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:
“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking time for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)