Talk:Bulgarian phonology

The 'rudeness' of shifting the stress to the left
I've removed the following bit from the section on stress as it's way too specific and IMHO has little to do with phonology: The stress is sometimes placed earlier in the word than it should be for emphasis (this is considered rude) – This applies only to the imperative forms of verbs. Stressing these on the first syllable is a feature of western dialects and my gut feeling is that the 'rudeness', if any, comes from the stereotype about speakers of these dialects rather than from anything else. Any thoughts on that? Uanfala (talk) 21:29, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
 * ('come here), instead of
 * ('tell me'), instead of
 * ('leave me alone'), instead of
 * It can be considered rude to talk to somebody in dialect on purpose I guess, but I think you are right otherwise. --V111P (talk) 21:56, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Wrong note about allophones
The section "Consonants" states in note 7:

"[l] can be analyzed as an allophone of /ɫ/, as it appears only before front vowels. A trend of l-vocalization is emerging among younger native speakers and more often in colloquial speech."

This doesn't make sense. [l] does not appear before front vowels - [ʎ] does. [l] and [ʎ] are certainly not allophones (e.g. луд [lut] vs лют [ʎut]). As stated, the note is false, it is not clear what it is trying to say and there is no source provided. I suggest removing it. Martinkunev (talk) 14:55, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Phonology: dz
The article states that /dz/ only exists in foreign words and is not part of the language inventory.

This is demonstrably wrong, as there are native words with this phoneme - дзифт, дзън, also dialectal дзвер and also when a final ц is voiced. It is rare, but known and any native speaker would recognize it. It also has a designated digraph, дз, which is used specifically for the voiced alveolar sibilant affricate. Petar Petrov Donchev (talk) 08:01, 23 November 2021 (UTC)


 * All of this is either dialectal or allophonic use. Дзифт is also written as зифт, дзън as зън. Дзвиска, дзак, etc. are purely dialectal words which do not exist in Standard Bulgarian. Actually the only words that can really be argued to exist in CSB are borrowings like камикадзе & дзенбудизъм. For this reason, almost no Western authors accept /dz/ as a phoneme in Bulgarian. VMORO 05:44, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

Overzealous discussion of palatalisation
Someone has edited the article, since I last visited it, to expand on the two schools of thought regarding the phonemicity of palatalised consonants in Bulgarian, and they were very passionate about it. The article is full of irrelevant information and improper style. There was a whole paragraph discussing the atrocities committed by the Red Army in their takeover of Bulgaria at the end of WWII. While those acts were monstrous indeed, they are completely irrelevant to the discussion. It is blatantly implied that the pioneer of the palatal interpretation is misrepresenting the facts due to him being Russian. I believe the entire article about palatalisation is copy-pasted somewhere. I will try to clean up as much as possible, but I am not a phonetician and there is probably a lot of irrelevant information or blatant misinformation I am not going to pick up on. Someone please look into it. Linguist27 (talk) 05:29, 19 October 2023 (UTC)


 * I have encountered sources which claim that Bulgarian has, in fact, palatalised consonants. It's also a dialectal thing but they do not appear in the standard language. The question is if half the article must be about that. Whoever edited that could have done a PhD instead if they are so vehement about this topic. Bizko4ito (talk) 19:59, 19 October 2023 (UTC)

Recent revert
My edits (as 2001:BB6:B84C:CF00:4CAE:8D0E:FDE6:9A88) to this page, which consisted of adding IPA and lang tags, wording (e.g. word finally > at word end), and formatting (mainly replacing bulky wikitext with ya and na templates, or avoiding overlinking/italicisation of non Latin script text, etc.), have been reverted. I believe they should be restored. @VMORO 2001:BB6:B84C:CF00:9483:892:F767:BA0F (talk) 12:29, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Palatalisation
I am a native Bulgarian speaker and I think that palatalisation is presented in a misleading way. Although the current text (08 June 2024) presents both concepts (39- and 22-consonant systems), it favours the  wrong  22-consonant system.

Why the 22-consonant system is wrong? Because palatalised (soft) consonants  are not  combinations of hard consonants with [j]. Such combinations do not exist normally in the Bulgarian language. Yet, every native Bulgarian speaker can distingush between the following words:
 * лава [лава] (meaning 'lava') with a hard "л" [l];
 * лява [л'ава] (meaning 'left') with a soft "л" [l'];
 * лйава [лйава] (no such word) with a hard "л" followed by j [lj].

Combinations of hard consonants with j are rarely found in compound words. For example:
 * Трансйордания [транс-йор-да-ни-йа] with а hard "с" [s] followed by j in the next syllable.

Compare it with
 * асансьор [а-сан-с'ор] (meaning 'lift') with a soft "с" [s'] (no j).

These words are pronounced and spelled differently: сйор [сйор] vs. сьор [с'ор].

Indeed, the distinction is stated in the text:


 * Palatal consonants cannot be considered to be formed by their hard counterparts by adding, as there is a clear auditory difference between pronouncing a soft consonant (as in Russian) and pronouncing a consonant and a glide (as in English). A 2012 comparative study of palatal phonemes in Russian, palatalized phonemes in Bulgarian and CjV clusters in English has deduced that the phonetic and auditory properties of Bulgarian palatals are similar to those in Russian and deviate substantially from the English consonant + glide sequences and that Bulgarian and Russian listeners did not need to wait for formant transitions to identify a consonant as palatal/palatalized unlike English listeners.

But this crucial argument is neglected in the text afterwards. On the contrary, the text is politically biased. The text persuades the reader to believe that the 39-consonant system is supported, even by the Bulgarian Academy of Science, onlu due to the political influence of the former USSR! Nothing could be more inaccurate. Nowadays (08 June 2024) there is no political influence over Bulgarian science, but BAS still supports the 39-consonant model.

I think that the 39-consonant model should be favored because it describes linguistic facts precisely and is supported by native speakers, incl. BAS.

The false charm of the 22-consonant model is due to the lack of pairs of hard and soft consonants in the majority of the Western languages. This model may also describe the origin of palatalized consonants: perhaps they originated as combinations of hard consonants with j. But their present pronunciation in the Bulgarian language (and in other Slavic languages) is different.

91.139.213.126 (talk) 09:39, 8 June 2024 (UTC)