Medieval Bulgarian anthroponyms and toponyms of popular Semitic origin. Aspects of the language situation in the early medieval Bulgarian state
Medieval Bulgarian anthroponyms and toponyms of popular Semitic origin. Aspects of the language situation in the early medieval Bulgarian state

Summary/Abstract: The present article deals with Medieval Bulgarian anthroponyms and toponyms of Syriac and Arabic origin. They have all been registered in the medieval epigraphy and written sources of Bulgarian and Byzantine origin and up to this moment they have not been examined in linguistic studies. In the second part of the article on the basis of previous investigations on the traces of direct translations from Syriac in Old Slavonic texts of Bulgarian origin an attempt at reconstructing the peculiarities of the medieval Old Slavonic (Bulgarian) – Syriac bilingualism is made. Some examples of literary translations of idioms, disregard for the metaphoric meaning of words and transliterations of uncommon words give arguments in favor of the hypothesis that this form of bilingualism had a popular character and typologically did not differ essentially from some latter forms of bilingualism registered in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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