Bulgarian and Russian

[Laura J. Olson]

Dear Emily,
        I'm an American Slavist whose major language is Russian and I learned
Bulgarian while I was in grad school. It's my opinion that Russian grammar
is quite different from Bulgarian, and I agree with your student's
statements that Russians cannot understand his Bulgarian. Bulgarian has a
different verbal system and lacks most of the cases that Russian has. So
your student would have no clue about the Russian case system. The sound
system is also different, and your student would need to work hard on
pronunciation of soft consonants. What is similar in Russian and Bulgarian
is the abstract vocabulary that comes from Old Church Slavonic. Thus, your
student may find it easy to read Russian theoretical texts (when I started
learning Bulgarian I found it more or less easy to read theoretical texts
in Bulgarian, even though I couldn't speak the language and didn't know
much about the grammar). But he will not find it easy to speak Russian. I
would put him in first year.
        I'm reminded of the plight of a "heritage student" in our university who
had heard Russian spoken by his Russian-speaking parents growing up in
Israel. This student did not actively speak Russian and lacks the instincts
of a native speaker that would tell him what sounds "right." Nevertheless
he was put into second year. Now, in the second semester of second year, he
is failing tests and generally doing quite badly.
        I would fear similar result from putting a Bulgarian speaker into second
year Russian.
        --Laura Olson
University of Colorado


At 10:09 PM 3/3/02 +0000, you wrote:
>Dear colleagues:
>    I'd like to ask for some help. I have a Bulgarian student who wants
>to be in my 4th semester Russian class. I want to keep him out on the
>grounds that his abilities are far superior to that of my students,
>especially since Bulgarian is close to Russian.
>    He argues that Bulgarian is very different from Russian, etc., that
>his Russian friends can't understand him when he speaks Bulgarian, that
>a lot of words in Bulgarian are from non-Slavic languages.
>    I may have to rebut his arguments in case we meet with the Dean.
>And, out of curiosity, would some nice Slavic linguist out there
>enlighten me as to the similarities between Bulgarian and Russian. I was
>under the impression that Bulgarian was the most similar to Russian of
>the Slavic languages (aside from Belorussian and Ukrainian). I know, of
>course, about the alphabet, and I would think the grammar is pretty
>similar.
>    You can reply off-list to me at mllemily at acsu.buffalo.edu  but maybe
>the topic is of interest to the whole list.
>    Thanks! Emily Tall  (SUNY/Buffalo)
>
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