Language of Bulgaria

Language is not an ethnic defining feature. This axiom of the old and the new worlds is often forgotten by scholars who identify ethnicity on the basis of an established or presupposed language spoken by the community under investigation. This refuted ethnic-linguistic approach is used in cases when it is assumed that there is no better means of differentiation between “us” and “them”.

The ancient rule states that it does not matter where one is born but what culture one carries. The rule does not implicate the modem meaning of “culture”, which is close to “art”, if not synonymous. The Latin term, which is a translation from the Old Greek “paideia”, means that a set of specific types of moral norms drive and shape a way of thinking, which determines the active social behaviour of man.

In other words, creative activity depends on thinking, as does disruptive activity. This dependence is a part of the mechanism of thought-speech/speech-thought, which is the most productive not just with what is directly said (in the text) but also with what is suggested (the subtext). Thus, the problem of the languages spoken by the Bulgarians during the different periods of their history, and with which they make cultural-literary contacts, takes a new form. In the oldest linguistic period of the historical life of the Bulgarians contacts were established not by means of abstract notions, but through the simplified use of the word, in which the latter obtains its meaning according to the position of the interlocutor, the place, circumstances and pronunciation manner. This kind of expressing doesn’t create versatility of the verbal existence and doesn’t reach the abstract-conceptual functions of speech-thought/thought- speech.

The terminological instruments of the civilisation of the Bulgarians are not built by Turkic-Altaic speech. That possibly existent poor resource has been wiped from the languages and dialects of the Indo-Iranian world. We must underline the fact that the problems of language in Antiquity and the Early Medieval Period are unavoidably associated with the ruling dynasty and with its state-legal, military and clerical functions. As the state is not “of the people” but belongs to the ruler’s house, the “people’s vernacular” does not influence the language, which forms and formulates the activity in the various domains of life and of spirituality in particular. Therefore, the established Iranian borrowings in the ancient Bulgarian language, including the titles and names of the Kans, show the process of the cultural- linguistic unison in the course of the “movement of civilisation” which Bulgarians realised in Euro-Asia from east to west.

Linguistic material collected in recent decades undermines the thesis that the ancient Bulgarians belong to the Turkic-Altaic language group. The vocabulary and grammatical structure, with parallels in the East Iranian relic languages, anthroponomy and etymology belonging clearly to the Iranian onomastic tradition, notions and calendar system similar to the East Iranian (Sogdian) practices, support such a conclusion.

The runic inscriptions left by the ancient Bulgarians along the routes of their migration lead in the same direction. Some of the graphemes closest to the Bulgarian runes are part of the Alan-Sarmatian epigraphy, with a priority over the Turkic (7th—8th centuries) and the Old Hungarian runes (10th century). The graphic-phonetic links between the Bulgarian runes and some of the glagolithic signs indicate that the “development” of the Bulgarian script was a continuous process with three mutually determining phases – Runic, Glagolitic, Cyrillic. This means that the Bulgarians did not get their script as a result of a good turn of fate. The script was a necessity for the growth of their civilisation and historical existence.