Книжовноезикови стилове на българския XVIII в.
Literary styles in 18th c. Bulgaria

Summary/Abstract: A new approach to the analysis of eighteenth century Bulgarian texts is proposed. They are classified into four types - a strongly classicized, an intermediate, a moderately classicized and a demotic one - which differ in the degree and the character of their classicization on the phonetic, morphological and syntactic level. With all the four written-language styles the vocabulary combines a good deal of the centuries-long tradition (abstract words, names for religious concepts, natural-science and philosophical terms) with innovative lexical items, as it is in present-day Bulgarian, and the spelling is traditional. The Greek moderate Katharevoussa (as a means of making a linguistically modern text look classical-like) is the typological model for the moderately classicized eighteenth century Bulgarian written style, as the Greek Dhimotiki is for the demotic one. Two varieties of the classical written language provide linguistic samples for the eighteenth century Bulgarian scribe: the South Slavic (Serbo-Bulgarian) bezjusov one (without letters for the Old Bulgarian nasal vowels) and the East Slavic Church Slavonic one. The language of Paisij Hilendarski is of the intermediate strongly-to-moderately classicized type with a mixed traditional Serbo-Bulgarian and East Slavic phonetics and orthography and does not contain dialectal-vernacular phonetic features as some specialists in the history of Written Bulgarian claim.

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