Old Bulgar

Old Bulgar 

or the Bulgar language, a now extinct language of the old Bulgars of the seventh to 15th centuries.

Old Bulgar is related to the Bulgar group of the Turkic languages. Judging from individual words that have been preserved, it was most similar to the modern Chuvash language, with which it shares a number of phonetic and morphological features, including correspondence of r and l to Common Turkic z and š ; the presence of two forms of ordinal numbers, the use of participial forms ending in -mïš/-miš (instead of -yan/-gen) and forms ending in -sun/-sün (instead of -yaj/-gej), and the presence of the old derivational affix -ïiq/-ik/-uq/-ük, Bulgar borrowings are to be found in the vocabularies of the Hungarian and Bulgarian languages.

REFERENCES

Ashmarin, N. I.Bolgary i chuvashi. Kazan, 1902.
Shakhmatov, A. A. “Zametka ob iazyke volzhskikh bolgar.” Sborriik muzeia antropologii i etnografii, 1918, vol. 5, issue 1.
Baskakov, N. A.Vvedenie v izuchenie tiurkskikh iazykov. Moscow, 1962.
Fekher, G. “Ostat’tsi ot ezika na dunavskitu prabulgari.” Izvestiia na Bulgarskiia arkheologicheski institut, vol. 5. Sofia, 1929.
Pritsak, O.Die bulgarische Fürstenliste und die Sprache der Protobulgaren. Wiesbaden, 1955.

E. A. POTSELUEVSKII