Cognate

[Harold D. Baker]

In response to my posting re the Russian translation of the word cognate, I
received a pertinent correction from Heinrich Pfandl
(pfandl at balu.kfunigraz.ac.at) regarding my statement that Bulgarian is
derived from Old Slavonic. The substance of his detailed explanation (which
I accidentally deleted and cannot simply reproduce here) is that Old
Slavonic actually means Old Church Slavonic, an "artificial" liturgical
language created by SS. Cyrill and Methodius on the basis of Slavic
dialects of the vicinity of Solun which are not obviously Bulgarian rather
than Macedonian, Slovenian, or other another Balkan language. In any case
the status of Old Church Slavonic as a liturgical language makes it
impossible to identify it with the Bulgarian language of the time. All
Orthodox Slavs used OCS in worship, but no one used it in everyday life.
Modern Bulgarian is influenced by OCS but by many other languages as well.

My mistake was not to realize that Old Slavonic is synonymous with Old
Church Slavonic. I should have refered to Proto-Slavic.

Harold D. Baker
Program in Russian
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92717 USA
1-714-824-6183/Fax 1-714-824-2379