Bulgarian Alphabet
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The Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet () is used to write the
Bulgarian language Bulgarian (; , ) is an Eastern South Slavic, Eastern South Slavic language spoken in Southeast Europe, primarily in Bulgaria. It is the language of the Bulgarians. Along with the closely related Macedonian language (collectively forming the ...
. The Cyrillic alphabet was originally developed in the
First Bulgarian Empire The First Bulgarian Empire (; was a medieval state that existed in Southeastern Europe between the 7th and 11th centuries AD. It was founded in 680–681 after part of the Bulgars, led by Asparuh of Bulgaria, Asparuh, moved south to the northe ...
during the 9th – 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School. It has been used in
Bulgaria Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern portion of the Balkans directly south of the Danube river and west of the Black Sea. Bulgaria is bordered by Greece and Turkey t ...
(with modifications and exclusion of certain archaic letters via spelling reforms) continuously since then, superseding the previously used
Glagolitic alphabet The Glagolitic script ( , , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed that it was created in the 9th century for the purpose of translating liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic by Saints Cyril and Methodi ...
, which was also invented and used there before the
Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...
overtook its use as a written script for the
Bulgarian language Bulgarian (; , ) is an Eastern South Slavic, Eastern South Slavic language spoken in Southeast Europe, primarily in Bulgaria. It is the language of the Bulgarians. Along with the closely related Macedonian language (collectively forming the ...
. The Cyrillic alphabet was used in the then much bigger territory of
Bulgaria Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern portion of the Balkans directly south of the Danube river and west of the Black Sea. Bulgaria is bordered by Greece and Turkey t ...
(including most of today's Serbia), North Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Northern Greece (Macedonia region),
Romania Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to ...
and
Moldova Moldova, officially the Republic of Moldova, is a Landlocked country, landlocked country in Eastern Europe, with an area of and population of 2.42 million. Moldova is bordered by Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east, and south. ...
, officially from 893. It was also transferred from
Bulgaria Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern portion of the Balkans directly south of the Danube river and west of the Black Sea. Bulgaria is bordered by Greece and Turkey t ...
and adopted by the
East Slavic languages The East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of the Slavic languages, distinct from the West Slavic languages, West and South Slavic languages. East Slavic languages are currently spoken natively throughout Eastern Europe, ...
in
Kievan Rus' Kievan Rus', also known as Kyivan Rus,. * was the first East Slavs, East Slavic state and later an amalgam of principalities in Eastern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century.John Channon & Robert Hudson, ''Penguin Historical At ...
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 The Glagolitic script ( , , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed that it was created in the 9th century for the purpose of translating liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic by Saints Cyril and Methodi ...
, devised by Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius. The Glagolitic alphabet was gradually superseded in later centuries by the
Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...
, developed around the Preslav Literary School,
Bulgaria Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern portion of the Balkans directly south of the Danube river and west of the Black Sea. Bulgaria is bordered by Greece and Turkey t ...
at the end of the 9th century. Several
Cyrillic alphabets Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the theologians Saints Cyril and Methodius, Cyril and Methodi ...
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 letter shapes in Bulgaria were made to look more 'Latin' in the 20th century (see the pictures on the right in the article), however they are rarely used today and most typefaces do not support them. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, the
Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...
became the third official script of the
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, following the
Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
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. * represents and is called "е" . * The sounds () and () are represented by and respectively. * Short I () represents . * represents () and is called "" (). * represents the vowel , and is called "" ('big er'). In spelling however, is referred to as where its official label "" (used only to refer to Ъ in the alphabet) may cause some confusion. The vowel 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. * is used on rare occasions (only after a consonant ndbefore the vowel ""), such as in the words '' (canyon), '' (driver), etc. It is called "" ('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 The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...
, 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 In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...
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:
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,
YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...
,
Skype Skype () was a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for IP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also had instant messaging, file transfer, ...
– 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 Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...
,
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
,
YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...
, PayPal,
Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
.


Keyboard layout

The standard Bulgarian
keyboard layout A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual, or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. Standard keybo ...
for personal computers is as follows: :


See also

* Bulgarian Braille * Cyrillic script in Unicode * Macedonian alphabet * Old Bulgarian * Romanization of Belarusian *
Romanization of Greek Romanization of Greek is the transliteration ( letter-mapping) or transcription (sound-mapping) of text from the Greek alphabet into the Latin alphabet. History The conventions for writing and romanizing Ancient Greek and Modern Greek diffe ...
* Romanization of Macedonian * Romanization of Russian * Romanization of Ukrainian * Scientific transliteration of Cyrillic *
Serbian Cyrillic alphabet The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (, ), also known as the Serbian script, (, ), is a standardized variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language. It originated in medieval Serbia and was significantly reformed in the 19th cen ...


References


External links


Campaign to promote the Bulgarian Cyrillic letter shapes

Extended Cyrillic: Bulgarian
{{Authority control Cyrillic alphabets
Alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...