ayearinlanguage:A Year in Language, Day 62: BulgarianBulgarian is a South Slavic language, a close r

ayearinlanguage:A Year in Language, Day 62: BulgarianBulgarian is a South Slavic language, a close relative to Macedonian. Bulgarian is the direct descendant of Old Church Slavonic, the oldest documented Slavic language which served as the literary language of all Slavs for several centuries.Bulgarian belongs to the Balkan Sprachbund, a group of languages in the Balkans united by common linguistic features born not of ancestry but of close and prolonged contact. As such Bulgarian has several atypical features for a Slavic language. Bulgarian has lost its case system, though, like English, it maintains a small part of it in its pronouns. Like the Scandinavian languages and Romanian it marks definiteness (English “the”) as a suffix.In opposition to its Balkan features Bulgarian also has some of the most conservative aspects of any Slavic language, specifically when it comes it it’s complex verbal system. Bulgarian verbs conjugate to agree with the subject in person and number, show nine tenses, active and passive voice, three moods, and, uniquely, evidentiality. In linguistics evidentiality means that the verb encodes how or how reliably the information is known. Bulgarian has four classes of evidentialty: Indicative (known from direct observation), Inferential (known indirectly through context), Rennarative (known because you were told about it), and Dubitative (Either more indirect than renarrative or doubtful in veracity). -- source link
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