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I was born and raised in Bulgaria, and now I live in the US. My username is a reference to Chernorizets Hrabar, and is pronounced IPA(key): in modern Bulgarian.
I'm a software engineer by trade, with a degree in computer science. I also got a chance to study sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and computational linguistics. After being denied the opportunity in high school, I was finally able to take Spanish in college, and I had a lot of fun being a Spanish teaching assistant. Sadly, my level of fluency has dropped since, mostly due to disuse.
I'm particularly fond of historical linguistics, focusing mainly on Slavic and Germanic languages. In fact, for the longest time, Wiktionary was fueling my addiction to discovering non-obvious cognates between Slavic and Germanic 🙂 These days, I'm doing my own little part in expanding Bulgarian coverage in the dictionary.
==Bulgarian== ===Alternative forms=== ===Etymology=== {{inh+|bg|sla-pro|*kotьka}}. ===Pronunciation=== * {{bg-IPA|ко́тка}} * {{bg-hyph}} ===Noun== {{bg-noun|ко́тка|f|m=котара́к|adj=ко́тешки|dim=ко́тчица}} # ] ('']'') ====Declension==== {{bg-ndecl|ко́тка<>}} ====Derived terms==== ====Related terms==== ===References=== * {{R:bg:RBE}} * {{R:bg:RBE2}} * {{R:bg:BER|котка|30|1}} {{C|bg|Felids}}
I come from north-eastern Bulgaria, so my dialect broadly falls under the Balkan group, particularly in the stronger reduction of unstressed vowels compared to literary Bulgarian. Additionally, the speech in my hometown is characterized by frequent elision of word-initial and word-medial sounds (procope and syncope, if you're fancy like that). My idiolect is influenced by the fact I was a stage actor growing up, so certain features of the local dialect - like palatalization before front vowels - were deemed too "provincial" and were actively discouraged, so I've lost them.
Examples:
Because of partial nasalization due to elided nasal consonants, as well as more common usage of /i/, /u/, /ɐ/ and /ʃ/, I've at times mistaken Brazilian Portuguese I overheard for Bulgarian, until I listened more closely.
Because of the many years I've lived in the US, people in Bulgaria can detect a slight accent, primarily in my intonation. I also tend to aspirate my /p/'s, /t/'s and /k/'s a bit more prominently than in regular Bulgarian speech, due to interference form English. For those reasons, I prefer not to record audio of Bulgarian words.
As a Bulgarian editor, I feel like it's important to be transparent about linguistic biases I might have about Macedonian. As it happens, I share the international view that Macedonian is an independent Eastern South Slavic language, joined by Bulgarian and Old Church Slavonic (OCS). I further maintain that OCS is the direct ancestor of both Macedonian and Bulgarian, and that the two languages underwent a period of shared development before diverging. In my opinion, the situation is not too dissimilar from that of Occitan and Catalan.
As of 2023, it is still the official position of Bulgaria that Macedonian is one of the three standardized literary norms of the pluricentric Bulgarian language (along with standard Bulgarian and Banat Bulgarian). Personally, I find that regrettable, and I hope that it changes.
I've only used {{Babel}}
to list languages where I have some level of skill in all of: speaking, listening, reading and writing. That's my personal definition of "knowing a language", for non-signed languages.
If some of those conditions are relaxed, I can understand: