TURKIC INITIAL PHONEME [j] AND ITS BULGAR REFLEXES IN SUBDAILECTS OF THE BASHKIR LANGUAGE
The Bashkirs, one of the ancient Turkic peoples, live in the southern Urals and in its foothills for more than 1,000 years. Probably, formation of the Bashkir people and their language has been going for centuries and started on the basis of local autochthonous population of the Urals. In the Middle Ages the Bashkirs lived side by side, on the one hand, with the the Pechenegs and the Kimaks, on the other, with the Volga Bulgars; besides historians locate a hypothetical ancestral home of the Magyars (lat. Magna Hungaria, Hungaria maior, in Hung. arian Nagy-Magyarorszag) in the Urals. All this historical process should be reflected in the formation of the Bashkir language. Therefore, in the dialects of the Bashkir language one observes diversity in phonetic correspondences in the initial position of the word. One of them is the initial phoneme [j] and its reflexes (j ~ s, j ~ š, j ~ d, j ~ ğ) in the dialects, which we regard to be the effect of the Bulgarian and the Magyar language. The main objective of the article is to demonstrate the listed ablaut phonetic correspondences in specific examples and identify the specific origins of these phenomena. The study has reached the following conclusions: a comparative study of the initial phonemes [j] of the Bashkir language in comparison with its dialectal phonetic correspondences and collected linguistic material from other Turkic languages demonstrates that the Bashkir language is characterized as the only j-language in the Volga area. However, in its subdialects there is sporadic (in some systematic) usage of such j-, s-, d-words that are dialectal phenomena reflecting the former influence of the Bulghar speaking.