Towards the Reconstruction of the Volga Bulgarian and Middle Chuvash Lexicon

Abstract Modern Chuvash is a descendant of the successive stages West Old Turkic, Volga Bulgarian, and Middle Chuvash, but not all lexical material in those unwritten predecessors survived to the first substantial documentation of Chuvash beginning in the eighteenth century. Inversely, Chuvash phraseologisms based on Turkic material for which no Turkic parallels are found, cannot be securely traced back to earlier stages of the language, but rather could potentially be recent coinages. Consequently, loanwords from earlier stages of Chuvash into Hungarian, Mari, Permian (Udmurt and Komi), Tatar, and Bashkir have permitted the reconstruction of otherwise lost pre- Chuvash lexicon, or confirmed that a Chuvash expression is of ancient date. This article offers new loan etymologies in the aforementioned languages that allow reconstructing the following Volga Bulgarian and Middle Chuvash words: ‘boundary between cultivated fields’, ‘spring flood’, ‘cock’s spur’, ‘to pray’, ‘flame’, and ‘foal, colt’.