Talk:Streamlined System for the Romanization of Bulgarian

A very bad system indeed
Mr Ivanov is the iniator of the so-called "streamlined system" of romanization of Bulgarian Cyrillic. The anglicised system made "mandatory" (!) by a Bulgarian law in 1995 has to be replaced in the context of the time: in the mid-90es, Bulgaria was in a deep crisis and tried to "go West" by all means. It was the time of "privatisation", and this meant "piratisation" of the economy by the former aparačiki, who wanted to become the best capitalists in Europe and began to anglicize the country in the name of their new ideology, neoliberalism. It was also the time of the "mutri" ("ugly faces"), mafiosi who terrorised the population. The "streamlined system" (why "streamlined" ?) has to be seen in this context and there are many good reasons to boycott it: 1. it is incoherent (the article Romanization of Bulgarian points out some logical problems, but there are others, e. g. why "i" for и and not "ee"?); 2. it is useless : Bulgaria used formerly a coherent system based on the system of slavic languages using the latin alphabet, the scientific transliteration. There was absolutely no need to make another - the only motivation was a political one (the wish to "go West" as radically as possible). As for the argument of electronical communication which doesn't allow the use of diacritics, it is specious, because nowadays, even the cheapest computer allows this use and for instance, you find all latin characters on the bottom of Wikipedia pages when you edit a text; 3. it is culturally cannibalistic: it is a hypocrite and cultureless contribution to the uniformisation of the world (pretexting modernity, of course) and looses the cultural tights with the other slavic cultural areas of the Balkan, especially the Macedonian, which is very close to the Bulgarian. 4. Wikipedia is a scientific (though for a broader audience), not journalistic project. Mr Ljubomir Ivanov, who is the "author" of this bad system, is not a linguist, but a mathematician, and his sense for cultural questions seems to be very limited indeed. He seems in exchange to have a very developped political sense, because he managed to impose this absurd decision on governmental level. Moreover, he has a a very keen sense of publicity: he wrote his autobiography and put it in the English Wiki... --Hubertgui (talk) 15:11, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Not the same system
Something is wrong here. The "streamlined system" promoted by Mr Ivanov and used in the Antarctica placenames, and the official system adopted by the Bulgarian state, are not the same system. They are similar in their basic letter correspondence rules, but crucially differ in details, most visibly in the treatment of word-final -ia. The Antarctica system systematically uses "Kamchiya", "Miziya", "Provadiya" etc., where the official Bulgarian system demands "Mizia", "Provadia" etc.

This needs to be rewritten. Somebody has evidently been editing this with a personal COI agenda of aggrandising their own role in the creation of the national standard. In the absence of actual identity between the two systems, and in the absence of demonstrable explicit reference by the creators of the state system to the Antarctic system as its source of inspiration, we cannot simply say that "the" "streamlined" system just "became" the official one. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:27, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Update: Since the Antarctic system appears to be just one in a series of similar systems that led up to the current "official" one, I propose merging the whole thing into the main Romanization of Bulgarian article, where all the comparisons can be treated much more appropriately. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:47, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * "They are similar in their basic letter correspondence rules, but ..." Really?  Similar?  Aren't their letter correspondence tables identical?
 * "In the absence of actual identity between the two systems etc." But when the official system was adopted on a state level in 2000 it was identical to the Streamlined System, and remained so in 2000-2006.  In 2006 the modification 'iya > ia'  was introduced, and even if you consider it a great change and a new system ("crucially differ in details" (?!)) rather than the modified detail that it is, you cannot change the origins of the present system from its 2000-2006 version i.e. the Streamlined System.
 * "... one in a series of similar systems that led up to the current "official" one." You mean some of the other principal systems presented in Romanization of Bulgarian led up to the current "official" one?  Which systems exactly, any sources?
 * The merger suggestion doesn't seem a good idea, right now if merged the general article would become disbalanced, lacking any detailed treatment of the other systems; if fully developed it would become too large prompting splitting; probably it would be better to develop individual articles for the other systems too. Apcbg (talk) 12:05, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Another thing: are there any independent sources that actually call it "the streamlined system" (i.e. independently of Mr Ivanov and Wikipedia?) Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:30, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * All the article's sources are independent of Wikipedia. Regarding the name, I am not aware of anyone using names other than the one given by the author of the system, and published in peer-refereed sources quoted in the article.  As for other authors, the system is called "Streamlined System" in the publication (Gaidarska, 1998). Apcbg (talk) 13:38, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Do the official state documents ever call it anything at all, and do any official sources ever explicitly refer to Ivanov? Is Gaidarska the only independent source that has treated it as a work of Mr. Ivanov? Is Contrastive Linguistics (Sofia) a peer-reviewed publication? (I haven't seen the Gaidarska study, but judging from the Ivanov paper that appeared in the same outlet, one would be let to doubt.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:53, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It would seem that you've been engaging in some OR that you might wish to continue yourself, as well as to clarify your doubts if the Contrastive Linguistics was peer-refereed with the journal itself. Apcbg (talk) 14:17, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

I've merged the articles. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:32, 8 May 2009 (UTC)