 | This article relies largely or entirely on a single source .(April 2023) |
The Reforms of Bulgarian Orthography are historical changes to the spelling and writing system of the Bulgarian language.
| | This article relies largely or entirely on a single source .(April 2023) |
The Reforms of Bulgarian Orthography are historical changes to the spelling and writing system of the Bulgarian language.
Until the 19th century, Bulgarian was predominantly a spoken language, with no standardized written form of the vernacular dialects. Formal written communication was usually in the Church Slavonic language. For a long, time the Cyrillic script was primarily associated with religious texts, and as such, it was more resistant to changes. The early Cyrillic alphabet from the 9th century, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire, contained 44 letters for 44 sounds. However, by the 19th century, the Bulgarian sound system had reduced its size, which would necessitate reforms.
[1] Formally, people would still write the language with the Church Slavonic writing system. However, informally, most would instead write with Russian rules (adapted to suit Bulgarian), such as о and е for etymological ъ and ь or і for /i/ before vowels (for example, "Болгарія" instead of modern "България"). The definite article, which was unique to Bulgarian among Slavic languages, would be written variously as a suffix (човекътъ), a suffix with a hyphen (човекъ-тъ), and a particle after the word (човекъ тъ).
Two schools of thought would emerge in the 19th century relating to the question of the Bulgarian orthography - the conservative Plovdiv school and the more moderate Tarnovo school. They agreed on the following issues:
The two schools would differ on many cases, such as the treatment of the definite article (the supporters of the Tarnovo school would fuse the article with the word, while their counterparts from Plovdiv would put a hyphen before it), the remnants of the old Slavic vocalic (syllabic) р and л, and the treatment of the archaic case forms, which only remained in writing (other than the vocative case, which would be fully retained). However, by the 1870's, the two schools were falling out of fashion, being seen as too conservative by keeping archaic letters like ы and і, both pronounced as /i/. Instead, a more decentralised era would again take hold, similar to previous decades. Many people, such as Lyuben Karavelov, would write in their own personal orthographies, with changes depending on the author's preference.
As Bulgaria was then part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1869, Bulgarian émigrés founded the so called Bulgarian Literary Society in Brăila, Kingdom of Romania, with Marin Drinov as its chairman. In a number of articles for the magazine "Periodic Magazine," he examined problems of orthography and grammar in the Bulgarian language. In the end, it was indeed Drinov's reform which would become the most widely used, even during the Ottoman Empire. It was defined by the following characteristics:
Drinov's spelling system would play an important role after the liberation of Bulgaria, and many of its innovations can be seen in the modern language today.
In 1878 a new Bulgarian Principality was founded. For the first 15 years of its life, the orthography question would be put on hold, as the government would worry about other things instead. During this time, Marin Drinov's writing system would remain the most used, and alternatives would not catch on.
[1] The first new reform would come in 1892, during the rule of Stefan Stambolov. The then-Minister of Enlightenment, Georgi Zhivkov, would appoint a commission to solve the problem of the orthography. It included high-profile teachers and philologists. After a short period, the commission would come up with a radical new writing system. It was characterised by its removal of traditional letters, moving away from Russian and closer to Serbian. Most agree that this was politically motivated, likely due to Stambolov's notoriously anti-Russian government. The reform is defined by these traits:
The reform was not liked by the population, who saw it as too radical by removing so many traditional letters, and it never managed to be implemented before the end of Stambolov's regime. Most people would continue writing with Drinov's spelling.
Another reform was created by a commission by Konstantin Velichkov, the next minister of enlightenment. The reform entailed:
Despite this reform being considerably less radical, it would not catch on either.
In 1898, the minister of enlightenment was Ivan Vazov, and he too would attempt to reform the Bulgarian spelling. His reforms were:
This reform would fail to catch on simply because Vazov would resign before it could be implemented. The new minister, Todor Ivanchov, would immediately start addressing the spelling. His new orthography would be the same as Vazov's, with the following changes:
Being a mixture of traditional spelling and practical reform, this orthography would become widely accepted. It would go on to be used until 1945.
In 1923, under the prime ministership of Aleksandar Stamboliyski, Stoyan Omarchevski would form another commission on reforming the Bulgarian spelling. He wanted to simplify the spelling so that, in his eyes, people and learners would have an easier time. The reform was:
This spelling would not be seen well by the more conservative, who saw it as destroying symbols of "bulgarianness". However the reform would remain popular among communists and agrarians.
The orthography would, in the end, last only two years, because after Stamboliyski's murder, it would be repealed. Several parts of it were, however, kept, such as the removal of the vowel ь and its replacement by ъ and я. The spelling would remain used by communists, which led to it being banned in 1928.
The last spelling reform would happen in 1945. The new communist government, the Fatherland Front ("Отечествен фронт"), would create a new spelling, less radical than the one of Omarchevski. The reform would be:
The orthography was published in 1945 by the regency council, and the old orthography was deemed illegal. The reform was executed in 6 months, but its implementation continued for over 20 years.
The Russian alphabet is the script used to write the Russian language. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th century for the first Slavic literary language, Old Slavonic. Initially an old variant of the Bulgarian alphabet, it became used in the Kievan Rusʹ since the 10th century to write what would become the modern Russian language.
Russian orthography has been reformed officially and unofficially by changing the Russian alphabet over the course of the history of the Russian language. Several important reforms happened in the 18th–20th centuries.
A yer is either of two letters in Cyrillic alphabets, ъ and ь. The Glagolitic alphabet used, as respective counterparts, the letters (Ⱏ) and (Ⱐ). They originally represented phonemically the "ultra-short" vowels in Slavic languages, including Old Church Slavonic, and are collectively known as the yers.
The Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet is used to write the Bulgarian language. The Cyrillic alphabet was originally developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 9th – 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School.
Little yus and big yus, or jus, are letters of the Cyrillic script representing two Common Slavonic nasal vowels in the early Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. Each can occur in iotated form, formed as ligatures with the decimal i (І). Other yus letters are blended yus (Ꙛ ꙛ), closed little yus (Ꙙ ꙙ) and iotated closed little yus (Ꙝ ꙝ).
Russian orthography is an orthographic tradition formally considered to encompass spelling and punctuation. Russian spelling, which is mostly phonemic in practice, is a mix of morphological and phonetic principles, with a few etymological or historic forms, and occasional grammatical differentiation. The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the models of French and German orthography.
The soft sign is a letter in the Cyrillic script that is used in various Slavic languages. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short or reduced front vowel. However, over time, the specific vowel sound it denoted was largely eliminated and merged with other vowel sounds.
Yeru or Eru, usually called Y in modern Russian or Yery or Ery historically and in modern Church Slavonic, is a letter in the Cyrillic script. It represents the close central unrounded vowel after non-palatalised (hard) consonants in the Belarusian and Russian alphabets, and after any consonant in most of Rusyn standards, where it represents the unrounded close-mid back unrounded vowel sound.
The Ukrainian alphabet is the set of letters used to write Ukrainian, which is the official language of Ukraine. It is one of several national variations of the Cyrillic script. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th century for the first Slavic literary language, called Old Slavonic. In the 10th century, it became used in Kievan Rus' to write Old East Slavic, from which the Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian alphabets later evolved. The modern Ukrainian alphabet has 33 letters in total: 21 consonants, 1 semivowel, 10 vowels and 1 palatalization sign. Sometimes the apostrophe (') is also included, which has a phonetic meaning and is a mandatory sign in writing, but is not considered as a letter and is not included in the alphabet.
The letter Ъ ъ of the Cyrillic script is known as er goläm in the Bulgarian alphabet, as the hard sign in the modern Russian and Rusyn alphabets, as the debelo jer in pre-reform Serbian orthography, and as ayirish belgisi in the Uzbek Cyrillic alphabet. The letter is called back yer or back jer and yor or jor in the pre-reform Russian orthography, in Old East Slavic, and in Old Church Slavonic.
Ukrainian grammar is complex and characterised by a high degree of inflection; moreover, it has a relatively free word order, although the dominant arrangement is subject–verb–object (SVO). Ukrainian grammar describes its phonological, morphological, and syntactic rules. Ukrainian has seven grammatical cases and two numbers for its nominal declension and two aspects, three tenses, three moods, and two voices for its verbal conjugation. Adjectives agree in number, gender, and case with their nouns.
In Russian, the term spelling rule is used to describe a number of rules relating to the spelling of words in the language that would appear in most cases to deviate from a strictly phonetic transcription.
Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the theologians Cyril and Methodius. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. Cyrillic is one of the most-used writing systems in the world. The creator is Saint Clement of Ohrid from the Preslav literary school in the First Bulgarian Empire.
The Smolyan dialect or Central Rhodope dialect is a Bulgarian dialect of the Rhodopean group of the Rup dialects. Its range includes most of the Central Rhodopes, i.e. the region of Smolyan. Its immediate neighbours are the Rhodopean Hvoyna dialect to the north, the Serres-Nevrokop dialect and the Razlog dialect to the west and the Turkish dialects of the Turkish population in the Eastern Rhodopes. To the south, the Smolyan dialect crosses the Greek-Bulgarian border and is spoken by much of the Muslim Bulgarian (Pomak) population in Western Thrace. As a result of the rugged mountainous terrain and the century-long isolation of the region from the rest of the country, the Smolyan dialect is the most idiosyncratic of all Bulgarian dialects and is not readily understandable even for its immediate neighbours.
The Botevgrad dialect is a Bulgarian dialect, member of the Southwestern Bulgarian dialects, which is spoken in the region of Botevgrad and Etropole in northwestern Bulgaria. It is located on the yat boundary and is closely related to the Eastern Bulgarian Pirdop dialect.
JCUKEN is the main Cyrillic keyboard layout for the Russian language in computers and typewriters. Earlier in Russia JIUKEN (ЙІУКЕН) layout was the main layout, but it was replaced by JCUKEN when the Russian alphabet reform of 1917 removed the letters Ѣ, І, Ѵ, and Ѳ. The letter Ъ had decreased in usage significantly after the reform.
Yaryzhka or Orthography of Slobozhanshchyna is the name of the Russian pre-revolutionary orthography used to write and print works in the Ukrainian language in the Russian Empire. Yaryzhka included all the letters that were part of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet of the pre-revolutionary period: ы, ъ, and so on.
The Komi language, a Uralic language spoken in the north-eastern part of European Russia, has been written in several different alphabets. Currently, Komi writing uses letters from the Cyrillic script. There have been five distinct stages in the history of Komi writing:
Since its inception in the 18th century and up to the present, it is based on the Cyrillic alphabet to write the Udmurt language. Attempts were also made to use the Latin alphabet to write the Udmurt language. In its modern form, the Udmurt alphabet was approved in 1937.
Zhelekhivka was Ukrainian phonetic orthography in Western Ukraine from 1886 to 1922, created by Yevhen Zhelekhivskyi on the basis of the Civil Script and phonetic spelling common in the Ukrainian language at that time for his own "Little Russian-German Dictionary", which was published in full in 1886.