Traditional and modern wine culture of the Turks

Róna-Tas András and Berta Árpád
University of Szeged

Traditional and modern wine culture of the Turks

47th Meeting of the PIAC, Cambridge 2004

The paper is dealing with the terminology of viticulture and wine-drinking of the Old Turks as reflected in the lexicon of the Hungarian language copied from the Turkic languages. Since the ecological boundaries of viticulture in the Middle Ages can be well outlined in East Europe, the territory of the Turkic–Hungarian contacts in the 5th–9th century can be narrowed. The terminology points to a Chuvash type Turk language spoken by Bulghars and Khazars. The paper discusses also the heritage of the terminology in some Kipchak languages which replaced the Bulghar and Khazar languages. Finally it tries to answer the question: what did the Kipchak languages preserve in modern times from the ancient terminology. The paper gives a few samples from the forthcoming monograph of the two authors on the Turkic loanwords in Hungarian.