Notes on the names of the Khwarizmians in medieval Eurasia

The Hungarian word káliz and what surrounds it. Part 1

Abstract

For the designation for Khwarizm and the Khwarizmians, there was once a form *χwālis, which was used among speakers of an Iranian language and can be traced back to around the middle of the 6th century. The author assumes that the Turkic-speaking peoples — among others the Khazars and the Pechenegs — adapted this word by resolving the consonant cluster in the forms *qālïs and *quwālïs. In the 9th century, Hungarian speakers who lived in the neighborhood of Kazaria borrowed this word in the phonetic form kāli̮s, which was recorded in an 1111 document with the letters caliz. The ḫaliṣ and the ḫuwāliṣ mentioned by Arabic writers in connection with the Khazars and the Pechenegs respectively correspond to the Turkic word *qālïs and *quwālïs. The ethnonyms, Χουάληϛ (Notitia Episcopatuum) and Χαλίσιοι (Joannes Kinnamos) may be a Greek rendering of the Turkic *quwālïs and *qālïs forms respectively. The East Slavic language adapted the form *χwālis from an Iranian language, whose speakers were presumably the Ās people. The name Хвалис does not refer to Khwarizm proper, but was primarily used to designate the Khwarizmians settled on the northern coasts of the Caspian Sea. The activity of the Khwarizmians — mainly in the field of long-distance trade — was not limited to Central and Eastern Europe, but spread all the way to China. The Chinese renderings of their name in the mid-eighth century reflect the Iranian (supposedly Sogdian) form, but among them there is also a Turkic form, Guoli 過利 (˂ *qālïs).