IN 1903 Y. WICHMANN PUBLISHED his meritorious work "Die tschuwassischen lehnworter in den permischen sprachen," MSFOu., XXI. iEIe dealt with 161 Votyak 1 words, 34 of which have correspondences in Zyrian.2 Two words were listed only from Zr. In spite of such a striking difference in the spread of the Chuvash 3 borrowings in Vt. and Zr. Wichmann, op. cit., 139, thought that at least a part of the Chv. words in Zr. were borrowed during the Proto-Permic period, when Zr. and Vt. had not yet separated. Wichmann's main criterion in favor of such an assumption was that in his opinion those borrowings had participated in the Proto-Permic changes: *mb to b, as in Vt. gubi, Zr. gob ' mushroom, sponge,' *nd to d, as in Vt. kxdy,4 Zr. kxd 'basket, bo2r,' *ng to 9, as in ? Vt. ugy ' ear-ring.' This criterion and the entire idea of the Proto-Permic borrowings was later strongly contested by N. Poppe5 for whom Wichmann's proofs were unsatisfactory. According to Poppe Vt. gubi, Zr. gob is not a Chv. but a Russian borrowing, and in Vt. kudy, Zr. kud d is only a substitution for Chv. nd. Poppe esp. insisted on the statement that in Proto-Chv. there were only initial kand t-, no 9or d-. Therefore Poppe could not accept Wichmann's conclusion according to which the borrowings from Chv. would offer the main proof for the assumption that the Proto-Permic period lasted until the 8th century. Wichmann, loc. cit., held it possible that a few Chv. borrowings could also have found their way into Zr. after the Proto-Permic period, independently from Vt. This idea was accepted by Gy. Lako, NyK, IL, 170 f., according to whom the South-Zr.-Chv. contacts were approaching their end in the middle of the 13th century. T. E. Uotila in his dissertation v; Zur geschichte des konsonantismus in den permischen sprachen " (MS