The importance of the Bulgarian alphabet

Another significant quality of the Old Bulgarian language and the literature of the early medieval period is their closeness to the language spoken by the people. There is no similar closeness between the spoken and the written languages in Byzantium. The situation in Central and Western Europe, where Latin stayed in the church, science and state offices but where, in all other domains, it was replaced by the evolving national languages, was comparable. Thus the artificial literary languages remained without any chance of new, live additions, which was characteristic of the official language spoken by the Bulgarians.

Sometimes the question is posed, and not without reason as to whether the design of the Old Bulgarian script did not distance the country from Latin-writing Europe. The danger that the use of one universal script will hamper the development of the unique national cultures is not valid. The Western Slavs, the peoples of the Germanic and the Romance groups did not lose their cultural individuality until the use of the national languages was established in Europe. The initial universal period left the common core and the closeness of culture which clearly separates the Catholic-Protestant Latin-writing community from the Slavonic-Byzantine community in the East. Yet, the union of Bulgarian culture with the sphere of Byzantine Greek-writing culture was inevitable. At the time of the cultural and state stabilisation of the Bulgarians on the Danube, Byzantium was the leading factor. Bulgaria borrowed from the cultural treasury of Byzantium but also preserved the borrowings in its language using its own code, thus preventing the otherwise unavoidable Greek assimilation, which would have had a greater impact than the moderate Latin assimilation in the West.

The changes in the language of the Bulgarians can be seen during the whole medieval period of the state. It is the natural development bulgaria trips of a living literary language, which develops in synchrony with the phonetic and the morphological changes of its spoken form.

According to written sources, Slavonic peoples from Central, Southeastern and Eastern Europe understood each other until the 11th century irrespective of the foreseeable specificity of the tongues. The lack of Bulgarian state organs with normative functions and of written correspondence in the 15th- 19th centuries caused chaotic change stimulated by the Bulgarians’ inner linguistic feeling, which distanced the Modern Bulgarian language from the other Slavonic languages in the following ways:

– Bulgarian is the only language in the Slavonic group which has a post-positioned definite article with nouns, adjectives, numerals, pronouns and participles;

– Bulgarian is the only language in the Slavonic group which has remained analytical – it has no inflections and cases, only nominative, vocative and, rarely, accusative;

– Bulgarian is the only language in the Slavonic group which forms the comparative and superlative degrees of adjectives, of some nouns and verbs with the particles “po” [more] and “nai” [most];

– Bulgarian is the only language in the Slavonic group which has the so-called dual personal pronoun;

– Bulgarian is the only language in the Slavonic group which lacks the non-finite mood (infinitive).

The importance of the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet is marked not only by its place in the spiritual space of medieval Europe, together with the Greek and Latin scripts, but also by its introduction into the system of the European Union (with Bulgaria’s imminent accession).