Middle Bulgarian language was the
lingua franca and the most widely spoken language of the
Second Bulgarian Empire. Being descended from
Old Bulgarian
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic () was the first Slavic literary language.
Historians credit the 9th-century Byzantine missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius with standardizing the language and using it in translating the Bible and othe ...
, Middle Bulgarian eventually developed into modern
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian (, ; bg, label=none, български, bălgarski, ) is an Eastern South Slavic language spoken in Southeastern Europe, primarily in Bulgaria. It is the language of the Bulgarians.
Along with the closely related Macedonian l ...
by the 16th century.
History
The use of Middle Bulgarian starts from the end of the 12th century and continues to the 17th century. This period of the language exhibits significantly different morphology from earlier periods, most notably in the complete disappearance of the locative, instrumental, and genitive cases. Analytical tools for the gradation of adjectives and adverbs appear. In most dialects ъi transformed to и, but ъi continued to be used in monumental inscriptions.
Features
In the Middle Bulgarian language there is an increased use of
prepositions
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
in the place of the
dative,
genitive and
instrumental
An instrumental is a recording normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to inst ...
cases. There are instances of the genitive being replaced by the preposition
от, and of the dative being replaced by various prepositional constructions.
References
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