakaliba formed on the basis of the primary ethnonym sak/saka.

Word Kypchak etymologically goes back to Turkic kuchak, which has two roots: kyu (kyu / kub / kuba) 'red', 'pale', 'white-red', 'light', and chuck, meaning sak/chak the ancient name of the Turks. Word kyu is also used in the meaning of 'swan', in a different way ak kosh 'White bird'. Kuu 'white', 'white bird' is another ethnonym with the word kizhi/keshe 'human', kuukizhi 'white people', 'swans'. Word kuu / kuu used by primary ethnonym man as kuman/commands. Compare also: mаn in a word Turkmenаn. In Western Europe instead of an ethnonym Kypchak applied word koeman.

What kyu in ethnonym kuchak / kipchak (kuman) has the meaning 'white, red, fair-haired', is also confirmed by the fact that among many Turkic peoples we observe white (yellow) and non-white (non-yellow). So, in the V-VI centuries. in the territory of Central Asia, Afghanistan, North-West India and part of East Turkestan White Huns, which were otherwise called kusanami/ku-shunami or Hephthalitesformed the state. Known in history white tatars and black tatars, white Khazars and black Khazars, white kyrgyz and other Kyrgyz, Sars Uighurs and etc.

So, the Turks included tribes that called themselves fair-haired, white. Further we will see that they were Kipchaks. That the ethnonym Kypchak means white, light[84], scientists-turkologists have long paid attention. So the Hungarian scientist J. Nemeth came to this conclusion in the late 30s. He wrote that pale yellow the names of the Cumans are tracing paper from their Turkic names koeman and kun, which go back to the Turkic adjective kyu (from an older cube) 'pale', 'yellow'[85].

In the Turkic languages, a blond person is often also called sary hаmember 'yellow-haired'. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Kypchaks also had another ethnonym from the word sarah -'yellow'. “Western Polovtsians in ancient Russian sources were called Sorochintsywhat is the name of the people sarahwho walked ahead of the people kun. (Subsequently, this name approached and merged with the European name of Muslims Saracens)"[86].

Consequently, a very large group of Turks of Eastern Europe, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, Minor, Middle and Central Asia, Afghanistan, East Turkestan, Northeast India, having their own local ethnonyms, called themselves a more general ethnonym with the meaning "white-faced", "light -yellow. Such ethnonyms were, first of all, the words kukizhi, kuman, kumandy, kuchak/kyfchak/kypchak. In this sense, the Arabs used the ethnonym sakaliba.

The most important thing to pay attention to is that these tribes themselves knew perfectly well the meaning of their common ethnonym and presented themselves to other peoples as white-faced, red-haired. In turn, representatives of other peoples immediately skalked the ethnonym of the white-faced. On this occasion, I.G. Dobrodomov writes the following: “It has long been noted that the Polovtsians in many languages are denoted by words derived from roots with the meaning yellow, pale: Rus. Cumans (cf.: sexual, obsolete: sexual); Polish (from Czech) plavci (Plawcy, Plauci, Plawci); hence also Hungarian. Palycz(ok)taken from the Eastern Slavs: German. Val(e)we(n) (cf. modern German. fahl and fabric 'faded', 'whitish', 'bulan'), Latinized Slavic forms Falones, Phalagi. The name of the people mentioned under 1050/51 in the 75th chapter of the "History" of the Armenian author Matthew of Edessa has the same meaning. hartesh (lit. 'light', 'whitish', 'blond'"[87].

From this quotation it becomes clear that the Kipchaks presented themselves to the Russians, Poles, Germans, Hungarians, Italians and Armenians as blond people, and therefore these peoples called the Kipchaks in their languages "blonde". They also presented themselves as "blonde" to the Chinese and Persians.[88].

For our topic, it is very important that the Kipchaks seemed to be "blonde" also to the Arabs, therefore the Arabs, calling them the Turkic ethnonym sakaliba, put into it the meaning of 'white-faced, fair-haired' and noted their belonging to the Turks. So, Abu Hamid al-Garnati reports that in the country of Sakaliba he visited the city of Gur Kuman, where the people are similar to the Turks, speak Turkic, even shoot an arrow in Turkic[89].

Thus, in Arabic and Persian sources, the Turkic ethnonym sakaliba used as a synonym for an ethnonym kuman or Kypchak (Kuchak). Kypchaks 'White Saks' called all the northern Turks, including the Bulgars.

§ 16. Is it possible sakalibabe considered unconditionally Slavs?

Leading Russian Arab scholars - V.V. Bartold, I.Yu. Krachkovsky, B.N. Zakhoder and others - note that Arab geographers often made mistakes when mixing[90] with Turks, Kirghiz, Bulgars, Khazars. If under Arabic sakaliba understand not the Slavs, but the Saks-Kypchaks, it becomes clear that it was not the Arab and Persian eyewitness geographers who were mistaken, but the Russian researchers of Arabic and Persian sources, translating the Arabic word sakaliba How 'Slavs'.

According to V.V. Bartold, the ethnonym sakaliba (in unit number suclab) is borrowed by the Arabs, probably from Greek sklaboi or sklabenoiwhich means Slavs[91], he also gives the possibility of a different etymology: this is from Persian sec 'dog' + leb 'lip' (Gardizi), this etymology is also based on the fact that the son of Yaphet Saklab was fed with dog milk[92]. Immediately, V.V. Bartold notes that the Kirghiz were called the offspring of the Sakaliba for their "red hair and white skin" ... apparently, the Slavs (i.e. Sakaliba) were subjects of the Bulgars. It is difficult to imagine that Ibn-Fadlan calls the king of the Bulgars Almas Shilka also the king of the subjects of the Bulgars, i.e. Slavs. Therefore, it is highly doubtful that the Sakaliba are Slavs.

In 2002, a solid book by D.E. Mishin "Sakaliba (Slavs) in the Islamic world in the early Middle Ages" was published in Moscow, in which the author, based on a huge number of sources, comes to the conclusion that: 1) in the world Islamic literature sakaliba applied mainly to the Slavs; 2) in Mashriq (East) sakaliba appears already by the middle of the 7th century, which is associated with the migration of the Balkan Slavs to Byzantine Asia Minor; 3) originally under sakaliba understood the servants who belonged to the people sakaliba, in all likelihood, to the Slavs; 4) slaves-sakaliba were imported into the Islamic world from the regions of the Slavic-German borderlands, from Rus' through the Volga Bulgaria and Khorezm; 5) in the first third of the XI century. word sakaliba received a new meaning "eunuch"; 6) a variety of servants later appeared in Mashriq-sakaliba - and eunuchs, and uncastled servants, and women; 7) in the Islamic world, servantssakaliba were both at court and in the possession of private individuals, sometimes they performed various natural assignments and occupied important public positions; eight) sakaliba experienced a lot of attention of Islamic culture, quickly learned the Arabic language, converted to Islam[93].

As can be seen from the conclusion, D.E. Mishin studied sakaliba very detailed, used almost all world sources, but did not pay due attention to the proof sakaliba Slavs, he trusted more the previous studies, which proved an unconditionally Slavic origin sakaliba. These studies include, first of all, the material on Sakaliba collected by B.N. Zakhoder in the second volume of his book “Caspian Collection of Information about Eastern Europe”.

In order to clarify the question of who the Sakaliba were: Slavs or Turks (Kypchaks / Kyw + Saks), we will analyze the code of B.N. Zakhoder, collected by him about the Sakaliba, in his words, about the Slavs. Word Slavs here we have replaced the original word sakaliba.

1. “From the Pechenegs to the Sakaliba, ten days of travel through forests and difficult roads. The Sakaliba people are numerous, they live in the forests along the plain. The Sakaliba has the city of V.b.nit ”(Zakhoder B.N., 1967, 109). This feature of the settlement of the Sakaliba can be attributed to both the Kypchaks and the Slavs. The name of the city is rendered in different ways: Va.i — file, Wabnit — oodial, Wantit — oînãaë, and it becomes clear that the name of the city from the point of view of the Slavic language is not deciphered. In the future, it is necessary to make an attempt to read it as a Turkic word. Name of the second city Khurdab or Hudud also undeciphered. As for the expression that some Sakaliba look like the Rus, here we can say the following: the Kypchaks in appearance really often looked like the Rus, and there were no other Slavs here.
2. “The Sakaliba used honey instead of grapes, they have developed beekeeping”[94]. This sign is characteristic of both the Slavs and the Kypchaks. But the specific content of the messages of the Eastern geographers makes it possible to identify the Sakaliba with the Kypchaks. So, Sakaliba make a drink from honey, "which they call sujuv"[95]. Even D.A. Khvolson, analyzing this word, inscribed as w?a, tried to explain it using Croatian ulisce 'hive', A.P. Kovalevsky and B.N. Zakhoder identify it with the word honeycomb[96]. Actually it is a Turkish word suji (seҗe/tөche), which was used in the Old Turkic texts in the meaning of 'wine' or 'sweet drink' and is still used in the Tatar and Bashkir languages in the meaning of 'sweet', 'sweet'.
3. "The Sakaliba have as many pigs as the Muslims have sheep"[97]. Here BN Zakhoder deliberately changed the text by adding the word "Muslims". In fact, it was said that the Sakaliba have herds of pigs and herds of sheep or herds of pigs, like a flock of sheep. It is known that the Kipchaks originally bred both pigs and sheep. The Christian Kypchaks continued this tradition, and the Muslim Kypchaks naturally abandoned pig breeding.
4. “When a sakaliba dies, his corpse is burned, his wife is thrown into the fire together with the deceased, while they perform a feast and have fun”[98]. As is known, the Guzes and part of the Burtases, whose Turkic-speaking no one doubts, burned their dead.
5. "Sakaliba worship fire (or bull)"[99]. Here, B.N. Zakhoder did not take into account that the Sakaliba were also idolaters. All this brings the Sakaliba closer to the Kypchaks than to the Slavs.
6. “Sakaliba sow millet; when harvest time comes, they put the grain in a sieve and, turning to heaven, say a prayer.[100]. Both the Slavs and the Kypchaks could do this. But the turning of the face to the sky (Tәңre) brings the Sakaliba closer to the Kypchaks, i.e. Turks.
7. “Sakaliba has different musical instruments: lutes, tamburas, flutes”[101]. On this basis, the Sakaliba can be brought closer to both the Kipchaks and the Slavs.
8. “The Sakaliba has few pack animals, horses; they wear shirts and put morocco boots on their feet; their weapons: spear, shield, pikes, sword, chain mail; ... the head of the sakaliba feeds on the milk of pack animals (koumiss) ... "[102]. The Kipchaks, like all Turks, used horses for riding, so they had few pack horses. Morocco boots were known among the Bulgar Turks, by a more common name - among the Kypchaks, koumiss was the national Turkic drink. The head of the sakaliba was called subanych (wãbiì?) and suiҗ (win?), in Turkic suchi, where su army -chy profession affix. Perhaps the spelling of the word subashi 'head of the army' in Arabic letters leads to a distortion. Some Arabists-Russists ØÜß wím?  read like ØÜjním? (Svyatopolk), and by this to prove that the head of the Sakaliba is the head of the Slavs Svyatopolk. But, as B.N. Zakhoder himself notes, ØÜß - it malik 'king', in general — it bitches malik 'king, head of the army'. Other words given here as the toponymy of the Sakaliba require additional research from the point of view of the Kypchak language.
9. “Sakaliba build underground structures in which they escape in winter from extreme cold (or from attacks by the Magyars)”[103]. This is a neutral expression, cited by B.N. Zakhoder does not allow us to determine the ethnicity of the Sakaliba. But further in the text we are talking about the ancient bath, which was inherent in the Kypchaks and modern Western Turks.
10. "The Sakaliba king takes tribute with a dress"[104]. On this basis, we cannot determine the ethnicity of the Sakaliba.
11. "Sakaliba is subjected to severe punishment for those guilty of theft and adultery"[105]. This custom, according to the description of Ibn Fadlan, is typical for the Bulgar-Sakaliba, i.e. in general - for the Kipchaks, in particular - for the Bulgars.

It should be noted that B.N. Zakhoder, apparently, purposefully listed here the statements of Eastern geographers. He missed the data that give reason to consider the Sakaliba as Turks. The researcher, of course, could not fail to note that, according to Ibn Fadlan, the Bulgars belong to the Sakaliba people. But he interpreted this fact in his own way: Ibn Fadlan constantly confuses Bulgars with Sakaliba, i.e. with the Slavs[106].

As we have already noted, Ibn Fadlan calls Almas Shilki Khan the king of Sakaliba, he was, apparently, from the Bulgar tribe, and therefore is called the king of the Bulgars. It is clear that in the Middle Volga region the Sakaliba country was later called the state of the Bulgars. It should be noted that the opinion that sakaliba denotes light-skinned Turks, was expressed by the historian Ahmed Zaki Validi Togan back in 1939. But it received sharp criticism from A.P. Kovalevsky[107].

V.V. Bartold notes that the Sakaliba invariably has a red hair color, but “despite the distinctive physical feature, the Sakaliba as the descendants of Yafet (Arabic Yafas) unite with the Turks”[108]. Abu Hamid al-Garnati in 1150, telling about his journey from the Bulgar to Hungary, wrote that he arrived in the city of the Sakaliba country, which is called Gur Kumanwhere people who look like Turks speak Turkic and shoot arrows like Turks[109]. It is superfluous to explain here who the Sakaliba were.

So, Sakaliba are Turks, the word sakaliba (suclab in units number) was used in the sense Kypchak 'white-faced'.

Some may object to this, arguing that in official Turkology, the transition of the Kypchaks from Asia to Eastern Europe allegedly dates back to the 11th century, and Arab and Persian geographers knew about the Sakaliba as early as the 8th century. Indeed, many Turkologists mistakenly believe that the first Turks came to Eastern Europe in the 4th century BC. under the name of the Huns, they disappeared after about 100 years, and their place was taken by the Avars who came from Asia; the Turks came from Asia to the place of the Avars, the last in the 7th century. they were replaced by the Khazars, in the VIII century. Pechenegs appeared, etc. In the XI century. supposedly Kipchaks (Polovtsy) came to Eastern Europe. This is a misconception: the Turkic-speaking tribes lived in Eastern Europe back in the days of the Cimmerians, Scythians and Sarmatians, and continue to live today. Here there was no change of ethnic groups, only the ethnonym changed, because in different periods of history, one or another tribe acted as the dominant tribes among the many Turkic tribes. Hence the change of the common ethnonym for the Turks.

Traces of the Kypchaks were recorded in ancient times. Yes, ethnonym Comanche we meet among the American Indians[110]. If we take into account that the ancestors of the American Indians moved to the American mainland from Asia 30-20 thousand years ago, then there is reason to believe that this ethnonym came to America from Asia at that time. Therefore, the ethnonym coman/comanche existed in Asia as early as 30-20 thousand years ago.

In the III century. BC. Chinese sources contain information about kyueshe, who spoke Turkish. M.I. Artamonov believes that this is the first information about the Kypchaks[111]. In our opinion, kyueshe is a typical Chinese abbreviation of the ethnonym kukizhi 'white-faced'.

According to Chinese information, even before our era. south of the Altai Mountains lived the Huns, in the north - the people co. They then broke up into 4 tribes: Kuman or Kuban, Kyrgyz, Chu-Kshi and Turk[112].

According to some scholars, the ethnonym kypchak (kybchak/kyfchak) appears in the second half of the 8th century. to designate a people previously called an ethnonym sir, which apparently also represents the Chinese abbreviation of the word sarir (sary ir 'yellow people'). In the monument of Tonyukuk (726), the ruling tribes are called Turks and Sirs, and in the monument of Eletmish Bilge-kagan from Shine Usu (760), the ruling tribes are indicated by ethnonyms Turk and kybchak[113]. It is important to note that in the first Arabic list of Turkic tribes, compiled in the 8th century, the ethnonym hyfchak/kybchak[114]. But later in the writings of Arab and Persian geographers instead of the ethnonym kybchak/(kuchak) its synonym begins to be used saclab, only from the 11th century. ethnonym appears in them again Kypchak and instead of the name "steppe of the Guz", used by geographers of the tenth century, the term "steppe of the Kypchaks" appears (Desht-i Kipchak)[115].

It must also be said that in official historical science, therefore, in both Russian and Western European Turkology, the question of the appearance and origin of the Polovtsians (by self-names: kukizhi, kuman, kuchak) is considered in connection with the idea of the movement of the Turks allegedly from the Far East to Western Asia and Eastern Europe[116]. This point of view is deeply erroneous: there was no such movement. Even in prehistoric times, the Turks, along with the ancestors of other peoples, lived in Western and Eastern Europe, in Minor, Middle and Central Asia, in Western Asia and the Far East, i.e. in those regions where they were known in historically known times and where, basically, they live now. The fact that the Cumans (Kums, Kuns) lived in Western Europe even before our era is proved by the presence of a BC. the city of Kum among the Etruscans (later - the city of Kuman in Hungary) and the city of Kumanovo in Macedonia.

Thus, the Kipchaks (Kukizhi, Kuman, Sarir, Sir) from ancient times imagined that their ethnonym meant blond, light yellow-haired people, therefore these neighbors called them blond in their own languages: Slavs - Cumans, Armenians - hartesh, Arabs and Persians called them the Turkic word sakaliba etc.

Word Kypchak (Kuman, Kukizhi) was a more general ethnonym. As part of the Kipchaks, smaller nationalities or tribes were distinguished - according to the eastern geographers, the Kirghiz, Huns, Bulgars, Khazars, etc. According to Ibn-Fadlan, in the Middle Volga region, the Sakaliba (Kypchaks) included Bulgars, Baranjars, Suars, Suases, Skills (skids/scythians), Khazars.

So, the Bulgars are one of the Kypchak (Kyw-Sak) tribes, so the Arabs called them the Turkic ethnonym sakaliba. This is eloquently evidenced by an objective analysis of the Book of Ahmed Ibn Fadlan.

§ 17. And according to the primary sources, the Bulgar language was common Turkic, and not Chuvash.

In the previous paragraphs, we considered all the arguments of the supporters of the Bulgaro-Chuvash theory and did not find a single reliable fact that would directly or indirectly testify to the existence of the Chuvash type of p-language among the Bulgars. In essence, all the arguments put forward by them were based solely on misunderstandings and erroneously interpreted facts. Consequently, the failure of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept is now obvious. The belonging of the Chuvash-like language to the Muslim Chuvash, who were going through the process of adopting the common Turkic Bulgar language, is beyond doubt.

Let's move on to the consideration of the Volga-Bulgarian language according to the primary sources.

The Volga-Bulgar language is recorded in tombstones of the 1st style. Let's start with the language of the epitaph of 1244, when the Mongol-Tatars had not yet settled in Bulgaria. … aldynda, 84 jašynde ğadäde: tarix alty jüz qyrq ekidä. 642... “... at the age of 84 years, according to the reckoning in six hundred and forty-two. 642nd…”, i.e. according to Christian chronology in 1244 ...[117].

As you can see, this epitaph is written in z-language, because. numerals are named juz (but not cur), qyrq (but not xerx), ekida (but not ikemes). The belonging of this epitaph to the Bulgars is not in doubt for the reason that it is dated 1244, when the Bulgar people continued to wage an insurrectionary struggle against the conquerors. And there can be no doubt about the correctness of the dating either, for it is given here twice: once with the words "alty juz qyrq ekida” and the second time with the numbers “642”.

Or here is another, more lengthy epitaph from the Bulgar settlement, dated 1311: …Fatima elci bint Ajup ibn Myxammet ibn Junys äl-Bolgari… Jegerme eki jašynda vafat boldy… hicratda jeti jüz on berdä. “... Fatima-ilchi, the daughter of Ayup, the son of Mohammed, the son of Yunus of Bulgar ... at the age of twenty-two, died according to the chronology in seven hundred and eleventh”[118].

This monument is dedicated to the noble Bulgar woman Fatima, who, judging by the pedigree, had all her ancestors - her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather - were Muslim Bulgars and lived in the city of Bulgar, apparently, long before the Mongols, but the epitaph is written on that the same z-language: as in the previous example, it contains numerals with zetacism, the same general Turkic forms of verbs and affixes of Bulgar case endings.

Or here is another text of the same Bulgar epitaph, but from the village of Tarkhany of Tatarstan, dated 1314: …Galimlärny tärbijä qylğan häm alarny sügän, mäscedlär gijmarät qylğa(n), üküš xäjr sahibe, meskenlär … Xuca uğly Gosman uğly tamğačy Ibrahim as-Suvari vafat bulğan. Bu tarix jeti jöz un türtenčedä Vomady äl-ävväli ajynyŋ un altunč köne ärdi. “... Who gave education to scientists and loved them, who built mosques, who did many good deeds, the son of Khoja, the son of Gosman, the tax collector Ismagil Suvarsky died, according to the chronology, in the seven hundred and fourteenth (year), the jumadi of the first month on the sixteenth day was”[119].

This monument is dedicated to the tax collector Ismagil, a representative of the Bulgar Suvar tribe, there are no signs of Chuvash rotacism and lambdaism here: all numerals (jeti 'seven', juz 'one hundred', un 'ten', Turkish 'four', alty 'six'), as well as all other words (aj 'month', ugly 'a son', ukus 'poor', etc.) are written in a typical s-language.

Many other epitaphs of the same style can be cited (in total, about 150 monuments of different times were discovered and described), and they are all written on the same h-a language that does not have signs of rotacism and lambdaism.

Based on the z-linguality of the late Bulgars, the Ashmarinists put forward a new version of the alleged "change of the Bulgar language". According to this version, the Bulgars allegedly once still spoke the Old Chuvash language, but then, even before the Mongols, they abandoned this old language of theirs and spoke in the usual Turkic h-language. The reason for this change of language is put forward by the alleged arrival in Bulgaria h-lingual Kipchaks, then the arrival of Central Asian clergy, then the influence of the common Turkic book language on the Bulgars[120], or even a complete change of population: supposedly after the pestilence of the Bulgars, this territory was occupied by the Kipchaks.

Of course, the transformation of the Chuvash r-language into a common Turkic s-language is unlikely, because these languages have coexisted in parallel for more than a thousand years and could not turn into one another in the recent past.

More specific information about the Bulgar language was preserved in the work of Mahmud Kashgarli, dating back to the 11th century. In his "Divan lugat-at-Turk" he provides data not only on the Bulgar, but also on other languages of the medieval Turks. To the Bulgars he ascribes the words qanaq 'cream', azaq 'leg', avus 'wax', lav 'seal wax', tugel 'not no', kukles 'to become related', and suvaram - bal 'honey', tava 'camel', azaq 'leg', bun 'bouillon'. M. Kashgarly writes: “The language of the Bulgars, Suvars and Pechenegs, located near Rum, (is) Turkic with the same falling endings”[121], which confirms the similarity of the Bulgarian language with the Pecheneg.

Unfortunately, all these valuable information of Kashgarly about the Bulgaro-Suvar language has been undeservedly ignored by many linguists until now, on the grounds that they contradict the ideas of the Ashmarinists. For example, Omelyan Pritsak, who devoted a special scientific publication to the information of Kashgarly, claims that Kashgarly himself had never been to Bulgaria, did not know the Bulgar language and wrote about it only by hearsay, from the words of visiting merchants, who, de, could not be Bulgars at all and the Bulgar language might not know. Pritsak considers the fact that the Bulgar words given in the "Divan" do not occur in the texts of the Bulgar epitaphs of the 2nd style as confirmation of his such judgment. Therefore, he proposes to ignore the reports of Kashgarly about the Bulgar and Suvar languages altogether.[122].

In fact, the information of Kashgarly surprisingly accurately characterizes the features of the pre-Mongolian Bulgar language, identified from the written monuments of that era. Among these works, a special place is occupied, for example, by Kul Gali's poem "Kyssa-i Yusuf" ("The Story of Yusuf"), written shortly before the Mongol invasion and reflecting the language of that era. Although the Ashmarinists try to remove this work from the Bulgars and attribute it to other peoples due to the fact that it is written in the z-language, more qualified studies of linguists have reliably established that it is precisely the Bulgar work and belongs to the pen of the poet Kul Gali, who came from Bulgaria.

The given data irrefutably prove that the Bulgar language, i.e. The Turkic language of the population of the Bulgar state did not have any Chuvash features, it was characterized by the same distinctive features that are characteristic of the modern Tatar language, manifested in its three dialects.

§ 18. General data, rejecting the Bulgaro-Chuvash, confirming the Bulgaro-Tatar concept.

In order to make it easier to understand various distortions of reality according to the linguo-ethnic features of the Bulgars in the broad sense of the word, it is necessary to briefly list the historical data recognized by all, rejecting the adequacy of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept, confirming the correctness of the Bulgaro-Tatar theory.

In citing the historical data related to the above concepts, we proceed from the following theoretical premises: the history of a language and the origin of its speaker are far from identical phenomena, so they cannot be identified. However, we should not forget that another extreme is no less dangerous for science: the separation of the history of a language from the history of its bearer. There is a pronounced relationship between them: although the history of a language and the history of its bearer are not the same, without the history of the people as a whole there is no history of its language, and, conversely, without the history of a language it is impossible to more or less fully represent the history of its bearer. That is why any ethnogenetic theory must have not only purely linguistic, but also anthropological, ethnographic, archaeological, i.e. in general ethnohistorical confirmation. This means that when solving ethnogenetic problems, it is necessary to proceed not from separate, disparate data, but from their totality. Only with such an integrated approach can historical reality be objectively depicted. Otherwise, there is a danger of moving away from objective analysis towards subjective conjectures.

From this point of view, we will try to give a brief answer to the question: is the Bulgaro-Chuvash theory confirmed from all sides, i.e. collection of data, or is it fraught with contradictions?

1. If the Chuvashs were formed mainly from the Volga Bulgars, if the Bulgar language historically passed into the Chuvash language, then such continuity would certainly be visible, first of all, in the anthropological type of the Bulgars and Chuvashs. Meanwhile, specific craniological studies give completely opposite results. “Even with a superficial morphological description, it is clear,” writes V.P. Alekseev, “that the Chuvash are craniologically similar to their Finnish-speaking neighbors and that, consequently, their anthropological type was formed with the intensive participation of that combination of features that is characteristic of the Finnish-speaking peoples of the Volga region and received the name subural"[123]. The second clearly expressed component in the anthropological type of the Chuvash is the Kypchak type. The Chuvashs, according to V.P. Alekseev, physically go back to the Kipchaks to a greater extent than the Tatars. As for the complex of features characteristic of the Bulgars, it is not captured in the composition of the Chuvash.[124], this Bulgar complex of features formed the basis for the formation of the anthropological type of the Volga Tatars. It was overlaid with a low-faced Mongoloid component, representing one of the variants of the Subural type, and a high-faced Mongoloid type, apparently associated with the Kypchaks.[125]. Consequently, according to craniology, the historical continuity between the Bulgars and the Tatars is more obvious than between the Bulgars and the Chuvashs.
2. The Bulgaro-Chuvash theory is not confirmed in ethnological terms either. Famous ethnographers N.I. Vorobyov and K.I. Kozlova note that the ethnological features of the Bulgars were basically preserved primarily among the Tatars[126]. So, for example, the Bulgars were characterized by a developed leather production and trade, which was then transferred to the Tatars, while the Chuvash did not develop these crafts and occupations.
3. The culture of writing from the Bulgars was passed on to the Tatars, the Chuvash had such a culture until the 19th century. did not have. The same can be said about the Muslim religion. Traces of the Bulgars have not been preserved either in mythology or in the folklore of the Chuvash, and for the mythology and folklore of the Tatars, the Bulgar theme is a cross-cutting one.[127].
4. The Chuvashs never called themselves Bulgars, and the Tatars believed that their villages were founded by immigrants from the Bulgars, that their grandfathers, great-grandfathers were Bulgars and often, until the 20th century, called themselves Bulgars in contrast to the nameTatars, which was planted from three sides: from the Mishars-Tatars who joined the population of the Kazan Khanate, from the Russians, who called almost all their eastern neighbors Tatars, and from those who namedTatars wanted to show his greatness. The fact that the Tatars almost until the twentieth century. stubbornly called themselves Bulgars, there is no political background. Nobody taught this to the people, because there were no history textbooks, no manuals, neither the native language nor the history of the people were studied in the madrasah, there they limited themselves to teaching Arabic, Persian or Turkish languages and general Muslim history. Official propaganda was deeply interested in planting the ethnonym Tatars. Consequently, the information that the Tatars are basically the former Bulgars has been preserved in the memory of the people. Unfortunately, this fact and other data that the basis of the ethnic composition and language of the Tatars are the Bulgar component and the Bulgar language were not taken into account by the supporters of the Bulgaro-Chuvash theory before. Now they are also being silenced.
5. The Bulgaro-Chuvash theory is not confirmed territorially either. Archaeological excavations show that there are no Bulgar archaeological sites of both pre-Mongolian and Golden Horde times on the territory of the Chuvash settlement, if we do not take into account the eastern and southeastern parts of Chuvashia, associated with the Sviyaga basin[128]. It could be assumed that the ancestors of the Chuvashs first lived on the territory of the Bulgar state, then someone forced them out of there to the Chuvash region, for example, the Mongols-Tatars, as some researchers believe. However, there is no direct confirmation of this.
6. Consider another historical fact. If the ancestors of the modern Chuvash were closely related to the Bulgars, they would certainly have inherited statehood from them. There is no reason to think that the ancestors of the modern Chuvash people in social development were once at the level of creating a state, and then abandoned this form of political organization. In history, it seems, there was no case that an ethnic collective, having its own state, was formed as a nationality, and over time it lost all this. Consequently, it is clear that the ancestors of the Chuvash did not have statehood, and they did not have a close relationship with the Bulgars. The Bulgarian state grew into the Kazan state, and the Tatars inherited their statehood from the Bulgars.
7. As is known, the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept arose and developed as a purely linguistic one. However, in this respect it is also very controversial. So, Mahmud Kashgarly in the XI century. noted the closeness of the Bulgar, Suvar and Pecheneg languages[129]. As is known, the Pecheneg language was not characterized by Chuvash features, but was a language of the Oguzo-Kypchak type. M. Kashgarly, noting the proximity of the Bulgar, Suvar and Kypchak languages, writes that “the sound [d], which is present in the language of the Chigils and other Turkic tribes, in the language of the Kypchaks, Yamaks, Suvars, Bulgars and other tribes, common before the Romans and Russians, replaced by the sound [h]"[130]. In addition to the fact that here the languages of the Kipchaks, Yamaks, Suvars and Bulgars are listed as of the same type on this basis, another side of this message deserves attention: here the so-called rotacism characteristic of the Chuvash language is not noted. It's just about alternation.e—h, which is observed up to the present time in the Turkic languages of the usual Oguzo-Kypchak type. Therefore, it must be assumed that the Bulgar language was not characterized by rotacism. If it occurs in the language of the Bulgar epitaph of the II style, then this can be explained by the influence of the language of the Chuvash ancestors on the language of the Bulgar epitaph, i.e. the fact that the Muslim Chuvash, who were at the stage of Bulgarization, took part in the compilation of the II style of the Bulgar epigraphy.
8. Let us give one more evidence of a contemporary of the Bulgars. In 1183, the Vladimir prince Vsevolod, before going to the Bulgars, informed the Kyiv prince Svyatoslav: “I don’t want to call the Polovtsy, because they have the same language and genus from the Bulgarians”[131]. Thus, in history there are two reliable information (Kashgarly and Vsevolod) about the proximity of the Bulgar language to the Pecheneg and Kypchak languages. In addition, it must be taken into account that these two messages, which are not territorially connected with each other, coincide.
9. It is impossible not to pay attention to the following. How to explain what modernTatars and Bashkirson the one hand, and the Balkars, on the other, have almost the same language, in any case, they understand each other well. After all, after the 7th century, i.e. division of common ancestors into three groups, Balkars and Bulgaro-Tatars had no territorial or economic ties. From the point of view of the Bulgaro-Chuvash concept, this could be explained as follows: their common ancestors, the Proto-Bulgarians, were Chuvash-speaking, and the languages of the Tatars and Balkars became similar to each other under the influence of the Kypchaks. However, as mentioned above, there were a small number of Kypchaks in the Tatars, and the Balkars, after the oppression of the Khazars, went to the mountains and gorges, it is unlikely that they could communicate so closely with the Kypchaks there to assimilate linguistically. The fact that the languages of the Tatars and Balkars are so close to each other is obviously explained by the common historical roots that go back to the language of the Proto-Bulgarians.
10. Further, if the Bulgar and Khazar languages were Chuvashe-Turkic, then noticeable traces of them would have remained throughout the vast territory once occupied by the Huns, Bulgars and Khazars. Moreover, even if we assume that in the deepest antiquity they spoke the Chuvashe-Turkic language, then all the same, during the hundred-year rule over them by the Turks of the Turkic Khaganate (VI-VII centuries), their language would have been influenced by the language of the Oguz-Kypchak type.
11. Finally, if the Bulgars spoke a Chuvash-like language, then they would have a self-namepalhar, which would be fixed in historical sources. But there is no such thing in history. The ethnonym spreadBulgar (Bulgarian), which is characteristic of the language of the common Turkic type.

The Bulgaro-Chuvash linguistic theory, which unreasonably extends to the ethnic history of both Tatars and Chuvash, is based on the presence of Chuvash words (along with Tatar ones) in some Bulgar tombstones, erected by the Chuvash themselves, who were at the stage of assimilation among the Bulgars; those. at the stage of their adoption of the Bulgar language instead of their own, already used by them Chuvash.

Thus, the Bulgaro-Chuvash theory already at a cursory examination does not withstand any criticism and turns out to be untenable. Consequently, the Bulgars, i.e. local Turkic tribes that received a common ethnonym Bulgar, were the ancestors of modern Tatars.

§ 19. When classifying the Turkic languages, Bulgar should be assigned to the Kypchak group, and not to the Chuvash.

From what has been said in the previous chapters, it also obviously follows that there is a need to revise the existing system of classification of Turkic languages. As is known, in all currently existing systems of classification, the Bulgar language is certainly considered as a rotating language and in this sense it is opposed to the rest of the Turkic z-languages. For example, A.N. Samoilovich and N.N. Poppe at one time divided all Turkic languages into two groups: 1) into R-languages, including the ancient Bulgar and modern Chuvash languages and 2) h-languages that include all other Turkic languages of the world. Now, according to the classification of modern Turkologists (Baskakov, Menges, Benzing, Tekin, etc.), the same languages are usually divided into Oguz, Kypchak and Karluk groups, but the Bulgar language is still among the rotating ones. In particular, according to the classification of Menges, the ancient Bulgar and modern Chuvash languages are included in the 6th or so-called "F" group of languages, characterized by rotacism and lambdaism. According to the classification of N.A. Baskakov, which is now considered a generally recognized system, these languages are also divided into Oguz, Kypchak and Karluk groups, but in addition, a fourth one is also distinguished[132], the so-called "Bulgarian group" R-languages, which include the ancient Bulgar, ancient Khazar and modern Chuvash languages[133]. However, due to the fact that the Bulgar language, as already mentioned, was not rotating, but was an ordinary Turkic h-language, then with the new classification, it naturally falls out of the fourth group and passes into the groups of Oguz and Kypchak z-languages.

As for the fourth group or group of p-languages, after the exclusion of Bulgar and Khazar, only one language remains in it - Chuvash. There was no other rotating language in the family of Turkic languages. True, there is an opinion about the presence of Chuvash-speaking Khazars, who were formed by mixing Mongol-speaking and Turkic-speaking tribes, among the usual Turkic-speaking Khazars. If in some languages, as, for example, in Karaite, Azerbaijani or Kazan-Tatar, there are sometimes episodic cases of manifestation of rotacism, then they should be considered as the result of the influence of the Finno-Ugric peoples on the Turkic language or the result of the influence of the same Chuvash language on them. R-language or as a result of contacts with the Mongolian languages, which are also characterized by rotacism and lambdaism, but the Turkic languages themselves, without exception, were originally zetacs, and remain so to this day.

Thus, in terms of their linguistic and ethnological features, the Volga Bulgars were usually Türkic-speaking, and not Chuvash-speaking. This in no way detracts from the importance of the Chuvash in the ethnic history of the Turkic-speaking tribes of the Ural-Volga region. The Volga Bulgars, which included other Turkic-speaking and Turkicized tribes of the Volga Bulgaria, formed the basis of the modern Bulgaro-Tatars. Chuvash - the former Veda, who first spoke the Finno-Ugric (ancient Mari language), closely communicated with the common Turkic-speaking Suas (one of the ancestors of the Kazan Tatars), half assimilated among the Suas, received an ethnonym from them suas, which has changed into Chuvash. Therefore, the ancient neighbors of both the Chuvash and the Bulgaro-Tatars, i.e. Mari, called Bulgaro-Tatars suases, and Chuvash - suaslamari.

The final remark of Yu.K.Begunov:

When academician M.Z.Zakiev writes about the ethnonym "Tatars", he emphasizes that the people themselves at all times initially called themselves Bulgars. And the ethnonym "Tatars" was once introduced into circulation only as an ectoethnonym, i.e. external alienation. The fact is that “Tatars” is translated from Turkic as “foreign people”, which in no way could be the self-name of the autochthonous Turkic people. The language spoken by modern Tatars is "saban", i.e. the same, basically, the language spoken by the ancient Bulgars from Idel-Ural.