Bulgarian alphabet

ISO 9

IPA

Name of Letter

English equivalent

Aa

/a/ or / a /

a as in "father"

Bb

/b/

b as in "bug"

Vv

/v/

v as in "vet"

Gg

// or / /

g as in "god"

Dd

/d/

d as in "dog"

Ee

// //

e as in "best"

s as in "treasure"

Zz

/z/

z as in "zoo"

Ii

/i/

ee as in "see"

Jj

/j/

y as in "yes"

Kk

/k/ or /c / /l/, // /m/ /n/

c as in "cat"

Ll Mm Nn

l as in "call" m as in "man" n as in "normal"

Oo Pp Rr Ss Tt Uu Ff Hh Cc

// or /o / /p/ /r/ /s/ /t/

o as in "order" p as in "pet" r as in "restaurant" s as in "sound" t as in "top" as in "tool" f as in "food" ch as in Scottish "loch" ts as in "fits" ch as in "chip" sh as in "shot" sht as in "shtick" u as in "turn" combined with <> as , for a pronunciation like yo in "yoyo"
less often with e as e, pronounced like ye in "yet"

/u/ or /o y / /f/ /x/ or / / /ts/ /t/ // /t/

, // or // Jj /j/ /ju/ /a/

u as in "menu" ya as in "yarn"

Most letters in the Bulgarian alphabet stand for just one specific sound. Three letters stand for the single expression of combinations of sounds, namely (sht), (yu), and (ya). Two sounds do not correspond to separate letters, but are expressed as the combination of two letters, namely (/d/) and (dz). The letter marks the softening (palatalization) of any consonant before //. The names of the letters are simple representations of their phonetic values, with all consonants being followed by // - thus the alphabet goes: /a/ - /b/ - /v/, etc. is known as "-kratko" (short /i/), as "er-golyam" (large Er), and as "er-maluk" (small Er). (When saying the alphabet fast, people often omit to say and , and pronounce simply as //.) For the transliteration of Bulgarian into the Latin alphabet (romanization), see romanization of Bulgarian.

[edit]Phonology [edit]Vowels

Standard Bulgarian vowels

Front Central Back

High /i/

/u/ //[12] // /a/

Mid //

Low

Bulgarian's six vowels may be grouped in three pairs according to their backness: front, central and back. All vowels are relatively lax, as in most other Slavic languages, and unlike the tense vowels, for example, in theGermanic languages. Unstressed vowels tend to be shorter and weaker compared to their stressed counterparts, and the corresponding pairs of open and closed vowels approach each other with a tendency to merge, above all as low (open and open-mid) vowels are raised and shift towards the high (close and closemid) ones. However, the coalescence is not always complete. The vowels are often distinguished in emphatic or deliberately distinct pronunciation, and reduction is strongest in colloquial speech. Besides that, some linguists distinguish two degrees of reduction, as they have found that a clearer distinction tends to be maintained in the syllable immediately preceding the stressed one. The complete merger of the pair /a/ - // is regarded as most common, while the status of // vs /u/ is less clear. A coalescence of // and /i/ is not allowed in formal speech and is regarded as a provincial (East Bulgarian) dialect feature; instead, unstressed // is both raised andcentralized, approaching //.[13] The // vowel

itself does not exist as a phoneme in other Slavic languages. It is often transcribed as //, also in this article. [edit]Semivowels The Bulgarian language possesses one semivowel: /j/, being equivalent to y in English like in yes. It is expressed graphically with the letter , as in /naj/ ("most"), /trlj/ ("trolleybus"), except when it precedes /a/ or /u/, in which case the combination of two phonemes is expressed with a single letter, respectively or : (e.g. /jutija/ "(flat) iron"). The semivowel /j/ does not occur after consonants. Thus, after a consonant, , , and signify its palatalisation rather than a semivowel: /b "white", /pluja/ "I al/ spit", /ls/ "loess". [edit]Consonants Bulgarian has a total of 35 consonant phonemes (see table below). Three additional phonemes can also be found ([x],[dz] and [dz]), but only in foreign proper names such as /xustn/ ("Houston"), /dzrinski/("Dzerzhinsky"), and /jadza/, the Polish name "Jadzia". They are, however, normally not considered part of the phonetic inventory of the Bulgarian language. According to the criterion of sonority, the Bulgarian consonants may be divided into 16 pairs (voiced<>voiceless). The only consonant without a counterpart is the voiceless velar fricative /x/. The contrast 'voiced vs. voiceless' is neutralized in word-final position, where all obstruents are pronounced as voiceless (as in most Slavic languages); this neutralization is, however, not reflected in the spelling. [edit]Hard and palatalized consonants The Bulgarian consonants /b/, /v/, //, /d/, /z/, /k/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /p/, /r/, /s/, /t/, /f/, /ts/ can denote both a normal, "hard" pronunciation, as well as a "soft", palatalized one. The hard and the palatalized consonants are considered separate phonemes in Bulgarian. The consonants //, //, /t/ and /d/ do not have palatalized variants, which is probably connected with the fact that they have arisen historically through palatalization in Common Slavonic. These consonants may still be somewhat palatalized in some speakers' pronunciation, but as a rule this is not the case. The softness of the palatalized consonants is always indicated in writing in Bulgarian. A consonant is palatalized if:

it is followed by / , / u/, or / / (Note: occurs only before in a/ .

Bulgarian) (When and aren't preceded by a consonant, they signal that the vowels /a/ and /u/ are preceded by the semivowel /j/. For /j/, Bulgarian uses "", as in , "New York".) Even though palatalized consonants are phonemes in Bulgarian, they may in some cases be positionally conditioned, hence redundant. In Eastern Bulgarian dialects, consonants are always allophonically palatalized before the vowels /i/ and//. This is not the case in Standard Bulgarian, but that form of the language does have similar allophonic alternations. Thus, /k/, // and /x/ tend to be palatalized before /i/ and //, and the realization of the phoneme /l/ varies along the same principles: one of its allophones, involving a raising of the back of the tongue and a lowering of its middle part (thus similar or, according to some scholars, identical to a velarized lateral), occurs in all positions, except before the vowels /i/and //, where a more "clear" version with a slight raising of the middle part of the tongue occurs. The latter pre-front realization is traditionally (and incorrectly) called "soft l", even though it is not palatalized (and thus isnt identical to the /l/signalled by the letters , and ). In some Western Bulgarian dialects, this allophonic variation does not exist. Furthermore, in the speech of many young people the more common and arguably velarized allophone of /l/ is often realized as a labiovelar approximant [w].[14] This phenomenon, colloquially known as "" (lazy "l") in Bulgaria, was first registered in the 1970s and isn't connected to original dialects. Similar developments, termed Lvocalization, have occurred in many languages, including Polish, Serbo-Croatian and certain dialects of English such as Cockney andAAVE. It is important to point out that even though it is traditionally accepted that palatal and nonpalatal consonants are different phonemes, some researchers [15] claim that only the nonpalatal consonants can be considered phonemes (with hard and palatalized allophones). The reason for this is that words with a palatal consonant can be considered as having an "underlying" /j/ after the consonant (which is also reflected in the spelling). This palatal approximant makes the consonant palatal through regressive assimilation. This theory is supported by the fact that these palatal allophones do not normally appear in syllable-final position as in other Slavic languages, such as Russian. [edit]Palatalization During the palatalization of most hard consonants (the bilabial, labiodental and alveolar ones), the middle part of the tongue is lifted towards the palatum, resulting in the formation

of a second articulatory centre whereby the specific palatal "clang" of the soft consonants is achieved. The articulation of alveolars /l/, /n/ and /r/, however, usually does not follow that rule; the palatal clang is achieved by moving the place of articulation further back towards the palatum so that //, // and/r/ are actually alveopalatal (postalvelolar) consonants. palatum and are considered palatal consonants. [edit]Table Bilabial Labio- Dental/ PostPalatal Velar dental Alveolar alveolar Soft // and /k/ (// and /k/, respectively) are articulated not on the velum but on the

hard

/m/ /m/

/n/ // /t/ /d/ /k/ // / / k / /

Nasal
soft

hard /p/ /b/

Plosive

/ / soft p b / /

/ / d t/ / /ts/ / ts/ /f/ /v/ /s/ /z/ // // /t/ /d/

hard

Affricate
soft

hard

/x/

Fricative
soft

/ / / / f v z s/ / / /

Trill

hard

/r/

soft

/r/

Approximant soft

/j/

hard

/l/ //

Lateral
soft

[edit]Word stress Bulgarian word stress is dynamic. Stressed syllables are louder and longer than unstressed ones. Stress, like Russian and other East Slavic languages, is also lexical rather than fixed as in French, Latin or the West Slavic ones, i.e. it may fall on any syllable of a polysyllabic word and its position may vary in inflection and derivation, for example, /m/ ("man"), /m t/ ("the man"). Bulgarian stress is also distinctive: for stress. Stress usually isn't signified in written text (one notable exception being the single dative female pronoun ("to her", to differentiate it from simple "", meaning "and"), which should always be stressed in writing. It may, however, be indicated in cases with minimal pairs like the above, where disambiguation is needed, or in order to signify the dialectal deviation from the standard language pronunciation. In such cases, stress is signified by placing an grave accent on the vowel of the stressed syllable. Usually an accent is put in Bulgarian-language books and dictionaries and, an accent is sometimes used to distinguish words that are written the same, but stressed on a different syllable. [edit]Grammar Main article: Bulgarian grammar The parts of speech in Bulgarian are divided in 10 different types, which are categorized in two broad classes: mutable and immutable. The difference is that mutable parts of speech vary grammatically, whereas the immutable ones do not change, regardless of their use. The five classes of mutables are: nouns, adjectives, numerals, pronouns and verbs. Syntactically, the first four of these form the group of the noun or the nominal group. The immutables are: adverbs,prepositions, conjunctions, particles and interjections. Verbs and adverbs form the group of the verb or the verbal group. example, ' / v lna/ ("wool") and '/vlna/ ("wave") are only differentiated by

[edit]Nominal

morphology

Nouns and adjectives have the categories grammatical gender, number, case (only vocative) and definiteness in Bulgarian. Adjectives and adjectival pronouns agree with nouns in number and gender. Pronouns have gender and number and retain (as in nearly all Indo-European languages) a more significant part of the case system. [edit]Nominal inflection [edit]Gender There are three grammatical genders in Bulgarian: masculine, feminine and neuter. The gender of the noun can largely be inferred from its ending: nouns ending in a consonant ("zero ending") are generally masculine (for example, {grad} "city", {sin} "son", {mzh} "man"); those ending in / (-a/-ya) ( {zhena} "woman", {dshterya} "daughter", {ulitsa} "street") are normally feminine; and nouns ending in , are almost always neuter ( {dete} child, {ezero} "lake"), as are those relatively few words (usually loans) that end in , , and ( "tsunami", {tabu} "taboo", {menyu} "menu"). Perhaps the most significant exception from the above are the relatively numerous nouns that end in a consonant and yet are feminine: these comprise, firstly, a large group of nouns with zero ending expressing quality, degree or an abstraction, including all nouns ending on / -{ost/est} ( {mdrost} "wisdom", {nizost} "vileness", {prelest} "loveliness", {bolest} "sickness", {lyubov} "love"), and secondly, a much smaller group of irregular nouns with zero ending which define tangible objects or concepts ( {krv} "blood", {kost} "bone", {vecher} "evening", o (nosht) "night"). The plural forms of the nouns do not express their gender as clearly as the singular ones, but may also provide some clues to it: the ending (-i) is more likely to be used with a masculine or feminine noun ( {fakti} "facts", {bolesti} "sicknesses"), while one in / belongs more often to a neuter noun ( {ezera} "lakes"). Also, the plural ending (-ove) occurs only in masculine nouns. [edit]Number Two numbers are distinguished in Bulgarian singular and plural. A variety of plural suffixes is used, and the choice between them is partly determined by their ending in singular and partly influenced by gender; in addition, irregular declension and alternative plural forms are common. Words ending in / (which are usually feminine) generally have the plural ending , upon dropping of the singular ending. Of nouns ending in a

consonant, the feminine ones also use , whereas the masculine ones usually have for polysyllables and for monosyllables (however, exceptions are especially common in this group). Nouns ending in / (most of which are neuter) mostly use the suffixes , (both of which require the dropping of the singular endings) and . With cardinal numbers and related words such as ("several"), masculine nouns use a special count form in /, which stems from the proto-Slavonic dual: / (two/three students) versus (these students); cf. feminine // (two/three/these women) and neuter // (two/three/these children). However, a recently developed language norm requires that count forms should only be used with masculine nouns that do not denote persons. Thus, / is perceived as more correct than / , while the distinction is retained in cases such as / (two/three pencils) versus (these pencils). [edit]Case Cases exist only in the personal pronouns (as they do in many other modern IndoEuropean languages), with nominative,accusative, dative and vocative forms. Vestiges are present in the masculine personal interrogative pronoun ("who") and in a number of phraseological units and sayings. The major exception are vocative forms, which are still in use for masculine (with the endings -e, -o and -) and feminine nouns (-[/]o and -e) in the singular. However, there is a tendency to avoid them in many personal names, as the use of feminine name forms in -[/]o[16] and of the potential vocative forms of foreign names has come to be considered rude or rustic. Thus, "" means "Hey, Ivan", while the corresponding feminine forms "" ("Hey, Elena"), "" ("Hey, Margarita") are today seen as rude[16] or, at best, unceremonious, and declining foreign names as in *"" ("hey, John") or *"" ("hey, Simon") could only be considered humorous. Interestingly, the "ban" on constructing vocative forms for foreign names does not apply to names from Classical Antiquity, with the source languages having the vocative case as well: cf "" ("Oh Caesar"), "" ("Oh Pericles"), ("Oh Zeus") and even "" ("Oh Aphrodite"). Case remnants See also: Bulgarian grammar - Case remnants Some key words do retain their cases, which today are no longer considered nominative, accusative and dative, but rather as being subject, direct object and indirect object parts of speech:

All personal pronouns - eg. masculine singular:

, {toy} (he) - , {ngo} (him) - , {nem} (to him - archaic)[17]

The masculine interrogative pronoun , {koy} (who) and all of its derivatives

- these, however, are not declined for all masculine nouns, but only when they refer to men:
{koy} (who) - {kog} (whom) - {kom} (to whom - very rarely

used).[18]

the words {nyakoy} (someone) and {nikoy} (no one) {vseki} (everyone) and {drug} (someone else) are similar (-

follow the same pattern as koy;

{-igo}; - -{imu}), but extremely rare

the relative clauses {koyto} (who/that), {kogoto} (whom/that) and

{komuto} (to whom/that) - again, only declined when referring to men i.e.

{chovekt, s kogoto govorya} - (the man , {stolt, na koyto sedya} - (the chair that I'm

that I'm talking to)

sitting on) [edit]Definiteness (article) In modern Bulgarian, definiteness is expressed by a definite article which is postfixed to the noun, much like in theScandinavian languages or Romanian (indefinite: , "person"; definite: , "the person") or to the first nominal constituent of definite noun phrases (indefinite: , "a good person"; definite: , "the good person"). There are four singular definite articles. Again, the choice between them is largely determined by the noun's ending in the singular.[19] Nouns that end in a consonant and are masculine use /, when they are grammatical subjects, and / elsewhere (all four endings are normally pronounced []). Nouns that end in a consonant and are feminine, as well as nouns that end in / (most of which are feminine, too) use . Nouns that end in / use . The plural definite article is for all nouns except for those, whose plural form ends in /; these get a instead. When postfixed to adjectives the definite articles are / for masculine gender (again, with the longer form being reserved for grammatical subjects), for feminine gender, for neuter gender, and for plural.

[edit]Adjective and numeral inflection Both groups agree in gender and number with the noun they are appended to. They may also take the definite article as explained above. [edit]Pronouns See also: Bulgarian pronouns Pronouns may vary in gender, number, definiteness and are the only parts of speech that have retained case inflexions. Three cases are exhibited by some groups of pronouns - nominative, accusative and dative. The distinguishable types of pronouns include the following: personal, relative, reflexive, interrogative, negative, indefinitive, summative and possessive. [edit]Verbal

morphology and grammar

According to some accounts, the Bulgarian verb can take up to 3,000 (sic) distinct forms, as it varies in person, number, voice, aspect, mood, tense and even gender. [edit]Finite verbal forms Finite verbal forms are simple or compound and agree with subjects in person (first, second and third) and number (singular, plural) in Bulgarian. In addition to that, past compound forms using participles vary in gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and voice (active and passive) as well as aspect (perfective/aorist and imperfective). [edit]Aspect Bulgarian verbs express lexical aspect: perfective verbs signify the completion of the action of the verb and form past aorist tenses; imperfective ones are neutral with regard to it and form past imperfect tenses. Most Bulgarian verbs can be grouped in perfective-imperfective pairs (imperfective<>perfective: <> "come", <> arrive). Perfective verbs can be usually formed from imperfective ones by suffixation or prefixation, but the resultant verb often deviates in meaning from the original. In the pair examples above, aspect is stem-specific and therefore there is no difference in meaning. In Bulgarian, there is also grammatical aspect. Three grammatical aspects are distinguishable: neutral, perfect and pluperfect. The neutral aspect comprises the three simple tenses and the future tense. The pluperfect aspect is manifest in tenses that use double or triple auxiliary "be" participles like the past pluperfect subjunctive. Perfect tenses use a single auxiliary "be".

[edit]Mood See also: Bulgarian grammar The traditional interpretation is that in addition to the four moods (, naklonenia) shared by most other European languages - indicative (, izyavitelno), imperative (, povelitelno), subj unctive(, podchinitelno) and conditional (, uslovno) - in Bulgarian there is one more to describe a generalistic category of unwitnessed events - the inferential (, prezkazno) mood. This view has been challenged in recent years.[who?] Admirative and dubitative mood forms, temporally distinct from the inferential, and optative mood forms, temporally but not grammatically distinguishable from the subjunctive, have been identified, bringing the total to eight. [edit]Tense There are three grammatically distinctive positions in time present, past and future which combine with aspect and mood to produce a number of formations. Normally, in grammar books these formations are viewed as separate tenses i. e. "past imperfect tense" would mean that the verb is in past tense, in the imperfective aspect, and in the indicative mood (since no other mood is shown). There are more than 40 different tenses across Bulgarian's two aspects and five (or eight) moods. In the indicative mood, there are three simple tenses:
Present tense is a temporally unmarked simple form made up of the verbal

stem of and a complex suffix composed of the vowel /e/, /i/ or /a/ and the person/number ending (, pristigam, "I arrive/I am arriving"); only imperfective verbs can stand in the present indicative tense independently;
Past imperfect tense is a simple verb form used to express an action which is

contemporaneous or subordinate to other past actions; it is made up of an imperfective or a perfective verbal stem and the person/number ending (x, pristigah; x, pristigneh, "I was arriving");
Past aorist tense is a simple form used to express a temporarily independent,

specific past action; it is made up of a perfective or an imperfective verbal stem

and the person/number ending (, pristignah, "I arrived", ,chetoh, "I read"); In the indicative there are also the following compound tenses:
Future tense is a compound form made of the particle (shte) and present

tense ( , shte ucha, "I will study"); negation is expressed by the construction (nyama da) and present tense ( , nyama da ucha, or the old-fashined form " ", "ne shte ucha" - "I will not study");
Past future tense is a compound form used to express an action which was to

be completed in the past but was future as regards another past action; it is made up of the past imperfect tense of the verb (shta) "will, want", the particle (da) "to" and the present tense of the verb ( , shtyah da ucha, "I was going to study");
Present perfect tense is a compound form used to express an action which

was completed in the past but is relevant for or related to the present; it is made up of the present tense of the verb (sm) "be" and the past participle ( , sm uchil, "I have studied");
Past perfect tense is a compound form used to express an action which was

completed in the past and is relative to another past action; it is made up of the past tense of the verb (sm) "be" and the past participle ( , byah uchil, "I had studied");
Future perfect tense is a compound form used to express an action which is

to take place in the future before another future action; it is made up of the future tense of the verb (sm) "be" and the past participle ( , shte sm uchil, "I will have studied");
Past future perfect tense is a compound form used to express a past action

which is future with respect to a past action which itself is prior to another past action; it is made up of the past imperfect of (shta) "will, want", the particle (da) "to", the present tense of the verb (sm) "be" (am) and the past participle of the verb ( , shtyah da sm uchil, "I would have studied").

The four perfect tenses above can all vary in aspect depending on the aspect of the main-verb participle; they are in fact pairs of imperfective and perfective tenses. Verbs in tenses using past participles also vary in voice and gender. There is only one simple tense in the imperative mood - the present - and there are simple forms only for the second person using the suffixes -/- (-i, -y/i) for singular and -/- (-ete, -yte) for plural; e.g., (ucha) "to study": (uchi), sg., (uchete), pl.; (igraya) "to play": (igray), (igrayte). There are compound imperative forms for all persons and numbers in the present compound imperative ( , da igrae), the present perfect compound imperative ( , da e igral) and the rarely used present pluperfect compound imperative ( , da e bil igral). The conditional mood consists of five compound tenses, most of which are not grammatically distinguishable. The present, future and past conditional use a special past form of the stem - (bi - "be") and the past participle ( ,bih uchil, "I would study"). The past future conditional and the past future perfect conditional coincide in form with the respective indicative tenses. The subjunctive mood is rarely documented as a separate verb form in Bulgarian, (being, morphologically, a sub-instance of the quasi-infinitive construction with the particle (da) "to" and a normal finite verb form), but nevertheless it is used regularly. The most common form, often mistaken for the present tense, is the present subjunctive ([o-] a,[po-dobre] da otida, "I had better go"). The difference between the present indicative and the present subjunctive tense is that the subjunctive can be formed by both perfective and imperfective verbs. It has completely replaced the infinitive and the supine from complex expressions (see below). It is also employed to express opinion about possible future events. The past perfect subjunctive ([o-] , [po-dobre] da byah otishl, "I had better gone") refers topossible events in the past, which did not take place, and the present pluperfect subjunctive ( , da sm bil otishl), which may be used about both past and future events arousing feelings of incontinence, suspicion, etc. and is impossible to translate in English. This last variety of the subjunctive in Bulgarian is sometimes also called the dubitative mood. The inferential mood has five pure tenses. Two of them are simple - past aorist inferential and past imperfect inferential - and are formed by the past participles of

perfective and imperfective verbs, respectively. There are also three compound tenses - past future inferential, past future perfect inferential and past perfect inferential. All these tenses' forms are gender-specific in the singular. There are also conditional and compound-imperative crossovers. The existence of inferential forms has been attributed to Turkish influences by most Bulgarian linguists. Morphologically, they are derived from the perfect tenses. [edit]Non-finite verbal forms Bulgarian has the following participles:
Present active participle ( ) is formed from

imperfective stems with the addition of the suffixes // (, "reading") and is used only attributively;
Present passive participle ( ) is formed by

the addition of the suffixes -// (, "that can be read, readable");

Past active aorist participle ( ) is

formed by the addition of the suffix to perfective stems (, "[have] read");

Past active imperfect participle ( )

is formed by the addition of the suffixes // to imperfective stems (, "[have been] reading");
Past passive aorist participle' ( )

is formed from aorist/perfective stems with the addition of the suffixes -/ (, "read"; , "killed"); it is used predicatively and attributively;
Past passive imperfect participle' (

) is formed from imperfective stems with the addition of the suffix (, "[been] read"); a, [been] being killed); it is used predicatively and attributively;
Adverbial participle () is usually formed from imperfective

present stems with the suffix () (, "while reading"), relates an action contemporaneous with and subordinate to the main verb and is originally a Western Bulgarian form. A more rarely used form is the one using the aorist stem, which implies purpose and is a more recent invention (, "by killing"[citation needed][dubious discuss], as opposed to , "while killing").

The participles are inflected by gender, number, and definiteness, and are coordinated with the subject when forming compound tenses (see tenses above). When used in attributive role the inflection attributes are coordinated with the noun that is being attributed. [edit]Adverbs The most productive way to form adverbs is to derive them from the neuter singular form of the corresponding adjective ( (fast), (hard), (strange), although adjectives ending in - use the masculine singular form, also in -, instead: (heroically), (bravely, like a man), (skilfully). The same pattern is used to form adverbs from the (adjective-like) ordinal numerals, e.g. (firstly), (secondly), (thirdly), and in some cases from (adjective-like) cardinal numerals, e.g. (twice as/double), (three times as), (five times as). The remaining adverbs are formed in ways that are no longer productive in the language. A small number are original (not derived from other words), for example: (here), (there), (inside), (outside), (very/much) etc. The rest are mostly fossilized declined forms, such as:
archaic unchangeable locative forms of some adjectives, e.g. (well),

(badly), (too, rather), and nouns (up), (tomorrow), (in the summer);
archaic unchangeable instrumental forms of some adjectives, e.g.

(quietly), (furtively), (blindly), and nouns, e.g. (during the day), (during the night), (one next to the other), (spiritually), (in figures), (with words). The same pattern has been used with verbs: (while running), (while lying), (while standing).
archaic unchangeable accusative forms of some nouns: (today),

(tonight) (in the morning), (in winter);

archaic unchangeable genitive forms of some nouns: (tonight),

(last night), (yesterday);

homonymous and etymologically identical to the feminine singular form of the

corresponding adjective used with the definite article: (hard), (gropingly); the same pattern has been applied to some verbs,

e.g. (while running), (while lying), (while standing).

derived from cardinal numerals by means of a non-productive suffix:

(once), (twice), (thrice); All the adverbs are immutable. Verb forms, however, vary in aspect, mood, tense, person, number and sometimes gender and voice. [edit]Lexis Main article: Bulgarian lexis Most of the word-stock of modern Bulgarian consists of derivations of some 2,000 words inherited from proto-Slavonic through the mediation of Old and Middle Bulgarian. Thus, the native lexical terms in Bulgarian account for 70% to 75% of the lexicon. The remaining 25% to 30% are loanwords from a number of languages, as well as derivations of such words. The languages which have contributed most to Bulgarian are Russian and Turkish, and to a lesser extent French. Latin andGreek are the source of many words, used mostly in international terminology. Many of the numerous loanwords fromTurkish (and, via Turkish, from Arabic and Persian) which were adopted into Bulgarian during the long period of Ottomanrule, have been substituted with native terms. In addition, both specialized (usually coming from the field of science) and commonplace English words (notably abstract, commodity/service-related or technical terms) have also penetrated Bulgarian since the second half of the 20th century, especially since 1989. A noteworthy portion of this English-derived terminology has attained some unique features in the process of its introduction to native speakers and this has resulted in peculiar derivations that slightly set the newly-formed loanwords apart from the original words (mainly in pronunciation), although many loanwords are completely identical to the source words. A growing number of international neologisms are also being widely adopted.