lexicon of its Adygian substrate, the Adygian lexical layer constituting probably 20%, and the balance 20% absorbed from the Arabic, Türkic, Persian, and again the languages of a somewhat different set of the nearest historical neighbors. Both languages preserved the substratum grammatical type, absorbing all the new loanwords in the initial agglutinating language. In the absence of the detailed objective studies, these numbers present only an order of expected magnitude deduced from the genetical picture.

There is good historical information about the Persian rulers dispatching and relocating groups of guards to their northern borders, but predominantly, these settlers belonged to non-Persian speaking peoples, and with their numbers too small and their concentrations only around strategic passes like a Daryal Pass, their assimilation into the surrounding populace would be wayhundred years dispersed between numerous tribes of the Caucasus, isolated in their enclaves, but integrated into the cultural and productive life of the host population. Traditionally multilingual, they mastered Adygian dialects, Türkic dialects, Kartvelian dialects, Lezginian dialects etc., in addition to Hebrew as a religious language and their own ancient (ca. 6th c. AD) Farsi vernacular, which still remains a lingua Franco between their scattered communities. Nowadays there are 100,000 Jewish Tats, plus Christian and Moslem Tats who all originated from the same Caucasus population; 525,000 Ossetians; 300,000 Adygians, etc. Numerically-wise, their numbers were quite compatible with the surrounding population, and thus they were in a position to contribute their Semitic genes and their Indo-Persian language to many of their neighbors. Traditionally, the Mountain Jews were engaged in