Notes on the Slavic Etymology of Some Bulgarian Words

The ability of some Bulgarian and Old Bulgarian words, suspected to have Proto-Bulgarian origin, to form semantic nests was investigated in our previous publications (Ivanov 2016; Ivanov, Minkova 2019). Based on the analysis of a sig nificant number of such words, a rule was formulated that if these Proto-Bulgarian words were of Indo-Iranian origin, they formed large semantic nests, while if they were of Altaic origin, they remained as completely isolated ones. In the present study, our attention is drawn to other Bulgarian and Old Bulgarian words that have a pan-Slavic character, but their ancient Slavic prototype, reconstructed in the Bulgarian etymo logical dictionary seems not to have akin cognates in the neighboring Indo-European languages. As a rule, each such Bulgarian and Old Bulgarian word was assigned to an identical cognate from the southern, Saka (Sogdian) branch of the East-Iranian languages. This conclusion agrees well with the data from our recently published book, which supports the conception that the Proto-Bulgarians were emigrants from the mountainous region of Sogdiana, speaking the Saka language.