ON THE PROBLEM OF VOCABULARY RELIABILITY IN THE STUDY OF ETHNIC HISTORY OF THE PERMIAN PEOPLES
The role of linguistic data in the research of ehtnogenesis and ethnic history is invaluable due to the fact that language units may contain important information concerning the location of the ethnic group in the past, the contacts with its neighbours, historic migrations, etc. It is essential that these facts should have high levels of reliability; it is of utter importance in regards to vocabulary, because it has lower levels of validity for this type of research. The paper deals with the lexical correspondences between the Komi and Udmurt languages which are used to discuss the following questions in the history of the Permian peoples: 1) localization of the ancestral homeland of the Permians; 2) the contacts of the Permians with their neigbours; 3) internal migrations of the population within the continuum of the related languages and dialects. It is suggested that the research of this type should contain more detailed etymology of the vocabulary; at the moment the reliability of vocabulary is not high enough.