За един възможен контакт между създателите на руския героичен епос и волжко-камските българи
On a Probable Contact between the Creators of Russian Heroic Epos and the Bulgarians from the Area between the Volga and the Kama Rivers

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the presence in the East Slavic epos of lexemes from foreign languages and that in the quality of a positive evaluation of the hero. The basic material used consists of the eponym of bogatyr characteristic of both East Slavic and Turkic-Mongolian epic tradition. The author considers in detail the views on the problem of Russian scholars from the end of the 19th c. and those of modern Soviet folklore studies. She then traces the presence of the lexeme in Old Russian literature and in Proto-Bulgarian stone inscriptions, and its reflection in the single Turkic languages is also traced. On the basis of this and a circumstantial lexical-semantic analysis, the conclusion is drawn that the word bogatyr was borrowed in Russian language but not later than the 9th c. Its adoption must have been a result of contacts between Turkic and Slavic tribes at a time when the byliny appeared as a genre. It becomes apparent from the linguistic evidence given and the historical data about the relations between Bulgaria of the Volga and the Kama and Russia of Kiev, that it was the language of the Bulgarians from which the word was borrowed in Russian. The observations and conclusions made point to the need for a linguistic approach in genetic and comparative culture studies.

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