History of The Bulgarian Language - Middle Bulgarian

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 yat 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. when under stress and before a hard consonant, 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 language area.) 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.