/ world today news/ In the last twenty years, especially with the development of technologies, the Bulgarian language raised the white flag before the invasion of foreigners.
My ten year old son says “teen” all the time. In the short time we are together, I explain to him that this is an adolescent, a boy, a boy, respectively a girl. However, he is having fun with a “teenager”. However, once he asked me what this youth was. I was stung by the feeling that the question had a trajectory that was many times more threatening than his ignorance. I was about to explain to him the age characteristics of boys (and girls) when he exclaimed, “But it’s a teenager!” The trajectory of the question “What is this adolescent?” leads to completely different and increasingly terrifying dilemmas – for example, do we deserve to celebrate May 24? Aren’t we destroying our own language? And to the extent that language is the spoken physiognomy and identity of a nation, aren’t we depersonalizing ourselves as an ethnic group?
In recent years, eras have changed in our country, and each new era comes with its own language. Technologies explosively introduced English words into everyday Bulgarian. However, here we will not talk about the loanwords for which the Bulgarian language does not have the exact correspondence (computer, flash drive, etc.). The threat is not in them, but in foreigners, for which our language has equivalent words.
A bunch of foreigners have already colonized the speech of the youngest Bulgarians – hater, loser, friend, event, cool, fashion, feeling, urban, mood, experience, appointment, gamer. All words that have exact Bulgarian substitutes. Bulgarian politicians brand themselves with “innovation”, throwing innovation, discovery or innovation into the garbage. They laugh with “initiate” (how unnatural it is in our speech with so many “i”), dropping I start, undertake, pick up, pick up. “Domination” banishes supremacy, superiority, advantage, advantage – a whole bouquet of our words. “Discussion” (also “debate”, “dialogue”) replaced discussion, deliberation, examination, brainstorming, conversing or arguing. In the public space, diversification is directly discriminated by “diversification”, the recipient is kicked by “beneficiary”, and the plot is almost erased from “lot”. We want politics to become “creative” instead of creative, ideational, inventive. Our tongues will literally run out of this ombudsman, but we stubbornly pass by the far more convenient proxy or authorized representative. Squares or monuments are no longer renovated, repaired or repaired – they are renovated. We journalists are constantly fussing over the “exclusive” interview (don’t you get tongue-tied by the crowding of so many agreeable ones) that someone has given for our media – in fact, an interview that someone has given just for us. In the name of “fan”, sports journalism banished the juicy word “enthusiast”, scattered other bouquet of related words such as admirer, supporter, supporter or lover. There are also comical language situations. In the weekly TV program brochures you may come across a “store show”. Is this a show about (from) a shop or just an overview show?
In our language there is a kind of “gender change” under the influence of English, in which nouns are masculine. We are giving up the feminine gender characteristic of our language and generic names in general, and we are leading it to the so-called masculinization. This is how the following tongue twisters are obtained: “A Russian policeman became “Miss Universe” (headline in a daily newspaper), “She is the most agile lion I have ever seen” (a popular TV show about animals), “Tereshkova is still friends with the Bulgarian cosmonauts” , and in another TV program it is said about a flight attendant that “She is a seasoned veteran”. In one website, Rada Moskova is presented as a “famous screenwriter, playwright and writer” – isn’t this linguistic hermaphrodism? In the Turkish language as well there is no gender, but for five centuries we did not change the “gender of our language”, and now we have done it for a quarter of a century.
Our well-known linguist Emilia Pernishka from the Bulgarian Language Institute at the BAS has already darkly prophesied that within 50 years, today’s Bulgarian language will completely melt away, and we will only use Anglo-Saxon words in our daily speech.
The destruction of the Bulgarian language proceeds from two opposite directions, which eventually intersect at one point – the omnipotence of the foreign language. On the one hand, we have prosperity, well-being, flourishing, flourishing, success, rise, but we wantonly squander all this linguistic wealth and adorn ourselves with one but foreign word – prosperity. Isn’t this linguistic suicide?
In the town hall of a large Bulgarian village there was an advertisement “Current information” of the Bureau of Labor. These are actually foreigners. The word “current” has at least 8 purely Bulgarian synonyms. With “information” they are less, but there are three of them. I offered my younger relative some of them: “New messages” or “Latest information”. “Um,” she stuttered, as if seeing something stale. This is how the whole of Bulgaria under the age of 40 would react. And what would be the reaction to the combination “Current News”, which is completely equivalent to “Current Information”? It will be regarded as a linguistic fossil. But this is a vivid example of how we are destroying our own language. And the English language is hardly to blame.
On the other hand, we don’t hold back the remnants of our words either. Here, now the word “team” is widely used. Let’s look for the Bulgarian word. “Collective” comes to mind, but it is foreign, then for “staff” – also foreign. Finally you think of “composition”. But we don’t use that word anymore – at least not in that sense. We have buried the Bulgarian word under the layers of foreigners – or our linguistic incompetence…
What should be done to still preserve our language or what is left of it? Do we need a special law against foreigners? And if not a law, why not something else be done – let the luminaries of linguists gather and issue a special commission that, for example, once a year will publish a study (or a list) of the Bulgarian expression of incoming foreigners. This can be done for example on May 24. This list can be sent to institutions, media, educational institutions, cultural institutions, various organizations. This commission could become a language legislator, although its study (or list) would be advisory rather than mandatory. However, if we accept her as the most authoritative factor on the matter and listen to her recommendations, our language will be cleaned in about 5-6 years. But this requires consent and a national effort. /BGNES
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Yuri Mikhalkov is an international journalist, works in the newspaper “Sega”. The material was published in “Sega” newspaper.
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