Историческа граматика на българския език

by Иван Харалампиев

В основата на това изследване стои лекционният курс по историческа граматика на българския език, четен от автора пред студентите по българска и славянска филология на ВТУ "Св.св. Кирил и Методий" в продължение на почти четвърт век.

244 pages

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Rebecka · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5 stars, rounded up. This book is meant for Bulgarian students of historical Bulgarian linguistic, but it works nicely for anyone who has reading skills in Bulgarian and who is already well acquainted with the morphology and syntax of Old Church Slavonic. The new twist this book adds is of course the modern day Bulgarian perspective, and how the development unfolded in Bulgaria (and Makedonia). That's also the problem if you're not Bulgarian: familiarity with Bulgarian dialects is partly key to seeing the bigger picture here. Also, since the book is for Bulgarians, the examples are very often not translated into modern day Bulgarian - because they are apparently understandable to Bulgarians. Now, I'm pretty good at OCS, but random phrases taken out of context are not always very easy to interpret. Also, the book kind of fails at truly emphasizing what part of the example was truly interesting. Better type-setting could have taken care of that. Some very, very interesting aspects, tied in with the move from a synthetic to analytic language, such as direct/indirect object doubling, were hard to grasp from the examples alone - because I can't tell that the supposedly "unacceptable" non-doubled variant is incorrect. It just looks normal to me, and without cases I couldn't really tell what was supposed to be the object anyway >_> Which is the point of object doubling, but I couldn't see it in the examples!

One thing that always bugs me with historical slavic linguistics is how impressionistic it is. I know the resources aren't really in place yet to make them quantitative, but it still means very little to say "the examples increase in the manuscripts in the 14th and 15th centuries" because what does that mean? Is the increase actually statistically significant? Is it a great enough increase to cancel out the effect of an increase in available material? And how many are those instances that are given as examples? This or that, like object doubling, shows up in Codex Suprasliensis. But is there one example, or 70?

The thing that strikes me the most is, while reading this, I understand perfectly well that Bulgarian did away with the inflexional case system. But why did the other Slavic languages keep it? I know that they sure as hell can't keep track of what's location and what's direction in both CS and PVL, that nominative/accusative is often undistiguishable, that the Old Russian redaction of OCS cannot separate between, for example, nom.f.sg, gen.f.sg, nom.f.pl, acc.f.pl for soft-stem nouns. This obviously shows up in the collapsing of the stems into a gender based system, but it's still amazing that the cases are actually still around and that the system is as diverse as it is.