Bulgarian orthography

The Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet is used to write the Bulgarian language.
The Cyrillic alphabet was originally developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 9th – 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School.

It has been used in Bulgaria (with modifications and exclusion of certain archaic letters via spelling reforms) continuously since then, superseding the previously used Glagolitic alphabet, which was also invented and used there before the Cyrillic script overtook its use as a written script for the Bulgarian language. The Cyrillic alphabet was used in the then much bigger territory of Bulgaria (including most of today's Serbia), North Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Northern Greece (Macedonia region), Romania and Moldova, officially from 893. It was also transferred from Bulgaria and adopted by the East Slavic languages in Kievan Rus' and evolved into the Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian alphabets and the alphabets of many other Slavic (and later non-Slavic) languages. Later, some Slavs modified it and added/excluded letters from it to better suit the needs of their own language varieties.

History

In the 9th century, the Bulgarian Empire introduced the Glagolitic alphabet, devised by Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius. The Glagolitic alphabet was gradually superseded in later centuries by the Cyrillic script, developed around the Preslav Literary School, Bulgaria at the end of the 9th century.

Several Cyrillic alphabets with 28 to 44 letters were used in the early and middle 19th century during the efforts on the codification of Modern Bulgarian until an alphabet with 32 letters, proposed by Marin Drinov, gained prominence in the 1870s: it was used until the orthographic reform of 1945, when the letters yat (uppercase , lowercase ) and yus (uppercase , lowercase ) were removed from its alphabet, reducing the number of letters to 30. Yat was also known as "double e" (), and yus was also known as "big nasal sign" (), crossed yer (), and "wide yer" (). Although Bulgarian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, some preferred letter shapes in Bulgaria are different to those in Russian use.

With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, the Cyrillic script became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek scripts.

List

Overview

Detailed table

The following table gives the letters of the Bulgarian alphabet, along with the IPA values for the sound of each letter. The listed transliteration in the Official transliteration column (known as the Streamlined System) is official in Bulgaria and is listed in the Official orthographic dictionary (2012). For other transliteration standards see Romanization of Bulgarian.

Most letters in the Bulgarian alphabet stand for just one specific sound. Five letters stand for sounds written in English with two or more letters. These letters are (ch), (sh), (sht), (yu), and (ya). Two additional sounds are written with two letters: these are () and (). The letter marks the softening ( palatalization) of any consonant (except , , and ) before the letter , while and after consonants mark the palatalization of the preceding consonant in addition to representing the vowels and .

The names of most letters are simple representations of their phonetic values, with consonants being followed by – thus the alphabet goes: – – , etc. However, the name of the letter is "i-kratko" (''short i''), the name of is "er-golyam" (''large yer''), and the name of is "er-malak" (''small yer''). People often refer to simply as .

The Bulgarian alphabet features:
* The Bulgarian names for the consonants are , , etc. instead of , , etc.
* Е represents and is called "е" .
* The sounds () and () are represented by дж and дз respectively.
* Yot (Й, й) represents .
* Щ represents () and is called "щъ" ().
* Ъ represents the vowel , and is called "ер голям" ('big er'). In spelling however, Ъ is referred to as where its official label "ер голям" (used only to refer to Ъ in the alphabet) may cause some confusion. The vowel Ъ is sometimes approximated to the ( schwa) sound found in many languages for easier comprehension of its Bulgarian pronunciation for foreigners, but it is actually a back vowel, not a central vowel.
* Ь is used on rare occasions (only after a consonant ndbefore the vowel "о"), such as in the words 'каньон' (canyon), 'шофьор' (driver), etc. It is called "ер малък" ('small er').

The grave accent is used to distinguish the pronoun 'her' from the conjunction 'and'. Ѝ is not considered a separate letter but rather a special form of .

Writing

Bulgarian is usually described as having a phonemic orthography, meaning that words are spelt the way they are pronounced. This is largely true, but there are exceptions. Three of the most cited examples are:
* The sounds and , which appear only in unstressed syllables, are written with two different letters each – "" or "", and "" or "" respectively.
* The vowel in stressed verb endings , , and and the stressed short definite articles and is pronounced . Thus ("I read") is pronounced , and ("the man") is pronounced .
* Voiced consonants are pronounced unvoiced when at the end of a word or when preceding an unvoiced consonant – e.g. ("second") is pronounced , and ("city") is pronounced . Similarly, unvoiced consonants are pronounced voiced when preceding a voiced consonant – e.g. ("building") is . (The voiced consonant "" is an exception – it does not cause the preceding unvoiced consonant to become voiced – (wedding) is .)

Modern developments

Since the time of Bulgaria's liberation in the late 19th century, the Bulgarian language has taken on a large number of words from Western European languages. All of these are transcribed phonetically into Cyrillic, e.g.:
* French – e.g. ( – sidewalk), ( – corkscrew), (from – ground floor)
* German – e.g. ( – bandage), ( – digger), ( – drill)
Notable is the transliteration of many English names through German, e.g.:
* Washington → (), Scotland → ()

In the years since the end of communism and the rise of technology, the tendency for borrowing has shifted mainly to English, where much computer-related terminology has entered and been inflected accordingly – again, in a wholly phonetic way. Examples include:
* () – I click on the file
* () – you download it onto the desktop
* () – we chat on the net
The computer-related neologisms are often used interchangeably with traditional Bulgarian words, e.g. 'download' and 'upload' can be simply and ( and – 'to bring down' and 'to put up').

Use of Roman script in Bulgarian

The insertion of English words directly into a Cyrillic Bulgarian sentence, while frowned upon, has been increasingly used in the media. This is done for several reasons, including –
* To shorten what would otherwise be a longer word or phrase –
:: (instead of - American)
:: ''The Yanks oppose more US troops in Afghanistan''
* To avoid the need to transcribe to Cyrillic or translate to Bulgarian well known abbreviations:
:: (instead of, for example, )
:: ''We have not seen the end of SOPA, PIPA and ACTA''

Brand names are also often not transcribed: WikiLeaks, YouTube, Skype – as opposed to , , . However, this is not always the case, as in the headline "" (official transliteration: ''Feysbuk vs. Gugal''). Note the inconsistency here – despite the insistence on Cyrillic, the "vs." has been retained in Roman script.

The 2012 ''Official Orthographic Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language'' by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences permits widely known proper names to remain in their original alphabet. Example sentences are given, all containing names of American IT companies: Yahoo, Microsoft, YouTube, PayPal, Facebook.

Keyboard layout

The standard Bulgarian keyboard layout for personal computers is as follows:

:

See also

* Belarusian alphabet
*Bulgarian Braille
*Bulgarian language
*Cyrillic script
* Cyrillic script in Unicode
*Cyrillic alphabets
*Early Cyrillic alphabet
*Greek alphabet
* List of Cyrillic letters
*Macedonian alphabet
*Old Bulgarian
* Romanization of Belarusian
* Romanization of Bulgarian
* Romanization of Greek
* Romanization of Macedonian
*Romanization of Russian
* Romanization of Ukrainian
* Russian alphabet
* Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic
*Serbian Cyrillic alphabet
*Ukrainian alphabet

References

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Cyrillic alphabets
Alphabet