Вопросы ономастики (Dec 2013)
On the Permic Toponymic Substrate in Mari El and in the Middle Course of the Vyatka River (In the Light of the Ethnic Interpretation of Archaeological Cultures). 1
Abstract
The article analyzes the substrate (pre-Mari and pre-Russian) toponymy of the Emanayevskaya and Kocharghinskaya archaeological cultures area of the late 1st — early 2nd millennium AD (in the middle course of the Vyatka River and the territory of the Mari El Republic) in order to verify the hypothesis about the colonization of the areas in question by the ancient Permic (ancient Udmurt) people. Until now for substantiation of the location of the Udmurt urheimat in the studied region some researchers introduced isolated toponymic facts, which were only compared in terms of formal assonance without taking into account the data of the Finno-Ugric historical phonetics and lexicology. The author tries to apply systematic approaches in order to identify linguistic affinities of the substrate toponymy in the middle course of the Vyatka River and the territory of the Mari El Republic. The methods of these approaches were developed and successfully applied by A. K. Matveyev while studying the substrate toponymy of the Russian North. They are based on the searching and isolating of repeating differential elements among toponymic formants, toponymic stems and ethnotoponyms, as well as on the careful consideration of comparative linguistic data and linguistic mapping which are considered to be important parts of such kind of research. The author suggests that a considerable number of substrate toponyms of the region can be explained with reference to the Volga Finnic linguistic data, and that, therefore, those place names represent the traces of an extinct language (or a group of dialects) related both to the ancient Volga Finnic languages and the Proto-Permic language and probably holding an intermediate position between them. The first part of the article contains the analysis of the toponymic formants, as well as of the facts confirming the presence of a Northern Finniс toponymic stratum in the northern part of the studied region, it also marks out the “Odo” Old Udmurt toponymic micro-area and substantiates its later (superstratic) origin. The second part provides the results of the analysis of toponymic stems, which was carried out using the method of ethnic modeling of the substrate toponymy.
