The Turkic variety used by the Khazars

This chapter reconsiders the affiliation of the Turkic variety used by the Khazars, returning to the author's earlier study (Erdal 2007) in response to Róna-Tas and Berta's West Old Turkic (2011), which concludes that the Bulgars and the Khazars spoke one and the same dialect. It outlines the distinction between r-Turkic (Bulgar-Chuvash) and z-Turkic, notes that many early Turkic loans in Hungarian show z-Turkic rather than r-Turkic features, and argues that the label "West Old Turkic" is used inconsistently and that onset q > x is an areal rather than a genetic feature. Two cases in which Róna-Tas and Berta made Khazar terms accord with Hungarian data are examined: the Khazar name of the Volga, which Greek and Muslim sources, including Ibn Faḍlān, show with onset /a/ rather than /ä/; and the personal name BWLŠCY in the Hebrew Schechter text, which the chapter, following Golden, reads as boluşçı 'helper', rejecting its proposed derivation from bošog via lambdacism as a bending of Turkic etymology to fit Hungarian búcsú. The chapter then turns to the funeral feast term recorded with an initial delta by Menandros (6th century) for the qaɣan Istämi and by Theophanes for the early 8th-century Khazars, which corresponds to yoɣ in the Orkhon inscriptions. Arguing against reading the delta as [ʤ], it concludes that Proto-Turkic onset /d/, preserved in Mongolic cognates, survived in Khazar into the early 8th century, so that Khazar Turkic was in this respect more archaic than contemporary Orkhon Turkic, whichever dialect grouping it belonged to.