Bulgarian grammar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section is incomplete and may require expansion and/or cleanup.
Please improve the article, or discuss the issue on the talk page.

Bulgarian grammar is the grammar of the Bulgarian language. The Bulgarian language is a South Slavic language that also is one of the members of the Balkan sprachbund. As such, it shares several grammatical innovations with the other southwest Balkan languages that set it apart from other Slavic languages. These include a sharp reduction in noun inflections; most Bulgarian nouns and adjectives are inflected for number and gender, but have lost noun cases. Bulgarian also has a suffixed definite article, while most other Slavic languages have no definite article at all. Bulgarian has also lost the verb infinitive, while otherwise preserving most of the complexities of the Old Bulgarian verb conjugation system, and has further developped the proto-Slavic verb system to add verb forms to express nonwitnessed, retold, and doubtful (irrealis) actions.

Bulgarian is a part of the Balkan linguistic union, which also includes Greek, Macedonian, Romanian, Albanian and Torlakian dialect of the Serbian language. Most of these languages share some of the above-mentioned characteristics.

1 Nouns
2 Adjectives
3 Pronouns
4 Verbs
5 Word order
6 External links

[edit] Nouns

Main article: Bulgarian nouns

Bulgarian nouns have the categories grammatical gender, number, case (only vocative) and definiteness. A noun has one of three specific grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and two numbers (singular and plural), With cardinal numbers and some adverbs, masculine nouns use a separate count form. Definiteness is expressed by a definite article which is postfixed to the noun.

[edit] Adjectives

Main article: Bulgarian adjectives

A Bulgarian adjective agrees in gender, number and definiteness with the noun it is appended to and is put usually before it. The comparative and the superlative form (unlike most other Slavic languages) are formed analytically.

[edit] Pronouns

Main article: Bulgarian pronouns

Bulgarian pronouns vary in gender, number, definiteness and case. They, more than any other part of speech, have preserved the proto-Slavic case system. The distinguishable types of pronouns include the following: personal, possessive, interrogative, demonstrative, reflexive, summative, negative, indefinite and relative.

[edit] Verbs

Main articles: Bulgarian verbs and Bulgarian conjugation.

Bulgarian verbs are the most complicated part of Bulgarian grammar. They are inflected for person, number and sometimes gender. They also have lexical aspect (perfective and imperfective), voice, nine tenses, five moods and six non-finite verbal forms. Bulgarian verbs are divided into three conjugations.

[edit] Word order

Although Bulgarian has almost no noun cases its word order is rather free. It is even freer than the word order of some languages that have cases, for example German. This is due to the agreement between the subject and the verb of a sentence. So in Bulgarian the sentence "I saw Lubomir" can be expressed thus:

Видях Любомир.
Любомир (го) видях.

It is clear that the subject is "аз" ("I"), because the verb "видях" ends in x.

Other examples - Ivan greeted the girls:

Иван поздрави момичетата.
Момичетата (ги) поздрави Иван.
Иван момичетата поздрави.
Момичетата Иван (ги) поздрави.
Поздрави Иван момичетата.
Поздрави (ги) момичетата Иван.

Theoretically all permutations are possible but the last one sounds rather odd.

The girls greeted Ivan:

Момичетата поздравиха Иван.
Иван (го) поздравиха момичетата.
Момичетата Иван поздравиха.
Иван момичетата (го) поздравиха.
Поздравиха момичетата Иван.
Поздравиха (го) Иван момичетата.

The clitic doubling (го/ги) is obligatory only when the subject and the object are both in third person, and they are either both singular or both plural, but when the meaning is clear from the context it can be omitted. Examples:

Иван го поздрави Мария. - Maria greeted Ivan.
Мария я поздрави Иван. - Ivan greeted Maria.

but

Ролите озвучиха артистите... - The artists...(enumerating their names) sound-screened the roles. (They made the soundtrack for the film.)

In the compound tenses, when a participle is used, and when the subject and the object are of different gender or number, the clitic doubling can also be left out. So the first two of the above examples can be expressed in a compound tense thus: