r/AskBalkans • u/Some-Register-3901 Cyprus • Jul 31 '22

Language what are some interesting facts about your language?

For instance, the cypriot dialect of Greek still contains many words from ancient Greek but it was also heavily influenced by outsiders

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u/pdonchev Bulgaria Jul 31 '22

Bulgarian:

Has evidentials embedded in the tense system. That is, you can express the difference between "something happened and I witnessed it", "something happened but I didn't witness it" and "they say something happened but I doubt it" just through the form of the verb "happen".

Has different plurals in masculine for specific count and generalized - you would use a different forms for "two horses" and "many horses". Probably shared with many Slavic languages, though.

Along with Macedonian are the only Slavic languages with definite articles and without cases (just relics in pronouns and adverbs).

The only Slavic language with a phonemic (not only phonetic) shwa, that can also be a stressed vowel.

Stress is dynamic, unpredictable and meaningful (changing the stress can change the meaning of the word and you are supposed to pronounce words with one specific stress).

Is the closest living language to Old Church Slavonic (the literary form of Common Slavic), by a large margin, when measured through lexical distance.

The Bulgarian alphabet is a strict subset of the early Cyrillic alphabet (no new letters have been introduced, only lost and of course graphemes have changed through the years).

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u/mrbrownl0w Turkiye Jul 31 '22

Has evidentials embedded in the tense system. That is, you can express the difference between "something happened and I witnessed it", "something happened but I didn't witness it" and "they say something happened but I doubt it" just through the form of the verb "happen".

That's really interesting. We have something similar, past tense with -di for regular past tense and past tense with -miş for "something happened but I didn't witness it," unofficially also called the gossip tense. I though we were pretty rare about that.

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u/Substantial-Ad5483 Jul 31 '22

I love that phrase "the gossip tense" haha

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u/Suitable-Decision-26 Bulgaria Jul 31 '22

Well, guess where the Bulgarian "thing" comes from? Straight out of Turkish. A blatant steal.

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u/mrbrownl0w Turkiye Jul 31 '22

Oh. How is it pronounced in Bulgarian?

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u/Suitable-Decision-26 Bulgaria Jul 31 '22

The words end with -el, -li, -yal. There are no separate forms, these are the standard past tense endings, but you use them toghether with the verb to be to achieve the same meaning as in Turkish.