ОЩЕ ПО ВЪПРОСА ЗА ВРЪЩАНЕ КЪМ ДРИНОВСКО-ИВАНЧЕВСКИЯ ПРАВОПИС
ON THE ISSUE OF RETURNING TO THE DRINOVSKO-IVANCHEVSKI ORTHOGRAPHY – SOME ADDITIONAL COMMENTS

Summary/Abstract: In the beginning of 1945 a new party which came into power through coup d’etat in Bulgaria made an orthography reform, as a result of which letters that existed in the Bulgarian language were replaced with others. This reform concerned the letters ѣ and ѫ that had been used for centuries. Depending on the phonetic conditions, the substitute for ѣ was я, and for ѫ was the letter ъ. After the democratic changes of 1989 in Bulgaria, many people – linguists, literary critics, i.e., people of precise speech, and other intellectuals posed the question of adopting completely the so-called Drinovski-Ivanchevski orthography that existed until 1945. This paper makes a critical analysis of the pros and cons of this proposal and the arguments for its rejection are pointed out. By providing numerous examples illustrating the subject matter, the author shows cases in which returning to the use of the grapheme ѣ would eliminate spelling difficulties in words including я and e. The article also points out the argument for putting back in use the letter ѫ in certain word positions. The author supports the view that the essence of the suggested restoring of the letters discussed concerns the resuming of a relation that was artificially severed – that of the contemporary and old Bulgarian literature whose natural successor is the Bulgarian language. On the other hand, with the replacement of the graphemes ѣ and ѫ the linguistic compulsion in pronunciation will be eliminated; and third, unity will be achieved in the orthography of some words and their forms, since the decreed reform in 1945 led to chaos in the orthography of certain words.

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