THE MAIN STRATA OF THE CHUVASH PERSONAL NAMES IN THE PRE-CHRISTIAN PERIOD

Thousands of traditional names make up a significant layer of the Chuvash language lexical system. Genetically, the Chuvash anthroponyms are divided into Chuvash, Tatar, Arabic, Iranian and Russian basic strata. The ethnic identity of the anthroponymic system is formed by the Chuvash original names. A twostage naming system in the Chuvash language included both the main taboo names and the names that replaced them in everyday life. A significant layer of Tatarisms is singled out among the Chuvash anthroponyms. They compete with the Chuvash names. The Chuvash-Tatar kinship relations and the significant influence of the Tatar culture on the Chuvash in the post-Bulgarian period determine their use. Numerous Tatar and Iranian names have the Tatar roots. The Chuvash name-building on the basis of various combinations of the same components is possible due to the anthroponyms of Islamic origin, namely to the Arab-Iranian and Tatar units. Tatar, Arabic and Iranian names ensure the existence of a common fund of personal names in the Volga-Kama language union. The Russian-Orthodox anthroponymic subsystem mainly includes ancient Greek, Latin and proper Russian names. Being adapted to the peculiarities of the Chuvash language they have undergone significant phonetic, derivational and semantic changes. The Russian names of the 18th century that appeared in the Chuvash language are qualified as both Orthodox and pagan. They are an intermediate link between pagan and modern names which completely coincide with European Christian anthroponyms. The unique fund of the pre-Christian Chuvash names exists due to the onyms combination with various linguistic and genetic basis. It is the phenomenon of a different cultural reality.


INTRODUCTION
Onomastic studies in Chuvash linguistics are not among the priorities. Meanwhile, the names have great potential, opening up new knowledge and research aspects in the field of history of the Chuvash language and linguistic contactology. It is necessary to recognize the primary, traditional onomastic material as an equal part of the Chuvash lexical system.
The names of the pre-Christian epoch are still the usual background of the Chuvash word culture. In particular, they are still found in colloquial speech in the form of names of Christian origin that assimilated with Chuvash ones (Leont'eva, 2006), predominate in fiction (Fomin, Ivanova, 2016). They arouse considerable interest in the scientific and everyday environment, but have not yet received a holistic coverage, which seems unfair. Pagan names are a phenomenon of a different cultural reality, largely mysterious and unknown, capable of clarifying traditional views in Chuvash studies and even moreof forming new theories in the history of the Chuvash language.
According to the periodization proposed by N. I. Egorov, the following epochs should be highlighted in the development of the Chuvash anthroponymicon: 3. the New Bulgarian (Chuvash) epoch (from the XVI century to the present), which initially preserved the Islamic anthroponymicon with a gradual transition to Christian names (Egorov, 1986, p. 95-97).
Most of the traditional Chuvash names belong to the Golden Horde, Khanate of Kazan and New Bulgarian epochs. Tatarisms, Arabisms and Iranisms absolutely fair prevail in the Chuvash anthroponymic dictionary. The layer of names that has not yet been etymologized is probably represented by the names of earlier epochsthe one before the Golden Horde, Middle and even Old Bulgarian.

METHODOLOGY
The purpose of this study is to identify the genetic strata of the anthroponymic system of the Chuvash language of the pre-Christian epoch on the basis of etymological research, to describe their linguistic features and to establish relationships between private national anthroponymic subsystems and others within the framework of the Chuvash onomasticon.
The research material is a corpus of Chuvash anthroponyms, collected by the authors of this work. It contains five thousand names of the pre-Christian epoch, mainly codified in the Chuvash dictionary of N. I. Ashmarin (Ashmarin, 1928(Ashmarin, -1950, the book "Chuvash Pagan Names" by V. K. Magnitsky (Magnitskii, 1905), numerous folklore texts, toponymic reference books, historical researches and documents.
The following research methods are used in this paper: 1) Etymological, which involves the use of phonetic, derivative, and semantic methods with the involvement of a wide historical and linguistic context; 2) Lexicographical, allowing to consider traditional Chuvash names as a systemic phenomenon; 3) Statistical, characterizing linguogenetic strata of names in quantitative terms.

RESULTS
The Chuvash anthroponymic dictionary consists of many linguistic strata (see Table 1). At the same time, the anthroponymicon is dominated by the Turkic layer, which includes the Chuvash, Tatar and all-Turkic layers (54.9 %). Since the basis of naming is such an extra-linguistic factor as the religious consciousness of native speakers, conditionally strata can be combined into three enlarged supra-ethnic formations (see Table 2). The Chuvash pre-Christian anthroponymicon is based on the proper Chuvash, Tatar, Arabic-Iranian and Russian (conditionally) onomasticon.

Names of Proper Chuvash Origin
In the epoch of paganism, the entire life of the Chuvash people was ritualized. A special role was given to the rituals associated with the birth of a child, in particular, to naming. In the perception of the Chuvash people in the pre-Christian epoch, the selection of a name was a particularly important task, designed to determine the future of man.
The Chuvash tradition originally assumed a double naming of a person. The first name is official, taboo, as a rule, benevolent, positive Ĕlkkempi 'beautiful mistress', Itelmes 'the dog won't take', Merčen 'pearl', Šorkka 'white'; the second one is domestic, discordant, usually with derogatory semantics Kurak 'rook', Śüppi 'weedy', Xărăm 'soot'. The named specificity was formed under the influence of pagan representations of the Chuvash people, according to which evil spirits could harm a person with an open name, so their it was assumed to taboo them, followed by the replacement of the main hidden name with a household one.
Scientists agree that the ethnography of the Old Chuvash naming convention is reduced to a single complex (Petrov, 1986, p. 75), moreover, it organically fits into the general Ural-Volga context (Egorova, 2010, p. 110).
The system of the ancient Chuvash naming convention began to actively disintegrate from the middle of the XVIII century, when decisive steps were taken to Christianize the non-Russian peoples of the Volga region. During this period, the Chuvash anthroponymicon became much more complicated. On the one hand, there was its own tradition of naming, on the otherthe Russian system, which brought Orthodox names to the Chuvash environment.
The replacement of pagan names by Orthodox ones was uneven among the Chuvash people. By the beginning of the XIX century, almost the entire Chuvash metropolis has already switched to new anthroponyms borrowed in a substitution form, cf.: Andrey → Untri / Entĕrkke / Entrey / Entri; Ekaterina → Katuś / Kat'uk / Kĕteri / Kĕterin / Kĕterne / Kĕterni / Kĕteruk.
The situation was different in the periphery, which was more committed to pagan traditions: in the Chuvash communities of the Ural-Volga region, traditional names were encountered until the middle of the 20th century (Petrov, p. 75).
In general, the anthroponymy of Chuvash origin itself is the strongest creative field of language activity, which consists in a specific linguistic system of name formation and functioning of names. In the epochs of great historical upheaval, the Chuvash anthroponymicon was subject to a significant influence of foreign languages, but nevertheless managed to preserve the basic elements.

Names of Tatar Origin
Tatar names compete with proper Chuvash names. It seems that the unique Chuvash anthroponymicon of the XVIII century, recorded by scientists, is predominantly a Tatar stratum.
Development of Tatar names in the Chuvash environment is associated with the entry of the Chuvash region in the Golden Horde, and then in the Kazan Khanate. The influence of Islam on the Chuvash people was significant (Yagafova, 2009, p. 10-60), in particular, it changed the onomastic system, which was rebuilt in the Tatar way: many Chuvash villages had Tatar names, Tatar names flooded into the Chuvash environment.
An important feature of Tatar names is associated with such a feature as the entry into an indissoluble connection of name-forming components with Arabic and Persian formants: Aykine from Tatar  In the field of derivation, Tatarism is characterized by complexity. The vast majority of Tatar names are tworooted, which is dictated by the creative approach to name formation, the desire to invest more useful potential and goodwill in the name.
From the point of view of derivative typology, all the variety of names of Tatar origin in the Chuvash language is represented by the following models: 1. Attention is drawn to such a peculiarity of the names, as their full-phrasal character (see 2.4).
The most interesting point in the functioning of the Chuvash names of Tatar origin is the developed compatibility of components with each other, which eventually creates an anthroponymic system with potentially infinite possibilities to form a diverse onomasticon (see Table 3).

Aχpălat Akparăs
Aktirek Aktimĕr Yaštirek Yaštimĕr The broad admission of Tatarism in the Chuvash anthroponymicon is due to the kinship of the Chuvash and Tatar languages. At the same time, names of Tatar origin cannot be analyzed by means of the Chuvash language, and in this case they have an advantage over the names of proper Chuvash origin. Meanwhile, tatarism-anthroponyms possess important qualities that allow to produce a significant number of names on the material of limited language means.

Names of Arab and Iranian Origin
Arab and Iranian borrowings are one of the mysterious and attractive topics in Chuvash linguistics. According to approximate estimates, in the modern Chuvash language there are at least three hundred of them and two-thirds of the borrowings are Arabic words (Skvortsov, 1968, p. 139-140). Observations show that the Chuvash realizations are phonetically farther from the Arab-Iranian prototypes than the Muslim Tatar ones. This is due to the Islamic religion based on the Arabic language, as well as the specifics of the sound system of the Chuvash language itself.
In terms of derivation, the names of Arab and Iranian origin can be divided into simple and complex names: Very often, names can no longer be called Arabic or Iranian in the full sense of the word, because they do not exist in the original languages, and they have occurred on either a Tatar or Chuvash basis.
A distinctive feature of the Arabic and Iranian anthroponyms is their participation in the formation of a common fund of personal names of the peoples of the entire Ural-Volga region. In this regard, anthroponyms-Arabisms and Iranisms are an important component that forms the Volga-Kama language union.

Names of Russian Origin
Orthodox names in the Chuvash phonetic design are a kind of transitional layer of names between authentic pagan and Orthodox anthroponyms in their modern sounding.
Phonetic adaptation of Russian names to the requirements of the Chuvash language is the main method of their becoming like Chuvash. The main substitutional processes in the Chuvash environment are aimed at replacing the voiced consonants of the Russian language, as well as [ In some cases, in borrowing Russian anthroponyms by the Chuvash language there is an unusual selection of parallel names, for example: Otok = Anton, T'akkăm = Maksim, Yulpike = Χristina. These examples probably reflect the tradition of combining an unofficial pre-Christian name with an official Orthodox name given to the same person at birth and baptism.
Russian names, penetrating into the Chuvash language through oral means, were subjected to various changes-mainly phonetic, sometimes word-forming, rarely semantic. As a result, the original names could be transformed beyond recognition. However, this kind of transformation allowed the formation of a unique system of Chuvash anthroponyms of Orthodox origin.

CONCLUSIONS
The traditional pagan anthroponymicon of the Chuvash language is Turkic in linguistic terms and Islamic in religious terms. Arabisms and Iranisms entered the Chuvash language through the medium of Tatar. Tatar, Arabic and Iranian names ensure the existence of a common fund of personal names in the Volga-Kama language union.
The foreign-language onomasticon is deeply embedded in the lexical system of the Chuvash language. Borrowed names on a Chuvash basis have passed through phonetic, word-formation and semantic transformations. Most likely, their number exceeds the lexical fund of the Chuvash language. To a large extent, the diversity of names is dictated by common naming models that allow for a wide range of component combinations.
Substituted pagan names, conditioned by Orthodoxy, became an intermediate stage in the transition of the Chuvash anthroponymicon to the Christian European way. However, distorted Russian names still function in the Chuvash language, reminiscent of another cultural reality that occurred in the recent past.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The study was financially supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the Chuvash Republic as part of scientific project No. 18-412-210002 p_a.