The History of the Bulgarian language can be divided into four major periods:

• prehistoric period (from the time of the settlement of the Bulgarian Slavs on the Balkans until the late 9th century);
• Old Bulgarian (from the late 9th until the 11th century);
• Middle Bulgarian (from the 12th century to the 15th century);
• Modern Bulgarian (from the 16th century onwards).

Bulgarian as a written language dates back from the end of the 9th century, i.e. from the time of Old Bulgarian.

Old Bulgarian

Old Bulgarian was the first literary period in the development of the Bulgarian language. It can be described as a synthetic language with a rich declension system. The language is attested by a number of manuscripts from the late 10th and the early 11th century written at the Preslav and the Ohrid Literary School or some of the smaller literary centres surrounding them. It is also the medium of a rich literary activity — chiefly in the late 9th and the early 10th century — with writers such as Constantine of Preslav, John Exarch, Clement of Ohrid, Chernorizetz Hrabar and Naum of Preslav (Naum of Ohrid). None of the works of those writers has, however, been preserved in the original; they are all attested by later copies.

Name

The name “Old Bulgarian” was extensively used in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century synonymously with Old Church Slavonic to describe the literary language of a number of Slavic peoples from the 9th until the 12th century. Although the name still can be found in a number of sources and is the only name used by the Bulgarian Slavonic Studies, it is usually applied nowadays only to the language of the manuscripts from the First Bulgarian Empire (Bulgarian recensions of Old Church Slavonic), excluding manuscripts from other recensions.

Traits

Old Bulgarian (or the Bulgarian recension of Old Church Slavonic) is characterised by a number of phonetic, morphological, syntactic and lexical traits (some of which, such as the reflexes of *tj ([t']) and *dj ([d']), are typical only for Bulgarian), as follows:

• phonetic:
  • very wide articulation of the Yat vowel (); originally still preserved in the archaic Bulgarian dialect of the Rhodope mountains;
  • Proto-Slavonic reflexes of *tj ([t']) and *dj ([d']):

• • use of [ra-], [la-] for the Proto-Slavic [or̃-], [ol̃-]
  • use of [s] for the Proto-Slavic [ch] before the Proto-Slavic åi
  • use of [cv-], [dzv-] for the Proto-Slavic [kv’-], [gv’-]

• morphosyntactic
  • use of the dative possessive case in personal pronouns and nouns: рѫка ти; отъпоуштенье грѣхомъ;
  • descriptive future tense using the verb хотѣти;
  • use of the comparative form мьнии (smaller) to mean younger.
  • use of suffixed demonastrative pronouns (тъ, та, то). These developed later into suffixed definite articles.

• orthographical:
  • original [ы] and [ъi] merged to [ы]
  • sometimes the use of letter 'Ѕ' (dz) was unified with that of 'З' (z)
  • verb forms naricają, naricaješi were substituted or alternated with naričą, naričeši

• lexical:
  • use of words with proto-Bulgar (Turko-Iranian) origin, such as кумиръ, капище, чрьтогъ, блъванъ, etc.

Significance

Middle Bulgarian

Modern Bulgarian

See also

• Bulgarian language