As a native Bulgarian speaker, our veteran project manager Svetlana Hilder is usually tasked with checking the Slavic languages when we perform our quality assurance (QA) checks – a standard procedure here at First Edition Translations before final delivery. The similarities between these languages mean that Svetlana can roughly match up sections and sentences even without speaking the language itself. In this article, Svetlana offers some insight into this language family.
You say tomato, I say….
Scrolling through texts in other Slavic languages can be truly amusing to me as they look like a parody of my own mother tongue, Bulgarian. For example, just imagine someone going around calling ice cream ‘frozelings’, saying ‘beg’ instead of ‘please’ or just generally twisting the pronunciation of every word by changing a few sounds. This is what other Slavonic languages look like to me, and it never fails to put a smile on my face.
A few years ago, I visited Prague and couldn’t stop laughing at these signs. To any Czech speaker, ‘POZOR!’ simply means ‘ATTENTION!’. To me, however, this means ‘SHAME!’ and it evokes images of someone wagging their finger at me.
Same words – wholly different meanings
While studying at university in Bulgaria, I had friends from several neighbouring Slavic-language countries which led to some interesting and comical misunderstandings. Our Macedonian friends, for instance, would say ‘те барам’ (‘te baram’ = I am looking for you), but ‘baram’ means ‘to grope’ in Bulgarian.
This of course works the other way around – speakers of other Slavic languages are equally entertained by words in my language. My Russian-speaking friend was once particularly tickled by the Bulgarian words for vacuum cleaner (‘прахосмукачка‘ – literally ‘dust-sucker’) and tights (‘чорапогащник‘ – ‘sock-o-pants’).
Here are just a few more examples:
- Живот – which means ‘stomach’ in Russian and ‘life’ in Bulgarian (imagine my confusion when I hear my friends say that their life hurts)
- Попа – ‘bottom’ in Russian, ‘the priest’ in Bulgarian
- Булка – ‘white bread’ in Russian, ‘bride’ in Bulgarian
- Trudnoća i dojenje – whilst in Croatian this means ‘pregnancy and breastfeeding’, it stands for ‘difficulty’ (they do have a point there…) and ‘milking’ (of animals) in Bulgarian
The root of the problem
There is an interesting explanation for all these bemusing similarities and overlaps, which goes back to the Indo-European language tree and the theory that all these languages have a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-European. Although there is no record that such language ever existed, linguistic researchers have used the so-called comparative method to analyse its descendants and reconstruct this hypothetical mother of all Indo-European languages.
The history of Proto-Indo-European
Over time, as speakers of Proto-Indo-European broke off into their own separate groups as a result of migration waves, the regional dialects of Proto-Indo-European spoken by the different groups each embarked on their own path of development. Each dialect experienced distinct shifts in vocabulary, pronunciation and morphology (i.e. how words are formed). As centuries passed, these dialects evolved into the known ancient Indo-European languages. Further linguistic divergence gave rise to their current descendants, the modern Indo-European languages.
The phonological changes that shaped each language often follow patterns that allow linguistic researchers to trace modern words back to their hypothetical origin in Proto-Indo-European. One example I remember from my student days is ‘wind’. This is ‘ventus’ in Latin, ‘вятър’ (vyatur) in Bulgarian and ‘باد’ (bad) in Farsi (also known as Persian). These versions are all related and followed changes which turned the hypothetical ‘hw’ sound from Proto-Into-European (assuming it was imitation of the sound of the wind) into ‘v’, ‘w’ or ‘b’ respectively.
Bulgarian today
My own mother tongue, a South Slavic language which descends from Proto Slavic, is spoken by around 7.6 million people worldwide, with Bulgarian-speaking communities also located in Ukraine, Moldova and Greece. You can find communities of Bulgarian expats dotted across the globe, including in the city of Cambridge, where First Edition Translations is headquartered.
Interested in tapping into Slavic markets?
Whether it’s Bulgarian, Russian or Czech (or any other language for that matter!), we can help you break into new markets. As a one-stop shop for localisation needs, we provide services for the translation, editing, proofreading, and typesetting of everything from cookbooks to clinical trial documentation. We are always happy to hear from you under enquiries@firstedit.co.uk