The Orthography Profile of a Bulgarian Clerk of 1889 (Sofia Region)

Margaret Dimitrova
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”

Abstract

This paper discusses the spelling of an administrative document of 1889 describing the clothing in Sofia region. Ten years after the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman rule, the governors of the different regions of the liberated country were asked by the Ministry of Internal Affairs to give information on the clothing in their regions. The secretary of the governor of Sofia region composed such a report describing the traditional clothes, local terms, local production and imported goods, and prices of the clothes.
In the two last decades of the nineteenth century, there was no codification of the orthography of the Bulgarian literary language and the secretary in question had to rely on the linguistic conventions and orthographic rules of different orthograhic schools that came into being in the period before the liberation of the country. The analysis of his orthography shows that he tried to be consistent as much as possible, including in the use of the letters ь, ъ, ѣ, and ѫ but the lack of dictionaries and codification lead to some variation. The biggest variation is attested in the form of the definite article in masculine adjectives and nouns. The secretary followed mostly the rules suggested by Marin Drinov but not only: influence of Ivan Momchilov’s Grammar and the editions by Lyuben Karavelov is also detectable – predominantly those features were chosen that were closer to the spoken language.

Keywords: orthography, Bulgarian literary language, administrative language register, history of the Bulgarian literary language