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( Bulgars)
The Bulgars (also Bolgars or proto-Bulgarians[1]) were a seminomadic people, probably of Turkic descent[2], originally from Central Asia, who from the 2nd century onwards dwelled in the steppes north of the Caucasus and around the banks of river Volga (then Itil). A branch of them gave rise to the First Bulgarian Empire. A leading theory about the origins of the Bulgars is that they were Turkic speaking people from Central Asia, and their language was, alongside with Khazar, Hunnic and Chuvash, a member of the Oghuric branch of the Turkic language family.[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][2][23][24][25][26][27] It is supported, among other things, by the facts that some Bulgar words contained in the few surviving stone inscriptions[28] and in other documents (mainly military and hierarchical terms such as tarkan, bagatur, and probably kan and kanartikin "prince") appear to be of Turkic origin, that the Bulgars apparently used a 12-year cyclic Bulgar calendar similar to the one adopted by Turkic and Mongolian peoples from the Chinese, with names and numbers that are deciphered as Turkic, and that the Bulgars' supreme god was apparently called Tangra, a deity widely known among the Turkic peoples under names such as Tengri, Tura etc.[29] Some also point out the presence of a small number of Turkic loanwords in the Slavic Old Bulgarian language, and the fact that the Bulgars used an alphabet similar to the Turkic Orkhon script, although this alphabet hasn't been satisfactorily deciphered yet fortunately, the Bulgar inscriptions were sometimes written in Greek or Cyrillic characters, most commonly in Greek, thus allowing the scholars to identify some of the Bulgar glosses. Supposedly, the name Bulgar is derived from the Turkic verb bulga "to mix, shake, stir" and its derivative bulgak "revolt, disorder", transliterated most commonly as Bulgars the "people of mixed blood".[30] "Further evidence culturally linking the Danubian Bulgar state to Turkic steppe traditions was the layout of the Bulgars' new capital of Pliska, founded just north of the Balkan Mountains shortly after 681. The large area enclosed by ramparts, with the rulers' habitations and assorted utility structures concentrated in the center, resembled more a steppe winter encampment turned into a permanent settlement than it did a typical Roman Balkan city."[31] Another alternative view is that Bulgar, far from being affiliated to Chuvash, belonged instead to the same branch as all other surviving Turkic languages and more specifically Kazan Tatar. Bulgarian scholar Ivan Shishmanov speculated in 1900 that this was the case,[32] and the same view is espoused also by modern Bulgarist Kazan Tatar linguist Mirfatyh Zakiev.[33]
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