Abstract:

The reconstruction of the culture of an individual ethnos based on the data of toponymy, the study of the correlation of culture and language in the diachronic aspect and in connection with the representation of the world view by the toponymy of a particular region is one of the most relevant tasks of ethnolinguistics. The author’s study confirms the presence of chronological strata previously established by toponymists in Bashkir toponymy, according to which the most ancient stratum is made up of geographical names of Indo-Iranian origin. As is known from history, in the II – I millennium BC there was an Indo-Iranian community – Aryans, the ancestors of modern Indian and Iranian peoples. There are various hypotheses about their ancestral home. As the author's research shows, Proto-Indo-Iranians left a noticeable mark in the Southern Urals. She revealed a rather large stratum of Indo-Iranian substrate geographical terms, preserved in toponyms, as well as in the dialect vocabulary of the Bashkir language. According to the author, the phenomenon of the substrate is not only a linguistic, but also an ethnic phenomenon, as evidenced by the Bashkir ethnonyms of Indo-Iranian origin and the toponyms associated with them. In this article, the Indo-Iranian stratum is associated with the mythology of Iranian and Indian peoples, with images of Indian and Iranian theonymy, with geographical terminology that characterizes the features of the water network.

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