History of the Bulgarian language
Encyclopedia
The History of the Bulgarian language can be divided into four major periods:
Bulgarian as a written language dates back to the end of the 9th century, i.e. from the time of Old Bulgarian.
with a rich declension
system. The language is attested by a number of manuscripts from the late 10th and the early 11th century written at the Preslav
and the Ohrid Literary School
or some of the smaller literary centres surrounding them. It was the medium of a rich literary activity — chiefly in the late 9th and the early 10th century — with writers such as Constantine of Preslav
, John Exarch
, Clement of Ohrid
, Chernorizetz Hrabar and Naum of Preslav (Naum of Ohrid). None of the works of those writers has, however, been preserved in the original; they are all attested by later copies.
to describe the literary language of a number of Slavic peoples from the 9th until the 12th century. Although "Old Bulgarian" is still used in a number of sources with the meaning "Old Church Slavonic", there is a growing tendency for the name to be applied only to the language of manuscripts from the First Bulgarian Empire
(Bulgarian recensions of Old Church Slavonic
), excluding manuscripts from other recensions.
However the changes which had affected the Bulgarian language were too great to hide - in many manuscripts from this period there are hints as to the state of the spoken language. Many of the characteristic traits of Middle Bulgarian started to appear in the Old Bulgarian period but reached their full extent from the 12th century onwards.
As regards Morphology, during this period a confusion of case endings is to be observed along with the increasing use of prepositions in syntax. This led to the loss of case (scholars dispute whether this has anything to do with phonetic changes such as the confusion of the nasals, or whether it is purely due to the influence of the Balkan linguistic union
).
Also typical is the use of the prefixes по- and най- to indicate comparative and superlative degrees of the adjective.
There are also signs of the emergence of a post-positive definite article (the earliest written example is from the Добрейшево Евангелие - "злыотъ рабъ").
The Old Bulgarian relative pronouns иже, яже and еже are replaced by interrogative pronouns with the suffix -то: който, която, което.
A new class of verbs develops with stems in -a-, conjugating like the old athematic
verbs e.g. имам, имаш etc. Another characteristic of this period is the emergence of a shortened form of the future tense marker (ще in the modern literary language and in many dialects, but other dialects have forms such as че and ше, all from the 3rd person singular present tense form of the verb hotjeti). The Renarrative verb form appears, which some scholars say has its roots in Old Bulgarian, while others attribute it to Turkish influence.
- prehistoric period (from the time of the settlement of the Bulgarian Slavs on the BalkansBalkansThe Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
until the late 9th century); - Old Bulgarian (from the late 9th until the 11th century);
- Middle Bulgarian (from the 12th century to the 15th century);
- Modern Bulgarian (from the 16th century onwards).
Bulgarian as a written language dates back to the end of the 9th century, i.e. from the time of Old Bulgarian.
Old Bulgarian
Old Bulgarian was the first literary period in the development of the Bulgarian language. It can be described as a highly synthetic languageSynthetic language
In linguistic typology, a synthetic language is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio, as opposed to a low morpheme-per-word ratio in what is described as an isolating language...
with a rich declension
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
system. The language is attested by a number of manuscripts from the late 10th and the early 11th century written at the Preslav
Preslav Literary School
The Preslav Literary School was the first literary school in the medieval Bulgarian Empire. It was established by Boris I in 885 or 886 in Bulgaria's capital, Pliska...
and the Ohrid Literary School
Ohrid Literary School
The Ohrid Literary School was one of the two major medieval Bulgarian cultural centres, along with the Preslav Literary School . The school was established in Ohrid in 886 by Saint Clement of Ohrid on orders of Boris I of Bulgaria simultaneously or shortly after the establishment of the Preslav...
or some of the smaller literary centres surrounding them. It was the medium of a rich literary activity — chiefly in the late 9th and the early 10th century — with writers such as Constantine of Preslav
Constantine of Preslav
Constantine of Preslav was a medieval Bulgarian scholar, writer and translator, one of the most important men of letters working at the Preslav Literary School at the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century. Biographical evidence about his life is scarce but he is believed to have...
, John Exarch
John Exarch
John Exarch was a medieval Bulgarian scholar, writer and translator, one of the most important men of letters working at the Preslav Literary School at the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century. Evidence about his life is scarce but his literary legacy suggests an excellent...
, Clement of Ohrid
Clement of Ohrid
Saint Clement of Ohrid was a medieval Bulgarian saint, scholar, writer and enlightener of the Slavs. He was the most prominent disciple of Saints Cyril and Methodius and is often associated with the creation of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets, especially their popularisation among...
, Chernorizetz Hrabar and Naum of Preslav (Naum of Ohrid). None of the works of those writers has, however, been preserved in the original; they are all attested by later copies.
Name
The name “Old Bulgarian” was extensively used in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century synonymously with Old Church SlavonicOld Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic or Old Church Slavic was the first literary Slavic language, first developed by the 9th century Byzantine Greek missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius who were credited with standardizing the language and using it for translating the Bible and other Ancient Greek...
to describe the literary language of a number of Slavic peoples from the 9th until the 12th century. Although "Old Bulgarian" is still used in a number of sources with the meaning "Old Church Slavonic", there is a growing tendency for the name to be applied only to the language of manuscripts from the First Bulgarian Empire
First Bulgarian Empire
The First Bulgarian Empire was a medieval Bulgarian state founded in the north-eastern Balkans in c. 680 by the Bulgars, uniting with seven South Slavic tribes...
(Bulgarian recensions of Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic
Old Church Slavonic or Old Church Slavic was the first literary Slavic language, first developed by the 9th century Byzantine Greek missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius who were credited with standardizing the language and using it for translating the Bible and other Ancient Greek...
), excluding manuscripts from other recensions.
Traits
Old Bulgarian is characterised by a number of phonetic, morphological, syntactic and lexical traits (some of which are shared with other Slavic languages and some, such as the reflexes of *tj ([t']) and *dj ([d']), are typical only for Bulgarian), as follows:- phonetic:
- very wide articulation of the YatYatYat or Jat is the thirty-second letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet. Its name in Old Church Slavonic is jěd’ or iad’ . In the common scientific Latin transliteration for old Slavic languages, the letter is represented by e with caron: .The yat represented a Common Slavic long vowel...
vowel ; still preserved in the archaic Bulgarian dialect of the Rhodope mountainsRhodope MountainsThe Rhodopes are a mountain range in Southeastern Europe, with over 83% of its area in southern Bulgaria and the remainder in Greece. Its highest peak, Golyam Perelik , is the seventh highest Bulgarian mountain...
; - Proto-Slavonic reflexes of *tj ([tʲ]) and *dj ([dʲ]):
- very wide articulation of the Yat
| Proto-Slavic | Old Church Slavonic | Bulgarian | Czech | Macedonian | Polish | Russian | Slovak | Slovenian | Serbian |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| *dʲ | ʒd | ʒd | z | ɡʲ | dz | ʒ | dz | j | dʑ |
| *tʲ | ʃt | ʃt | ts | kʲ | ts | tɕ | ts | tʃ | tɕ |
| *ɡt/kt | ʃt | ʃt | ts | kʲ | ts | tɕ | ts | tʃ | tɕ |
-
- use of ra-, la- for the Proto-Slavic õr-, õl-
- use of s for the Proto-Slavic ch before the Proto-Slavic åi
- use of cv-, dzv- for the Proto-Slavic kv’-, gv’-
- morphosyntactic
- use of the dative possessive case in personal pronouns and nouns: рѫка ти; отъпоуштенье грѣхомъ;
- descriptive future tense using the verb хотѣти;
- use of the comparative form мьнии (smaller) to mean younger.
- use of suffixed demonastrative pronouns (тъ, та, то). These developed later into suffixed definite articles.
- orthographical:
- original [ы] and [ъi] merged to [ы]
- sometimes the use of letter 'Ѕ' (dz) was unified with that of 'З' (z)
- verb forms naricają, naricaješi were substituted or alternated with naričą, naričeši
- lexical:
- use of words with proto-BulgarBulgarsThe Bulgars were a semi-nomadic who flourished in the Pontic Steppe and the Volga basin in the 7th century.The Bulgars emerge after the collapse of the Hunnic Empire in the 5th century....
(TurkoTurkic languagesThe Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
-IranianPamir languagesThe Pamir languages are a group of the Eastern Iranian languages, spoken by numerous people in the Pamir Mountains, primarily along the Panj River and its tributaries. This includes the Badakhshan Province of northeastern Afghanistan and the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province of eastern Tajikistan...
) origin, such as кумиръ, капище, чрьтогъ, блъванъ, etc.
- use of words with proto-Bulgar
Middle Bulgarian
Between the 12th and 15th centuries the structure of the Bulgarian language changed quite radically. Few of these changes are to be observed in contemporary written records, thanks to the tendency towards archaicism driven by a desire to preserve the purity of the Cyrilo-Methodian tradition.However the changes which had affected the Bulgarian language were too great to hide - in many manuscripts from this period there are hints as to the state of the spoken language. Many of the characteristic traits of Middle Bulgarian started to appear in the Old Bulgarian period but reached their full extent from the 12th century onwards.
- The phonetic features of Middle Bulgarian include:
- Changes to the nasal vowels, which lose their nasal element in the majority of the Bulgarian dialects. The frequent confusion of the letters for the front and back nasal vowels suggests that the two vowels were phonetically very similar.
- As in other Balkan Slavic languages /ы/ becomes /и/ (although it is thought this change occurred later in Bulgarian).
- The yatYatYat or Jat is the thirty-second letter of the old Cyrillic alphabet. Its name in Old Church Slavonic is jěd’ or iad’ . In the common scientific Latin transliteration for old Slavic languages, the letter is represented by e with caron: .The yat represented a Common Slavic long vowel...
vowel falls together with /e/ in Western dialects, with some manuscripts confusing it not only with e but also with the front nasal letter. In Eastern dialects the situation is more complex, as is reflected in the treatment of jat in the modern literary language (based on the Eastern pronunciation, i.e. [я] when under stress and before a hard consonant, [e] everywhere else. - As for consonants, the East/West distinctions of hardness and softness become more clearly defined, with the hardening of consonants occurring more in the West while the Eastern dialects preserve the opposition hard/soft for most consonants.
As regards Morphology, during this period a confusion of case endings is to be observed along with the increasing use of prepositions in syntax. This led to the loss of case (scholars dispute whether this has anything to do with phonetic changes such as the confusion of the nasals, or whether it is purely due to the influence of the Balkan linguistic union
Balkan linguistic union
The Balkan sprachbund or linguistic area is the ensemble of areal features—similarity in grammar, syntax, vocabulary and phonology—among the languages of the Balkans. Several features are found across these languages though not all need apply to every single language...
).
Also typical is the use of the prefixes по- and най- to indicate comparative and superlative degrees of the adjective.
There are also signs of the emergence of a post-positive definite article (the earliest written example is from the Добрейшево Евангелие - "злыотъ рабъ").
The Old Bulgarian relative pronouns иже, яже and еже are replaced by interrogative pronouns with the suffix -то: който, която, което.
A new class of verbs develops with stems in -a-, conjugating like the old athematic
Athematic
In the Indo-European languages, thematic stems are stems ending in a theme vowel, a vowel sound that is always present between the stem of the word and the attached ending...
verbs e.g. имам, имаш etc. Another characteristic of this period is the emergence of a shortened form of the future tense marker (ще in the modern literary language and in many dialects, but other dialects have forms such as че and ше, all from the 3rd person singular present tense form of the verb hotjeti). The Renarrative verb form appears, which some scholars say has its roots in Old Bulgarian, while others attribute it to Turkish influence.
See also
- Bulgarian languageBulgarian languageBulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...