The paper presents a computational analysis of Bulgarian dialect variation, concentrating on pronunciation differences. It describes the phonetic data set compiled during the project* ‘Measuring Linguistic Unity and Diversity in Europe’ that consists of the pronunciations of 157 words collected at 197 sites from all over Bulgaria. We also present the results of analyzing this data set using various quantitative methods and compare them to the traditional scholarship on Bulgarian dialects. The results have shown that various dialectometrical techniques clearly identify east-west division of the country along the ‘jat’ border, as well as the third group of varieties in the Rodopi area. The rest of the groups specified in the traditional atlases either were not confirmed or were confirmed with a low confidence.
The renarrated mood, sometimes called the “evidential”, is an innovation in Bulgarian grammar. Although it is primarily expressed with inherited forms, it includes one innovative form, a participle built on the imperfect stem of the verb. Prescriptive grammars of the socialist period stated that this participle could be used only in the meaning “renarrated”, and only without auxiliaries in the 3rd person. In the face of ample evidence that the participle is indeed used in a perfect-like compound form (i.e., with 3rd person auxiliaries), several grammarians proposed in the 1980s that this perfect-like form carried inferential meaning and should be termed the “conclusive mood”. This paper claims that the form in question is currently taking on a different, much broader meaning than either of these, and that this meaning, roughly defined as “generalized durative action in the past” is rapidly gaining acceptability among the younger generation.
Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition (BDLT) has been one of the longestrunning Slavic digital humanities projects in the United States. Initially conceived in 2008 as a series of printed volumes, the digital project was built upon the foundation of a long-term international collaboration dating to the 1970's. As BDLT nears completion in 2019, this paper reflects on the trajectory of its development and its sustainability as an unfunded digital humanities project, and the ways it can serve as both a model and cautionary tale for others who seek to undertake similar work.
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