Bulgarian and "Macedonian" language : historical background

[Ptolemy]

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.


Old Bulgarian
SYLLABICATION: Old Bulgarian


The medieval Slavic language used in the translation of the Bible by Cyril and Methodius and in early literary manuscripts and still used as a liturgical language by several churches of Eastern Orthodoxy. Also called Church Slavonic


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The Columbia Encyclopedia: Sixth Edition. 2000.


Bulgarian language


Member of the South Slavic group of the Slavonic subfamily of the Indo-
European family of languages (see Slavic languages). Bulgarian is the native tongue of some 9 million people, most of whom live in Bulgaria, where it is the official language. It is also spoken to some extent in bordering and nearby countries.


The Bulgarian language lacks definite rules for stress; therefore, the accent of every word must be learned individually. Unlike most other Slavic tongues, Bulgarian has a definite article. This is in the form of a suffix joined to the noun. Another difference between Bulgarian and most other Slavic languages is that Bulgarian has almost completely dropped the numerous case forms of the noun. It uses position and prepositions (like English) to indicate rammatical relationships in a sentence instead of cases (like Russian). Despite these differences, Bulgarian closely resembles the other Slavic languages, especially with regard to grammar. A modified form of the Cyrillic alphabet is used for writing Bulgarian.


The Bulgarian language is the earliest written Slavonic language. Its development comprises four main periods: pre-literal (till the 9th century), Old Bulgarian (9th-12th centuries), Middle Bulgarian (12th- 14th centuries), and Modern Bulgarian (15th century and later). The beginnings of the Old Bulgarian language date back to the creation of an alphabet (the Glagolitsa) in 862 by Constantine Cyril the Philosopher and Methodius. At the end of the 9th century another Old Bulgarian alphabet was created - the Cyrillic alphabet. The first Glagolitic and Cyrillic Old Bulgarian manuscripts were written. Bulgaria became a center of Slavonic culture and literacy. The Old
Bulgarian language is a basis for the creation of Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Croatian variants and gained the significance of a universal literary Slavonic language. During the Bulgarian National Revival the modern Bulgarian literary language is formed. It is characterized by dropping of the case forms, by the use of the definite article, by nine tenses, four moods, etc.


See S. B. Bernshtein, Short Grammatical Sketch of the Bulgarian Language (tr. 1952); H. I. Aronson, Bulgarian Inflectional Morphophonology (1968); C. Rudin, Aspects of Bulgarian Syntax (1986).
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Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics


Edited by R.E.Asher and J.M.Y.Simpson (Oxford, New York, Seoul and
Tokyo: Pergamon Press).

[Ptolemy]

BULGARIAN AND MACEDONIAN


Bulgarian is the official language of the Republic of Bulgaria and is spoken as their native language by about 8.5 million people within the boundaries of Bulgaria. It belongs to the groups of South Slavonic languages, alongside Serbo-Croat and Slovene, and is also one of the Balkan languages (forming the Balkan Sprachbund), together with Romanian, Albanian, Modern Greek and, partially, Serbian.


The issue of the Macedonian language, in official use as separate literary language in the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia since 1944 (about 1.5 million speakers), is heavily charged with political emotions on the part of Bulgaria, Greece, and the former Yugoslavia, and has to be approached carefully.


From a strictly linguistic point of view Macedonian can be called a Bulgarian dialect, as structurally it is most similar to Bulgarian. Indeed, Bulgarian scholars reject Macedonian as an individual language,
but since it now has the status of a literary language most other scholars accept its independent existence.


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Historical background


The name 'Bulgarian' goes back to the Proto-Bulgarian tribes or Bulgars who in the seventh century AD settled in the eastern part of the Balkan Peninsula, to which a number of Slavic tribes had moved in the previous
century. The adoption of Orthodox Christianity in the second half of the ninth century brought about the necessity of creating a Slavonic literary language to serve the purposes of the Church. This was achieved by the so-called 'Slav apostles,' the brothers Cyril and Methodius, who produced the first translation of the Christian Scriptures from Byzantine Greek into Slavonic.


This Slavonic language was 'Old Church Slavonic,' which is also called 'Old Bulgarian. Essentially it was a literary language based on the dialect used by the two brothers.


The first alphabet used was the 'Glagolitic' alphabet, whereas the 'Cyrillic' alphabet, from the name of Cyril, was created by the brothers' disciples. The Cyrillic alphabet is mainly based on the Greek alphabet, supplemented by new graphemes to render specifically Slavonic phonemes.


The original manuscripts have survived only in the form of later copies.


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[Ptolemy]

History of the language


The history of the Bulgarian language can be divided into three periods: 'Old Bulgarian' (ninth to eleventh centuries), Middle Bulgarian (twelfth to fourteenth centuries), and 'Modern Bulgarian' (fifteenth century onwards).


Old Bulgarian was a synthetic language, still quite close to 'Proto-Slavonic' or Common Slavonic.' Middle Bulgarian was a transitional stage during which the language underwent crucial changes leading to its emergence as a 'Balkan' language with analytic characteristics; owing to the strong tradition of the liturgical literature, however the actual changes found in the vernaculars were hardly reflected in the manuscripts.
The vernaculars of Modern Bulgarian provided the basis of the Modern Bulgarian literary language. The same evolution was followed in principle also by Macedonian.


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History of the 'literary' language


The history of the Bulgarian language has to be treated differently from the history of the literary language with its codified character.


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Both the Old Bulgarian literary language of the ninth century and the Modern Bulgarian literary language of the nineteenth century were initiated in the western or 'Macedonian' territories. However, in both cases the focus of literary activities then moved eastwards.
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The Modern Bulgarian literary language is mainly based on the North- East Balkan dialects of the eastern territories with a few elements from the West Bulgarian dialects, whereas literary Macedonian is based
on the central dialects of the 'West Bulgarian linguistic territory.'


This, of course, led to certain differences in the forms of the now two literary languages.

Attempts to create a Macedonian literary language started only this century.
Modern Bulgarian uses a Cyrillic alphabet, which after the orthographic reform of 1945 is virtually identical to the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet used by literary Macedonian is based on the Serbian variant of Cyrillic.


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Bulgarian dialects


In a simplified picture, the Bulgarian linguist territory is divided into the East Bulgarian and the West Bulgarian dialects.

In the 1990s Macedonian, as well as the dialect of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, are part of the West Bulgarian dialects.


The main distinction lies in the realization of Proto-Slavonic "'e" (called 'yat'), which yielded "ja" and "e" in East Bulgarian, but only "e" in the West, e.g., "melko" 'milk' > South Slavonic "ml'eko" > East Bulgarian "mljako", but "mleka" (plural) and West Bulgarian and Macedonian "mleko", "mleka". Macedonian further distinguishes between Northern, Central and Southern dialects.


Late twentieth-century literary Bulgarian and Macedonian have to be regarded as representatives of both the 'Slavonic' languages and the 'Balkan' languages.


Owing to historical circumstances Bulgarian and Macedonian have acquired a large number of Turkish and Greek loan-words and loan- expressions.


In Bulgarian most of them are avoided in the literary language, but they survive in colloquial speech. Only a few of them are part of the basic vocabulary, for instance, "tavan" 'ceiling' (Turkish), "moliv" 'pencil' (Greek).

Macedonian developed a more 'benevolent' attitude towards them.
Furthermore, the Bulgarian lexicon is full of Russian elements (mainly from the nineteenth century), whereas Macedonian has experienced an analogous influence from Serbian.


Sample sentences:


Bulgarian: Toj chranese naroda sas slovoto, onzi istinski chljab, kojto ukrepva sarcata, no v sastoto vreme toj ne zabravjase da chrani i telesno onezi, za koito vidja, ce imat nuzda ot takava chrana.


Macedonian: Toj go hranese narodot so slovoto, onoj vistinski leb sto gi ukrepuva srcata, no vo isto vreme toj ne zaboravase da gi hrani i telesno onie sto gledase oti imaat nuzda ot takva hrana.


The two sentences render the same original, which may be translated:

'He nourished the people with the word, that real bread which fortifies the heart, but at the same time he did not forget to nourish also with earthly food those who he realized needed such food'


A literal translation of the Bulgarian: 'He nourished people-the with words-the, that real bread, which fortifies hearts-the, but in same-the time he not forgot that [he] nourishes also physically those, about whom [he] saw, that [they] have need of such food.'


A literal translation of the Macedonian: 'He it nourished people-the with word-the, that real bread that them fortifies hearts-the, but at [the] same time he not forgot that [he] them nourishes also physically those that [he] looked/saw that [they] have need of such food'.

J.Henniger,


Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (1994), vol.1, p.429


Edited by R.E.Asher and J.M.Y.Simpson (Oxford, New York, Seoul and
Tokyo: Pergamon Press).