Olga M. Mladenova

Definiteness in Bulgarian: Modelling the Processes of Language Change

Like other Slavic languages, Bulgarian lacked a definite article in its earlier stages. Unlike them, it has one today. The book formulates the rules that govern the use of articles and other markers of (in)definiteness in Modern Standard Bulgarian in comparison with the seventeenth century, and constructs a model of transition from the older system to the modern one, a model which is then evaluated against broader historical and dialect data and placed in a Balkan and general Slavic context.

Language use and enforcement of cultural values

Abstract Traditional Bulgarian society can be differentiated from the modern on the basis of certain theories developed by scholars in sociology of language, social anthropology and semiotics. This paper provides a brief overview of several typological theories of society and culture and examines how they might apply to Bulgaria. It then goes on to posit a co-variation between patterns of language use and the typological characteristics of Bulgarian society over the last two centuries. The second part of the paper demonstrates that the semantic opposition of Generic vs. Specific behaves as predicted in two corpora of texts produced during Bulgaria’s “traditional” and “modern” stages of development, respectively.

Vernacularization of Bulgarian literacy in the seventeenth century: new perspectives

ABSTRACT The homily On the Ten Commandments, attributed to Damaskēnos Stouditēs but in fact authored by his teacher Theophanēs Eleavoulkos, was included in manuscripts of different types and read in the Bulgarian lands for over three hundred years starting in the late sixteenth century. This article reports the results of the textual analysis of 26 copies of the text in Greek, Church Slavonic, vernacular Bulgarian, and Romanian, and shows what light the textual study of a vernacular text in conjunction with its accessible counterparts can shed on the processes of vernacularization that took place in the Bulgarian lands in the seventeenth century. The article concludes that in this period there existed a circle of anonymous conservative men of letters who adhered to the opinion that Church Slavonic in a minimally modernized form should continue to be the written language of Bulgarians. It suggests that they were associated with the Adzhar school of calligraphy and illumination (1630s–1760s). The views endorsed by these men of letters were in contrast with those of their more radical contemporaries who championed a Bulgarian written language based on the vernacular. These two circles of men of letters shared many creative characteristics, probably due to their schooling together.

Early Modern Bulgarian Translations of Sermons by Ēlias Mēniatēs

It was established recently that four sermons by Ēlias Mēniatēs – On Apostolic Vocation, Praise to theDeipara, Eulogy on theDormition of theDeipara and Eulogy on the Nativity of the Deipara – in an early modern Bulgarian translation, made directly from the Greek most probably around the 1720s, were incorporated anonymously into three handwritten miscellanies of the so-called Fourth group of Bulgarian vernacular damaskins. It was clearly a challenge to translate these exquisite rhetorical texts at a time whenwriting in the vernacular was only coming into being. The article discusses textual and linguistic aspects of the translation and its significance in the context of Bulgarian culture. It also sheds light on the translator’s views on proper Bulgarian written language, as far as they were reflected in his work, and on his innovative use of quotation marks and brackets. The emphasis on Virgin Mary makes it possible to narrow down the search for the Northeast Bulgarian highland location of the culture centre, which produced the prototypes of the texts included in the Fourth group of Bulgarian vernacular damaskins, toparish churches andmonasteries devoted to theMother ofGod.