James David Bourchier

“ Among the writers of the literary renaissance were George Rakovski (1818–1867) , a fantastic writer of the patriotic type, whose works did much to stimulate the national zeal, Liuben Karaveloff (1837–1879) , journalist and novelist, Christo Boteff (1847–1876) , lyric poet, whose ode on the death of his friend Haji Dimitr, an insurgent leader, is one of the best in the language, and Petko Slaveikoff (died 1895) , whose poems, patriotic, satirical and erotic, moulded the modern poetical language and exercised a great influence over the people. ”

“ This view receives support from the fact that the two nasal vowels of the Church-Slavonic (the greater and lesser ûs) , which have been modified in all the cognate languages except Polish, retain their original pronunciation locally in the neighbourhood of Salonica and Castoria; in modern literary Bulgarian the rhinesmus has disappeared, but the old nasal vowels preserve a peculiar pronunciation, the greater ûs changing to ŭ, as in English “but,” the lesser to ĕ, as in “bet,” while in Servian, Russian and Slovene the greater ûs becomes ū or ō, the lesser e or ya. ”

“ These authorities agree in describing the liturgical language as “Old Bulgarian.” A different view, however, is maintained by Miklosich, Kopitar and some others, who regard it as “Old Slovene.” According to the more generally accepted theory, the dialect spoken by the Bulgarian population in the neighbourhood of Salonica, the birthplace of SS. Cyril and Methodius, was employed by the Slavonic apostles in their translations from the Greek, which formed the model for subsequent ecclesiastical literature. ”

“ Thus zhena-ta is “the woman”; zhena-va or zhena-sa, “the woman close by”; zhena-na, “the woman yonder.” In the borderland between the Servian and Bulgarian nationalities the local use of the article supplies the means of drawing an ethnological frontier; it is nowhere more marked than in the immediate neighbourhood of the Servian population, as, for instance, at Dibra and Prilep. The modern Bulgarian has admitted many foreign elements. It contains about 2000 Turkish and 1000 Greek words dispersed in the various dialects ”