I think I know where Boris is coming from, and I consider that he is right,
but all this talk of Bulgarian/Russian alphabets is misplaced. We don't
speak of an English or American alphabet (identical as far as I know), do
we? Nor of a Norwegian or Swedish alphabet (which I suspect are not
identical). Both Bulgarian and Russian use an alphabet which is largely
based on the Greek alphabet with added characters to represent sounds not
present in Greek of the 9th century CE. It may have been developed by St
Cyril, but more likely his invention was what is known as the Glagolitic
alphabet, which is described and illustrated here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_alphabet and amazingly, provided for
in Unicode http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2C00.pdf
There are no characters used in Bulgarian that are not also used in modern
Russian, and in Russian a hard sign is no more than an orthographical relic
of what was once a vowel. A similar relic is the curiosity of the
preposition "B" occasionally taking the form "BO".
For those who want to delve deeper (or, like me, need to refresh their
memory after 30 years!)
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/eieol/ocsol-0-X.html would be a good
place to start.
--
Piers
-----Original Message-----
From: olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Andrew Dacey
Sent: 06 November 2005 03:31
To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [OM] Re: USA Southwest
On 11/4/05, Willie Wonka <alienspecimen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I think Andrew D gave a good answer (although he still calls the Bulgarian
alphabet Cyrillic...:), but here are few observations:
No, I said that the Bulgarian alphabet is a variant of the Cyrillic
alphabet. Much as the Russian alphabet is a variant of the Cyrillic
alphabet. There are letters in the original Cyrillic alphabet that don't
appear in either modern Bulgarian or Russian. And the spelling rules and
word construction are certainly different (such as Bulgarian using the hard
sign as a vowel).
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