# Bulgarian language origin



## dihydrogen monoxide

What kind of Slavic language do Bulgarians speak since Bulgarians in Europe are not of Indo-European origin but some Turkic tribe. Which Slavic language did they take?


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## Athaulf

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> What kind of Slavic language do Bulgarians speak since Bulgarians in Europe are not of Indo-European origin but some Turkic tribe. Which Slavic language did they take?



It's a South Slavic language. Back in early medieval times, there wasn't a clear differentiation between Slavic languages. It was just a large continuum of dialects, and even the most remote ones were still mutually intelligible without too many problems. 

Also, we've had a discussion about the ethnic origins of Bulgarians last year, but unfortunately, such topics are usually so controversial and burdened with passions that starting a discussion about them is like striking a hornet's nest...


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## dihydrogen monoxide

But does historical evidence show of which Slavic tribe are we talking about or there's no single clue?


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## avok

By the way, "Indo-European" is used for languages. Peoples who speak "Indo European" languages are not necessarily genetically related.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Bulgarian today is an Indo-European languages Slavic subgroup. But we are talking about assimilations of Bulgarians. They took some Slavic language and made it their own, just like the French did, for one time they spoke Germanic language and now speak Romance language. Bulgarians are not Indo-European people and so they had to assimilate with some Slavs sometime in the past and I'd like to know which Slavic tribe spoke the language that most likely resembles present Bulgarian. I know that answer may be not known or known, because we have no written records, but maybe reconstructions did some of the work. If you know, there are two nations who call themselves Bulgarians, the ones are that speak Indo-European language and the other ones that speak some sort of Turkic language.


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## Darina

According to one of the theories, the Bulgarians did not "take" the language but rather merged with the so called Seven Slavic clans and the tribe Severi (also Slavic). With the time their language disappeared, only the name Bulgaria and a few words remained. 
To avoid confusion, historians use the term "Bulgars" when talking about the old Bulgarians.



> and the other ones that speak some sort of Turkic language.


Do you mean the Balkarians?


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## dihydrogen monoxide

If you use the term? You've answered my question. What do we know about tribe Severi?


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## Outsider

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Bulgarian today is an Indo-European languages Slavic subgroup. But we are talking about assimilations of Bulgarians. They took some Slavic language and made it their own, just like the French did, for one time they spoke Germanic language and now speak Romance language. Bulgarians are not Indo-European people and so they had to assimilate with some Slavs sometime in the past and I'd like to know which Slavic tribe spoke the language that most likely resembles present Bulgarian. I know that answer may be not known or known, because we have no written records, but maybe reconstructions did some of the work. If you know, there are two nations who call themselves Bulgarians, the ones are that speak Indo-European language and the other ones that speak some sort of Turkic language.


That interpretation assumes that there has always existed an individualized "Bulgarian people", who migrated in bulk to present-day Bulgaria, and then adopted a local language. You are still confusing linguistic communities with peoples, in my opinion.

Here's a scenario that I find more likely:

Once upon a time, there was no Bulgaria, no Bulgarians, and no Bulgarian language. There was a people in Asia who spoke a certain Turkic language. Some of those people — most likely a small percentage of them — migrated to the Balkans during the Middle Ages. They kept speaking their Turkic language for a while, but, because they were so few compared to the locals, eventually their descendants assimilated with the Balkanic population, and even adopted the local language, a medieval variety of Slavonic. At this time, it's possible that Old Slavonic hadn't yet branched into the various Slavic languages we are familiar with in the 21st century.

Those medieval Turkic-speaking migrants came to be known as the Bulgars in the region, and because they suceeded in becoming politically dominant (or at least influential), the name "Bulgar" eventually extended to all the inhabitants of the region, including the speakers of Slavonic — who were no doubt the vast majority. In the course of conflicts with the Byzantines, the region where they lived came to be known as "Bulgaria" (after the people who lived there), and its inhabitants as Bulgars or, later, Bulgarians. When their language had diverged enough from Old Slavonic to be regarded as a language of its own, it was called "Bulgarian".

Thus were born Bulgaria, the Bulgarian people, and the Bulgarian language. They were formed gradually by certain historical events. They were not some abstraction that had always existed from the beginning of time, waiting to be materialized. Nor did they arrive to Bulgaria from some other place in bulk. There was some migration, but for the most part the Bulgarians are descended from people who lived where Bulgaria is presently located.

I apologize for any historical inaccuracies I've committed, and will be thankful for corrections.


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## Darina

Yes, Outsider!
In fact, The Bulgarians must have been fewer than the Slavs and they were assimilted by them, not the other way round. This explains why we speak a Slavic language now. The Turkic theory is one of 17 theories, althogh the most popular. The confusion comes from the controversial chronicles (mainly Greek) - ones the Bulgaians were called Slavs, ones Unogonduri but I am affraid this is off topic.
Now, Some linguists try to "reconstruct" the three main Slavic languages (Eastern, Western and Southern) from 3-8 century but I am not an expert and I do not know how realistic this study is.
H2O, Severi probably lived somewhere around the Balkan mountain because they were asked to protect the Balkan passes during the battle against Byzantium in 680.


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## OldAvatar

Darina said:


> Yes, Outsider!
> H2O, Severi probably lived somewhere around the Balkan mountain because they were asked to protect the Balkan passes during the battle against Byzantium in 680.


They were living most probably somewhere on Danube river's banks, since the name of Severin (actual Turnu Severin in Romania - Severin Tower) town bear their name.
Also, their name has to do something with North (_sever_ in Slavic languages), so living in the Balkans mountains was most unlikely, since the region is, more or less, the Southern limit of Slavic populations.


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## Darina

Thanks, OldAvatar! It sounds logical.


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## Darina

See entry South Slavs in Wikipedia! It shows the migration of the Slavic tribes before, during and after the formation of Bulgaria. It is also explained how Bulgarians were gradually slavonicized as more and more Slavic tribes joined the Bulgarian League.
Looking to the map from 700 AD I could conclude that my ancestors were Strymonoi. 
Severi(ans) are located quite South but OldAvatar can be still right as they were moved from their original homeland to protect strategically important positions.


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## sokol

You're opening Pandora's Box again here, dihydrogen monoxide.

Basically one has to be careful to propose the existence of a 'people' in the past; this has been done many times by historicians, and many times to sustain some ideology - so you're walking on thin ice here (especially with Bulgarians).

Because there certainly didn't yet exist a Bulgarian people in the 12th century - not a people in the sense we understand this nowadays - and _especially _so in 'former Yougoslavia' nations as well as 'former Warsaw treaty nations'. The 'nation-state' people in this region usually is understood as 'you speak this language and therefore you belong to this people'. (This is not the case in the German speaking area - because how then could exist the Austrian and Swiss nation - nor in the Spanish and English speaking areas, for obivous reasons too.)

So in the Middle Ages there was no 'Bulgarian people', neither was there a 'Bulgarian language' but up to a certain point in history (exact time not known) only an 'Old Church Slavonic language' beginning to split itself into dialects and several other languages (the Turkic Bulgarian being only one of them, in this area).
(There wasn't even a German people then, nor an English one: because the nation as we know it today didn't exist yet.)

But as already some foreros have written excellent posts about the dangers of involving oneself in Bulgarian theories I won't write more about them here, for now.


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## Athaulf

sokol said:


> Because there certainly didn't yet exist a Bulgarian people in the 12th century - not a people in the sense we understand this nowadays - and _especially _so in 'former Yougoslavia' nations as well as 'former Warsaw treaty nations'. The 'nation-state' people in this region usually is understood as 'you speak this language and therefore you belong to this people'.



In the Balkans, this is true only for ethnic oppositions between peoples speaking very distant languages (e.g. Albanians vs. Greeks vs. Romanians vs. various Slavic speakers). Among Slavs themselves, it was much more complicated. Modern South Slavic ethnicities emerged in the 19th and 20th century due to combined influences of borders between old empires and their constituent parts, religion, and the choice of Slavic speakers in various regions to redefine their vernacular language as a "dialect" of this or that newly coined artificial standardized language and identify themselves with the corresponding newly awakened national consciousness (which was, just like everywhere else in Europe, given a pseudohistorical basis by projecting it into the far, semi-mythical past). Therefore, you'll find many places where people speaking the exact same local Slavic dialect will perceive themselves as belonging to different ethnicities. For example, in Bosnia, the dividing criterion was mainly religion, while the border between Croats and Slovenians emerged according to the ancient borders between the Habsburg crown lands and the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen. To avoid stirring hornets' nests, I won't mention any concrete places where a smooth dialect continuum was broken by more or less arbitrary local identification with newly coined national standard languages, sometimes as a result of random outcomes of 19th and 20th century wars, but I'm sure you can think of such examples too.

Needless to say, this collective schizophrenia is alive and well even today, despite all the blood and misery it has wrought in the last century, and the local linguists and (especially) historians are usually only too eager to promote it and become its partisans. Thus, rational discussion  of any historical issues that touch on the local ethnogenesis is still hardly possible in any South Slavic nation. Sad, but true.


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## Darina

> So in the Middle Ages there was no 'Bulgarian people', neither was there a 'Bulgarian language' but up to a certain point in history (exact time not known) only an 'Old Church Slavonic language' beginning to split itself into dialects and several other languages (the Turkic Bulgarian being only one of them, in this area).


 
I don't understand how the Old Church Slavonic could split into dialects and Turkic languages?


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## sokol

Athaulf said:


> Therefore, you'll find many places where people speaking the exact same local Slavic dialect will perceive themselves as belonging to different ethnicities. For example, in Bosnia, the dividing criterion was mainly religion, while the border between Croats and Slovenians emerged according to the ancient borders between the Habsburg crown lands and the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen. To avoid stirring hornets' nests, I won't mention any concrete places where a smooth dialect continuum was broken by more or less arbitrary local identification with newly coined national standard languages, sometimes as a result of random outcomes of 19th and 20th century wars, but I'm sure you can think of such examples too.


I can very well imagine them, yes. 

I have done some research on this area in the late 1990ies for my magisterial thesis and although I am a little bit out of tune now and not up to date at all some nice anecdotes from that time still nestle in my mind. (I only fear they're off-topic here  so just a hint of one of them: and that is, Bosnian Serbs beginning to switch to ekavian standard language despite their dialect being (i)jekavian because ekavian was considered 'proper' Serbian by them; I don't know if it stayed that way or if this only was an episode.)



Darina said:


> sokol said:
> 
> 
> 
> So in the Middle Ages there was no 'Bulgarian people', neither was there a 'Bulgarian language' but up to a certain point in history (exact time not known) there only was, on the one hand, an 'Old Church Slavonic language' beginning to split itself into dialects and, on the other hand, several other languages (the Turkic Bulgarian being only one of them, in this area).
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I don't understand how the Old Church Slavonic could split into dialects and Turkic languages?
Click to expand...


Sorry, this of course isn't about Old Church Slavonic splitting into several Slavic dialects AND non-Slavic non-IE languages: my phrasing probably was a little bit unlucky.
I should have added 'on the one hand' and 'on the other hand' as I have now done here in this quote.


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## Darina

Now I see what you mean. 
Of course, there was time when Slavic and Bulgarian languages existed together.
The Old Church Slavonic was based on local Slavic dialects (will you agree) and it was the first standard Slavic languages with its own alphabet - the Glagolic. Fact is, that it became the official language of the Bulgarian state in the middle of 9. century and that was the death sentence for the other languages on its teritory.


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## sokol

Darina said:


> The Old Church Slavonic was based on local Slavic dialects (will you agree) and it was the first standard Slavic languages with its own alphabet - the Glagolic. Fact is, that it became the official language of the Bulgarian state in the middle of 9. century and that was the death sentence for the other languages on its teritory.


Now this is where theories diverge.

Of course Old Church Slavonic always was based on local Slavic dilaects: even though, when the first documents were written, the language still seemed to be quite homogenic we should assume that over the huge area over which Slavic already had spread there were _at least_ minor dialect varieties. They aren't, however, represented in script (or only in very limited numbers), and of course there still was no sign at all of the loss of declension in Bulgarian and certain features of the Balkan Sprachbund.

There's additional reading here about it (and still more threads on WRF - search with Google and the phrase 'site:forum.wordreference.com bulgarian sprachbund' which limits the search to WRF).
The features which later became so typical for Bulgarian only did show at some point in the 13th or 14th century (that we do not know exactly; for sure we know that this happened before the Turkish rule on the Balkans).

So one thing is for sure: Bulgarian as a language as it is today most certainly did not exist already in the 9th century when 'Slavs living in the region that is now Bulgaria' still used basically Old Church Slavonic style dialects; rather the Bulgarian language most likely slowly developped over the Middle Ages and was approximately what it is now in the 15th century.


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## modus.irrealis

Athaulf said:


> In the Balkans, this is true only for ethnic oppositions between peoples speaking very distant languages (e.g. Albanians vs. Greeks vs. Romanians vs. various Slavic speakers).


Even there, it's not so simple. There are non-Greek speaking groups that have identified as Greek (the Arvanites for example) where the most important factor seems to be religion, even within the Orthodox Church. Around here, for example, there are many people bilingual in Greek and a Slavic language but who's first language is Slavic (the easiest way for me to tell is whether the grandmother is called _baba_ or _yaya_) but they have to decide whether they will go to a church where the liturgy is celebrated in Greek (and self-identify as Greek) or in Church Slavonic (and self-identify otherwise, usually as Macedonian). And even that is oversimplifying things (because of things like the Macedonian Orthodox Church not being in communion with the other Orthodox Churches, which matters to people who are religious).


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## Darina

Well, I don't see different theories here. 
I did not mean that we simply took the Church Slavonic and there was no development of the language since 9. century. That would be ridiculous!
I tried to say that modern Bulgarian evolved from Old Church Slavonic because it was a standard. 
And of course, there was an influence from different languages, mainly form neighbouring countries and this influence was mutual. But this happens to every language, agree?


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## sokol

Darina said:


> Well, I don't see different theories here.


That is because I didn't tell you about them!
(Which is because I don't want to go through the same discussion again; the links provided give some clues. One of the theories is that the Turk-Bulgarian language played a major role in forming the later Slavic-Bulgarian language, but this is disputed and therefore discussed controversely.)

Certainly modern Bulgarian evolved from Old Church Slavonic: there is absolutely no doubt about that.
The question is only why the Bulgarian and Macedonian language are vastly different from all other modern Slavic languages: and this is where the theories begin ... and where the facts are - well, not facts, basically.

(In one of those WRF-threads I proposed that Bulgarian was responsible for the Balkanic features and later had to admit that this only was a rather wild theory for which no real proof can be offered. Therefore I try to be very careful indeed.)



modus.irrealis said:


> Even there, it's not so simple. There are non-Greek speaking groups that have identified as Greek (...)


Yes, certainly - that too!
After the First World War there was a kind of 'ethnical cleansing' (ridiculous term, that - but it exists) between Turkey and Greece: many 'Greeks' living within the new borders of Turkey went to Greece, and 'Turks' living within the new Greek borders went to Turkey.
These 'Greeks' in some cases had nothing but religion in common with 'Greek speaking Greeks' because their mother tongue was Turkish - and the same was true the other way round: 'Turks' with Greek mother tongues but 'feeling' as Turks because they were Muslims.
(But really here we are on the brink of becoming intolerably off-topic ... ;-)


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## dudasd

I'd say there is some confusion about "Old Slavonic" and "Old Church Slavonic" here. It's usually considered that Old Slavonic (a kind of "unique" Slavic language with relatively minor dialectal differences, and with no gaps between "church" and "everyday" speach) was "active" till 11th century. From 11th century on, we can talk about Old Church Slavonic, because that's the period when the local everyday speach of different Slavic grupations started diverging from the language of Church and turning from "dialects" to autonomous languages. Etc, etc, we don't need the whole theory here, I am sure it was already dicussed. My point: the language that Bulgars adopted was not "Old Church Slavonic" but Old Slavonic, so we can say that it had the same regular course of development as the other Slavic languages, including its eventual separation from the church language and (not unimportant at all!) its own redaction of Old Church Slavonic.


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## Kanes

First, there is not a single document or anything indicating a Turkik language, I chalinge you to find one. Just historians identify any horse people from the east as Turks. This aside...

The Balkan speachbound was created about the 10th century. There was multilingualism trought the balkans. People spoke Bulgarian, Aromanian, Greek, Albanian. Over time they started to sync the grammers into one. Just applying different sets of vocabularies to the same grammatical structure. Language fammilies are determined mainly by grammer. Realisticly today Bulgarian is not a slavic languages. It is clasified as one because of the vocabulary set. If you judge balkan languages the way others are, there should be Balkan familly in contrast to Romance, Slavic, Iranic... About the language spoken before that... we can not say how Slavic it was as there was no even a profe of Slavophonia anywhere else.

Another problem was that when we pushed the Romans south and took the land we moved seven tribes which are described by the Romei as Slavs. They were relocated in today's Serbia and central Romania as buffer populations. More so, the land was almost empty and depopulated at first place. Bulgarians were a majority. During the first war with Constantinopole we had an army of 80,000 (battle of Ancheloi). For such an equiped army you need at the minimum a million and something population. Allot for the time. Culture is the other factor, there is no trace of Slavic mitology... in Bulgaria.

The only explanation is that we spoke a language akin to what would later become Slavic. Language distance was not so great 1500 years ago. An average 'German' would of probably got allot from listening Latin for example.


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## dudasd

Kanes said:


> battle of Ancheloi


 
I guess you mean Anchialo? Yes, a great battle it was! And you are right about the large Bulgarian population even in those early times, but how it came that such a large population accepted a neighbour's language? Not only concerning the vocabulary; if Old Slavonic is any familiar to you, then you'll know how many common features Bulgarian and Old Slavonic have - in some of its features, Bulgarian is closer to Old Slavonic than Serbian, for example. (And at my own surprise, after learning Russian, Old Slavonic and Macedonian, I discovered that I understood Bulgarian better than any of those languages, without ANY learning - OK, you can ascribe it to my Bulgarian ancestry and my genes, but being a kind of a linguist, I wouldn't believe pure genetics.) I'd say the clue word is "mutual assimilation" - an old phenomenon, that a new population is "conquering" bringing its traditions, genetics, ways, but the old-timers are imperceptibly "winning" by imposing their language. It happened so many times in history. Thus I'd say that "seven tribes" (if it's not just one of the legends of the old ages) were not displaced, but more likely assimilated, mixed with fresh Bulgarian blood. (Btw, the fact/legend about "seven tribes" is not known amongst Serbs at all, so we have more ground to suppose that they were not relocated.)

Personally (oh, now I am in danger to have my post deleted!) - my humble opinion is that the original "body" (or let's say "core") that created Bulgarian nation was not of a Turkic origin, because Turkic languages, for example, do have noun cases, and Bulgarian is "avoiding" them (having borrowed only a small - or reduced - number of noun cases in personal pronouns), and not only that (just allow me mention tenses and participles); that's a point where I agree with you. But if we have to "classify" the modern Bulgarian, certainly we can't put it together with Balkan aboriginals' languages any more, especially when the mutual intelligibility between - let's say again - between Serbian and Bulgarian is higher than 60 per cent for an "average" speaker (I did my own little inquieries) and higher than 90 per cent for a "moderate explorer of comparative linguistics of Slavic languages" (like me), then you'll certainly call it "Slavic". Its roots may be different, and they certainly are, but the result is an "ideal" mix, comprehensive in a high extent to other Slavic native speakers. If this "test" can be a proof, I tried to estimate the level of mutual intelligibility between Bulgarian and Russian/Serbian/Czech/Slovak, and found it to be higher than Russian-Serbian-Czech/Slovak amongst themselves. So I'm inclined to call it a "link between Slavic languages", in spite of non-Slavic origin of Bulgars.

I hope this post was not off-topic; my small research is to be continued soon (at the very place of Anchialo), and I can say only thanks to Kanes for giving me some new ideas...


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## Athaulf

Kanes said:


> The Balkan speachbound was created about the 10th century. There was multilingualism trought the balkans. People spoke Bulgarian, Aromanian, Greek, Albanian. Over time they started to sync the grammers into one. Just applying different sets of vocabularies to the same grammatical structure.



That's not true in any meaningful sense of the term. Vernacular languages spoken in the 10th century Balkans were for the most part not documented at all (for example, Romanian and Albanian were first attested 5-6 centuries later), so we can't even know what the situation was like back then. Furthermore, it's certain that Slavic dialects belonging to the Balkan Sprachbund acquired their characteristics placing them into this sprachbund only several centuries later.



> Language fammilies are determined mainly by grammer.


Completely untrue. Languages are classified into families _exclusively_ according to their origin from a common ancestor language. 



> Realisticly today Bulgarian is not a slavic languages. It is clasified as one because of the vocabulary set.  If you judge balkan languages the way others are, there should be Balkan familly in contrast to Romance, Slavic, Iranic...


No, Bulgarian is classified as a Slavic language because it developed from the same ancestor language (Proto-Slavic) as all other Slavic languages. How far their vocabulary and grammar have diverged since then is completely irrelevant, as long as their common origin can be conclusively proved. Even if 90% of Bulgarian vocabulary were replaced by non-Slavic words, it wouldn't change anything for the purposes of this classification. 



> [...]
> During the first war with Constantinopole we had an army of 80,000 (battle of Ancheloi). For such an equiped army you need at the minimum a million and something population. Allot for the time.


For nomadic steppe-peoples, in which every adult male could take the role of a mounted soldier, there was no need to have such a large population base to send a few tens of thousands of men into a battle. Not to mention that numbers like this from Byzantine sources should be taken with a huge grain of salt.



> Culture is the other factor, there is no trace of slavic mitology... in Bulgaria.


I don't know much about Bulgarian folklore, but this claim strikes me as absurd. Are you really claiming that there is nothing in Bulgarian folk customs, songs, stories, etc. that has roots in pre-Christian Slavic traditions?



> The only explanation is that we spoke a language akin to what would later become slavic. Language distance was not so great 1500 years ago.


1500 years ago, Slavs most likely still all spoke the same language, with very little dialectal variation. So people back then either were Slavic speakers or not.



> An average 'german' would of probably got allot from listening latin for example.





There has never been any mutual intelligibility between Germanic languages and Latin. Although they share Proto-Indo-European as the common ancestor, the ancestors of Latin and Proto-Germanic separated and diverged thousands of years before Rome was founded.


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## Kanes

I wasn't sure of the old speling sorry, now is Aheloi, good beach, not many drunk Swedes =D

The history of the language is a mistery, I can only eliminte posabilities if they don't fit with history or things we know. What makes it stranger is that we were probably more then the Slavs here and as I mentioned most went on the periphery of the country. First acount of us on the Balkans was from 4th century, later refugies from our country made us majority and Asparuh freed the land in 680. Its interesting that contemporary historians made distinction between us and Slavs. I don't think we could of adopted Slavic in 100 years or so, between that time and when the church language was writen down. Things just don't work this way.

If I start speculating, my most logical theory is that we spoke language that was closer to Slavic then to other IE branches but still distinct. Culturaly and geographicly Scythian fits but we don't have language acounts(?). Later church language was created as official language, a unification atempt, along with a new alphabet that may have worked to a degree, at least vocabulary wise as it is easier to change then the grammer. Thats why I think we can comunicate with other orthodox Slavs, it became everyones church language, as you said a link. The grammer gap though... Later the balkanization may have messed it up even more but we don't know how much of it came from us.


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## Kanes

*Athaulf*

_Languages are classified into families exclusively according to their origin from a common ancestor language. _

*True, but best way to find are they related to a comon ancestrial language is grammer as it is the hardest thing to change.*

_No, Bulgarian is classified as a Slavic language because it developed from the same ancestor language (Proto-Slavic) as all other Slavic languages. How far their vocabulary and grammar have diverged since then is completely irrelevant, as long as their common origin can be conclusively proved. Even if 90% of Bulgarian vocabulary were replaced by non-Slavic words, it wouldn't change anything for the purposes of this classification._ 

*The Bulgarian vocabulary is very much Slavic, the huge difference is in the grammer. We have tences and other things that don't exsist in other Slavic languages and the oposite. Its hard to prove the common origin.*

_For nomadic steppe-peoples, in which every adult male could take the role of a mounted soldier, there was no need to have such a large population base to send a few tens of thousands of men into a battle. Not to mention that numbers like this from Byzantine sources should be taken with a huge grain of salt._

*We were not nomadic. Every adult male that is fit for combat makes about a fifth to a fourth of the population. More so there were two other armies in the north, all in all 100,000+ soldiers that were equiped the same way, in millitary units... Also the Romans had 110,000 army, do you think we could of killed 70,000 of them in a day if we were couple of tens of thouand nomads? Nomadic step-peopel with Slavic mithology?*

_I don't know much about Bulgarian folklore, but this claim strikes me as absurd. Are you really claiming that there is nothing in Bulgarian folk customs, songs, stories, etc. that has roots in pre-Christian Slavic traditions?_

*No, we were monotheistic, had shamans(kolobri), calendar based on Jupiter, fire festivals, and today every march there are guys with animal masks, hides and bells dancing on the streets to scare evil spirits. Also I never heard of Slavic gods, tales.. before looking on the net.*

_1500 years ago, Slavs most likely still all spoke the same language, with very little dialectal variation. So people back then either were Slavic speakers or not._

*1500 years ago we were called Bulgarians for long time.*

_There has never been any mutual intelligibility between Germanic languages and Latin. Although they share Proto-Indo-European as the common ancestor, the ancestors of Latin and Proto-Germanic separated and diverged thousands of years before Rome was founded._

*Romance and Germanic were dialects at a point, I can get about 1/3 of Latin withouth ever studuing it. What does founding Rome have to do with Latin?*


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## Kanes

For the 'historians' on the previos page that said that Bulgarian language and ethnicity didn't exsist until coupel hundred years ago... Before the spread of cirlic and the church language from Bulgaria there is no evidence of slavophonia anywhere else in the world. Think on that =D


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## Athaulf

Kanes said:


> *True, but best way to find are they related to a comon ancestrial language is grammer as it is the hardest thing to change.*



No. Common origin of languages is proved using the comparative method, which is primarily based on regular sound correspondences between words, not grammatical similarities (although they can also help). Alternatively, for some languages that have exceptionally long documented history, for example Romance languages, it's possible to directly point out to written evidence on how the ancestral language split. 



> *The Bulgarian vocabulary is very much slavic, the huge difference is in the grammer. We have tences and other things that don't exsist in other slavic languages and the oposite. Its hard to prove the common origin.*


No, it's not hard at all. First, medieval Bulgarian is attested well enough that we actually have some evidence about when and how these major grammatical changes happened. Second, even it weren't, it is trivial to prove its relatedness to other Slavic languages thanks to the shared vocabulary that exhibits regular sound correspondences.



> *Romance and Germanic were dialects at a point, I can get about 1/3 of latin withouth ever studuing it. What does founding Rome have to do with Latin?*


You can understand some Latin words because these words entered European languages from Latin in recent history, _not_ because these words are shared with Latin due to their common ancestor. 2500 years ago, Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of modern Germanic languages, was already a language totally different from and completely unintelligible with Latin that was spoken at the same time in Rome. (And so was ancestor of Proto-Slavic spoken at the same time.) It is true that one can find common words between these languages because they all ultimately developed from Proto-Indo-European, but these correspondences are so heavily obscured by thousands of years of sound changes that it takes an expert eye to even spot them.


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## Kanes

No body was talikng about the church language but of the language before that. It is clear we did not spoke Slavic then, latter church one became official for political reasons and then it was clear what was happening. But this was what Latin is today for Catholics. Before this though? More so you can not seak about Proto-Slavic because there are no evidence about it. if you follow logic, Bulgarian of middle ages was Proto-Slavic. The languge before this is the question and what rle in plaed in the varnicular languge that remained today and the balkan speachbound.

What sound changes? All IE languages have basicly the same basic sounds, just some use certain ones more often. Plus allot of the languages have huge borrowings. Those are easy to change, much easier then how you put them together. Try spaking English withouth word order. Plus have dialects that lack few sounds, makes them diferent languages? lacking like 5 sounds in one: щ, я, ъ, х, ц, and having different words.


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## Athaulf

Kanes said:


> No body was talikng about the church language but of the language before that. It is clear we did not spoke slavic then, latter church one became official for political reasons and then it was clear what was happening.



No, it's not clear what was happening. We know very little about medieval Balkans, and even what we know comes from highly suspicious and unreliable sources, and tends to be distorted by myths peddled by nationalistic pseudo-scholars. (The latter is true for each and every modern nation, of course -- it's just a matter of degree -- but in the Balkans the problem is especially severe.)



> But this was what Latin is today for Catholics. Before this though? More so you can not seak about proto slavic because there are no evidence about it.
> [...]
> What sound changes? All IE languages have basicly the same basic sounds, just some use certain ones more often.


Oh, come on, please.  

You should get informed about the basics of linguistics before you make such bold and confident assertions. Normally I prefer to politely point people in the right direction rather than scolding them, and I've been doing that in my last several replies to your posts in this thread, but you keep writing wildly absurd statements with complete self-confidence. Right now, when you write about anything related to linguistics, you are sounding like someone who hasn't mastered even 8th grade physics, but who feels entitled to lecture people on general relativity. Please stop embarrassing yourself in public and misleading potential readers who might be equally unknowledgeable as you.


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## Outsider

Not by "how they sound", but by how their sounds correspond to each other.

I found your claim that Indo-European languages all have the same sounds very amusing. Even such close languages as Spanish and Portuguese have quite different sound inventories. Even different _dialects_ of each of them can have quite different sound inventories! Seriously, do you speak any foreign languages besides your own?


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## Athaulf

Quote snipped after the original message has been deleted.

Well, here are some free online resources where you can educate yourself abut how genetic relationships between languages are determined:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method
http://www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/PIE.html
http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/gordon/115/115week3.pdf

Until you've understood the issues discussed in the materials above, it's entirely pointless for you to make assertions about any matters of historical linguistics. If you don't believe me, just ask any linguist.


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## Kanes

How their sounds correspond to each other and how they sound... kinda the same. Athaul, what you gave me links to only one kind of linguistic comparasen. The only solid way to determine genetic relation are shared gramatical features. A language can change all its sounds and every single word in the vocabulary, this things don't change its genetics.

I speak Bulgarian, English, Russian, Greek, Spanish, little of Arabic and Turkish.


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## Athaulf

Kanes said:


> Athaul, what you gave me links to only one kind of linguistic comparasen. The only solid way to determine genetic relation are shared gramatical features.



Then would you be so kind to provide some references to linguistic research that uses these other methods that contradict what I've been saying? Any serious academic work will be fine -- journal or conference articles, lecture notes, textbooks, whatever. 

I am waiting.


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## Flaminius

*Moderator Note:

The topic of the discussion within this thread is the origin of Bulgarian language.  Different opinions may be stemming from or attesting to different comparison methodologies, but theoretical issues should be referred to insofar as they directly address the thread topic.

A comment has been branched to a new thread in order to give room within this forum for a more theoretical topic.

Flaminius, moderator*


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