Anthroponyms of Arabic Origin with Religious Meaning in Bashkir ‘Shejere’

Bashkir genealogies (shejere) constitute a unique genre of manuscrits of the 16th–19th centuries containing valuable materials related to the history, ethnography, literature and language of the Bashkirs. Since their main purpose was to set in chronological order the names of a family’s male members, the names registered in these manuscripts are of a particular interest for onomastic research. The article focuses on the Arabic loan names with religious meaning whose number progressively increased with the growth of the influence of Islam in Bashkir society. The authors provide a semantic classification of those names, making particular emphasis on the Bashkir Muslim names derived from the names of Allah and his Prophets. The authors point out that the meanings of the names closely correlate with their structure, religious personal names being generally formed by compounding. The names of Allah as elements of anthroponyms are used, according to the religious principles, only with particular anthroponymic elements, the most frequent being the stem gabd- ‘servant of God’. Personal male names, as reflected in shejere, are formed from the names of the 25 Prophets mentioned in Quran, the most frequent is the name of the Prophet Muhammad. The article also considers some phonetic features of contemporary Bashkir anthroponyms in comparison with those from shejere. The authors show that traditional anthroponymic elements are conserved only in family names and are absent from modern personal names.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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