Anna-Maria Totomanova

Book Review: Златанова, Румяна. Книги на пророците Осия, Софония, Агей, Захария и Малахия в старобългарски превод (Диалог и духовност 9). София: TEMTO, 2022. 392 pp. ISBN 978-954-9566-94-9

The paper includes the edition of the recently discovered second witness of the Letter of Patriarch Callistus to the Bulgarian spiritual leader Theodosius of Tǎrnovo and his associate Romanus (RGB, f. 98, Egorov N 274). The edition is accompanied by variant readings taken from Syrku’s edition of the text found in RNB, F I 211, which has been the only known witness of the document for more than a century. Both witnesses have a western Russian provenance and date to the second half of the 15th c. (the new one has recently been dated to the last quarter of the 15th c.). The witnesses were compared in terms of orthography, grammar and lexis in order to establish their connection to a supposed Bulgarian original. The detailed philological analysis allows us to conclude that though both witnesses show significant traces of the Second Slavic influence on Russian literature, the two scribes introduced the innovations in different ways and to a different extent. Taking all this into account we dare to suppose that both witnesses descend rather from an earlier copy-mediator with Russian spelling features than directly from a Middle Bulgarian original.

Prof. Tatyana Slavova has just turned 65 this year. She was born on February 9, 1957 in Dimitrovrad and completed secondary school in Burgas in 1975. That same year, she enrolled in the Faculty of Slavic Philology at the St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia graduating with a master’s degree in Bulgarian philology in 1979. In 1980 she specialized in Old Bulgarian Glagolitic and Cyrillic palaeography and epigraphy supervised by Prof. Ivan Dobrev (then still associate professor). This research resulted in her doctoral thesis which she defended in 1985 on the subject of „Преславска редакция на старобългарския евангелски превод“ [“The Preslav Redaction of Old Bulgarian Translation of the Gospels”]. In 2001 she was awarded the academic degree of doctor of sciences (DSC) for her dissertation on the „Тълковната палея в контекста на старобългарската книжнина“ [“The Palaea Interpretata in the Context of Old Bulgarian Literature”].

The lack of declensional endings is the most characteristic trait of the modern Bulgarian language and its dialects. It seems exotic on the background of the remaining Slavic languages but in the large Indo-European language family the development from synthetism to analytism is a rule of which only Slavic and Baltic languages make an exception. Some scholars define the transition from synthetism to analytism as a process of dispatching the nominal flexion, during which part of the grammatical information (syntactic) is transferred to link-words (most commonly prepositions and particles). This is why all analytic languages develop a common form after prepositions (casus generalis), partly or completely fixed word order, pronoun particles for the marking of objects. The main precondition for the common Indo-European development towards the existence of an extended prepositional-declensional use is to be found in the Indo-European protolanguage. The author proposed not only a survey of the well known hypotheses but some new arguments for the appearance and development of Bulgarian analyitsm.

In the article consequently have been analyzed all cases with a held weak “yer” in the prefixes “sa-“, “va-“ and “vaz-“ in the contemporary Bulgarian language. In the prefix ”sa-“ the “yer” vowel is kept not only before a following root with an initial s or z, but also before any kind of consonants, compare sabariam, sabitie, sablazan, sablicham, sabludavam, saboleznovavam, sabudia, sabuia, savet, saveshtavam, saglasna, saglasia se, sadeistvam, sajalia, sakrusha, sachinia, sashia. Before a following consonant the “yer” is always kept, compare for example saedinia, saesha, saoraja, saumeia, saorudia, saobrazia, etc. Especially significant are the cases where with one and the same morpheme structure, once the “yer” has dropped, as its phonetic position requires, and in another – it is preserved. Such cases are not scanty in the Bulgarian language, compare sbera, sbiram, sbor, but sabera, sabiram, sabor; svestia, sviast, savest; svarshen and savarshen, sgledam, sgleda and sagledam; sgrada and sagradia; sgresha and sagresha; sdruja and sadruja; sdarjam and sadarjam; skria, skrit, but sakroven, sakrovishte; spregna and saprejen; storia and satvoria. The prefix “va-“ usually loses its final yer before following verb roots with an initial consonant, as here, the very peculiarity of the newly formed consonant combination (in a number of cases in full contradiction with the inherited from proto-Slavonic structure of the syllable, compare vstapvam, vstrastiavam, vsmukvam, vsmakvam) helps the morpheme parsing of the word and the distinguishing of the prefix. The generalization of the preposition- prefix as f in the colloquial language is also an expression of the aspiration to achieve a clear morpheme structure. In the prefix “vaz-“ with exception of some Russian borrowings such as vzriv and vzvod the weak yer is always kept. The only exception in a domestic word is the verb vzema, which in Bulgarian is considered to be formed by zema and the prefix v, as we can see from its derivatives – izzema, vazzema, etc., whose fate clearly shows that the drop of the yer in vaz- leads to the breaking of the uniform morpheme vz- in the preposition v- and the initial root z- to an undesired decomposition of the word. The behaviour of the weak yer-s in the suffixes is also subject of morphological restrictions, mostly connected with the aspiration to generalize the base of the word. In some cases the holding of the weak yer brings additional grammatical information: in the suffix –aka the yer is held in a weak position, only if the substantive is a noun, compare jaltak, jaltaci and malak, malki; the countable form and the definite form of the masculine nouns also hold the weak yer, etc. The detailed analysis shows that similar to the behaviour of the root yer-s, the behaviour of the yer-s in the prefixes and suffixes is also subject mainly of morphological and morphonological regularities and in a smaller degree it simply depends on phonetical conditions.