Category talk:Bulgarian language

Ancestor tree

Hi @Benwing2 and @Thadh - considering that both Middle Bulgarian and Modern Bulgarian are descendants of Old Church Slavic, why is that not reflected in the ancestor tree? Middle Bulgarian literary artifacts in particular are very conservative in nature and considered closer to OCS than to what the spoken varieties would have been at the time.

At any rate, it's incorrect for the middle stage of the language (Middle Bulgarian) to be hanging off of the proto-language directly. At the very least, if for some reason there's still pushback on this site against OCS being the ancestor of Bulgarian, there needs to be an "Old Bulgarian" alias of OCS (I believe we support aliasing) that is the link between Proto-Slavic (up to 7-8th c) and Middle Bulgarian (12-15th c.). Chernorizets (talk) 01:38, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

@Chernorizets There has actually been a ton of discussion about this previously. I think most people are in favor of Bulgarian (and maybe Macedonian too) descending from OCS but some aren't. You probably need to start another BP discussion, but before doing that, you should look up the past history and summarize it. Benwing2 (talk) 01:40, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

BTW I'm not sure where all the discussions have taken place; some in the Beer Parlour, some Slavic discussions in WT:RFM, and I also see a discussion here: Wiktionary:Etymology_scriptorium/2017/July#нужда. Benwing2 (talk) 01:43, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 the outcome of those discussions has already made it possible for both Bulgarian and Macedonian to use {{inh|<bg or mk>|cu}}. I'm not really asking for anything new, other than to be consistent between our etymology templates and our representation of the ancestor tree shown on this category page. I think it's important to understand that the tree is simply incorrect for Bulgarian today, because it implies that Old Bulgarian is equivalent to Proto-Slavic, which it isn't. Sound changes particular to South Slavic and Eastern South Slavic in particular had taken place by the time of the earliest OCS literary artifacts. Chernorizets (talk) 01:50, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

@Chernorizets What's going on technically is that Middle Bulgarian is an etymology-only variant of Old Church Slavonic. Maybe we need to list OCS as an ancestor of Middle Bulgarian. Pinging User:Theknightwho, who implemented the ancestor functionality. Benwing2 (talk) 02:08, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

@Benwing2 that would be correct - Middle Bulgarian is distinct from OCS, in that it's the period where the nominal case system of OCS began to disintegrate, so that by the Modern Bulgarian period (conventionally dated 16th - onwards) it was already moribund and stylistically constrained. Chernorizets (talk) 02:14, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

@Chernorizets So there are two mechanisms here: Middle Bulgarian is still an etymology-only variant of OCS (though we could change it to be a variant of Bulgarian instead, if you think that would make more sense). Separately to that, I've just set OCS as the ancestor of Middle Bulgarian.

It seems a bit counter-intuitive that a variant could also be a descendant, but it's because with historical languages the "full langauge" represents an archetypical point in time for the language. We get the same thing with Latin, where Late Latin, New Latin etc are descendants of "Latin" (which really means Classical Latin). Theknightwho (talk) 02:24, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

@Theknightwho thank you for making that change!

I'm not sure how we generally handle historical stages of languages on EN Wiktionary. Speaking just from the POV of linguistics, the relationship between Old Bulgarian (OCS), Middle Bulgarian and (Modern) Bulgarian isn't much different from that between Old English, Middle English and (Modern) English - in both cases, we're referring to periods of a language defined by traditional scholarship as exhibiting certain distinctive traits, and lasting approximately between some start and end point.

As for the practical considerations on how Middle Bulgarian is treated on EN Wikt, the history of those choices predates my participation in the project. The most obvious difference with Middle English is that we have practically zero coverage of Middle Bulgarian. That's not surprising considering that it's somewhat of a specialized subject, and there are few people who could contribute confidently out of an already small editor base. Whatever makes the most sense given this reality is fine with me.

Thanks,

Chernorizets (talk) 02:35, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

It is true that Middle Bulgarian is still primarily known from religious texts that adhere closely to the orthographic tradition of OCS. Leaving things as-is, if it doesn't create any trouble, is OK with me. As far as I understand from what I've learned, written Middle Bulgarian is to OCS as Church Slavic is to OCS, while scribal "errors" indicate that the spoken language was well on its way to significant changes in phonology and morphology. Chernorizets (talk) 02:41, 14 November 2023 (UTC)