Language
Although there is sparse knowledge about the Avar language, if there was some original Avar (Ur-Avar) language, scholars generally posit that the extinct language of the Eurasian Avars belonged to the Oghuric group, showing both strong similarities and discernable differences to Common Turkic. Today, Chuvash is thought to represent the last remaining branch of Oghuric. How well modern Chuvash represents archaic Oghuric remains speculative. Chuvash itself is not intelligible by speakers of Common Turkic, despite having undergone significant degrees of Turkicization in recent centuries.
Whatever the 'original' languages of the various Avar groups, Slavic was adopted as the dominant language of the Avar khaganate.
Read more about this topic: Eurasian Avars
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“The writer’s language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.”
—Paul De Man (1919–1983)