User:Chernorizets

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I was born and raised in Bulgaria, and now I live in the US. My username is a reference to Chernorizets Hrabar, and is pronounced in modern Bulgarian.

I'm a software engineer by trade, with a degree in computer science. I also got a chance to study sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and computational linguistics. After being denied the opportunity in high school, I was finally able to take Spanish in college, and I had a lot of fun being a Spanish teaching assistant. Sadly, my level of fluency has dropped since, mostly due to disuse.

I'm particularly fond of historical linguistics, focusing mainly on Slavic and Germanic languages. In fact, for the longest time, Wiktionary was fueling my addiction to discovering non-obvious cognates between Slavic and Germanic 🙂 These days, I'm doing my own little part in expanding Bulgarian coverage in the dictionary.

Subpages

 * Bulgarian editor news - a collaboration space for Wiktionarians contributing Bulgarian entries
 * Bulgarian Lemma Improvement Project - a collaborative project for raising the bar of Bulgarian entries
 * Sandbox - messy and changes often
 * Bibliography - under construction
 * bg-top-5000-bnc - top 5,000 words by frequency according to the Bulgarian National Corpus (BNC)
 * bg-top-10000-bnc - top 10,000 informal/fiction words from the BNC
 * bg-words-with-dz-affricate - words with the rare affricate.
 * poetic-bg-vocabulary - personal tracking list of BG words found in poetry

Small victories

 * Aug. 2023: together with User:Benwing2 and User:Kiril kovachev, got important fixes pushed to Module:bg-pronunciation (thread, ). Prior to that, a high percentage of Bulgarian terms had wrong IPA transcriptions.
 * Aug. 2023: my article was Foreign Word of the Day (FWOTD) on Aug. 13, 2023. User:Kiril kovachev graciously provided the audio for it.
 * Oct. 2023: the article which I significantly expanded was FWOTD on Oct. 28, 2023. Audio courtesy of the tireless User:Kiril kovachev once again.
 * Nov. 2023: my article was FWOTD on 11/24. Audio, as always, by User:Kiril kovachev.

Bulgarian terms

 * Requested entries (Bulgarian) - let's use this more!

Bulgarian wordlists on Wiktionary

 * Bulgarian term frequency list (top 5000)
 * Matthias Buchmeier's English-Bulgarian dictionary generated from Wiktionary
 * Jberkel's Wanted BG list
 * Benwing2's bg-freq-fiction list
 * LinguisticMystic's BG Top list
 * Kiril Kovachev's BG Wordlist, Page 1 (of 8)

Words heard during my childhood
🇨🇴

Further words to add
🇨🇴

Banat Bulgarian resources

 * Austrian Academy of Sciences resource page
 * Wikipedia articles:

Etymology
.

Noun

 * 1) cat (Felis cattus)

My Bulgarian dialect
I come from north-eastern Bulgaria, so my dialect broadly falls under the group, particularly in the stronger reduction of unstressed vowels compared to literary Bulgarian. Additionally, the speech in my hometown is characterized by frequent elision of word-initial and word-medial sounds (procope and syncope, if you're fancy like that). My idiolect is influenced by the fact I was a stage actor growing up, so certain features of the local dialect - like palatalization before front vowels - were deemed too "provincial" and were actively discouraged, so I've lost them.

Examples:
 * What are you doing after?
 * : Какво ще правиш после?
 * : Ко ши прайш после?
 * What you're not gonna do is argue with each other!
 * : Няма да се карате!
 * : Няа (да) са карати!
 * I don't know if he/she is going to call you.
 * : Не знам дали ще ти се обади.
 * : Ни знам дали ш' ти са обади.

Because of partial nasalization due to elided nasal consonants, as well as more common usage of, , and , I've at times mistaken Brazilian Portuguese I overheard for Bulgarian, until I listened more closely.

Because of the many years I've lived in the US, people in Bulgaria can detect a slight accent, primarily in my intonation. I also tend to aspirate my 's, 's and 's a bit more prominently than in regular Bulgarian speech, due to interference form English. For those reasons, I prefer not to record audio of Bulgarian words.

Macedonian language
As a Bulgarian editor, I feel like it's important to be transparent about linguistic biases I might have about Macedonian. As it happens, I share the international view that Macedonian is an independent Eastern South Slavic language, joined by Bulgarian and Old Church Slavonic (OCS). I further maintain that OCS is the direct ancestor of both Macedonian and Bulgarian, and that the two languages underwent a period of shared development before diverging. In my opinion, the situation is not too dissimilar from that of Occitan and Catalan.

As of 2023, it is still the official position of Bulgaria that Macedonian is one of the three standardized literary norms of the pluricentric Bulgarian language (along with standard Bulgarian and Banat Bulgarian). Personally, I find that regrettable, and I hope that it changes.

Babel box caveats
I've only used to list languages where I have some level of skill in all of: speaking, listening, reading and writing. That's my personal definition of "knowing a language", for non-signed languages.

If some of those conditions are relaxed, I can understand:
 * a fair amount of written and spoken Russian, due to the influence of Old Church Slavic on Russian, and the much later influence of Russian on modern literary Bulgarian in the 19th century. No writing or speaking skills.
 * a fair amount of written and spoken Macedonian, due to its closeness with Bulgarian. No writing or speaking skills.
 * some amount of everyday spoken Ekavian BCMS, but less so than Russian or Macedonian. My reading comprehension lags behind my listening comprehension, and I can't speak or write in it.
 * some amount of written Portuguese, via my knowledge of Spanish. My listening comprehension lags behind my reading comprehension, especially for European Portuguese, and I can't speak or write in it.
 * minimal amounts of the other Slavic and Romance languages.