IH Sofia

Given its location, it’s not surprising that the Bulgarian language has a long and colorful history, and that that history is mostly colored bloody, dripping red. I’m talking war, and there is no better way to see the effect war has had on the language than by looking at its names for weapons. тояга-club, staff [...]

Let’s say you are a Bulgarian who is fluent in English, taking part in a psychological test. With an electroencephalogram attached to your head, you  look at a list of pairs of English words. Your instructions are to indicate which word pairs that are ” related in meaning.” For example, “Child:Kid” has a relationship “Child:Nebula” [...]

Okay, we’ve talked about the Bulgarian terms for family members both of blood relation and marriage. I’m sure you agree that was complicated enough. But we still have one more aspect of family to discuss, which is what terms you use to talk to each other. When you listen to Bulgarian, you might hear these [...]

This has nothing to do with Bulgarian families, which is why I’m squeezing it in on a Tuesday. Charles Stross’s blog, in a discussion of the dialogue conventions of written English, pointed out that real conversations are very different from the dialogue we see in novels. Real speech has a lot more hedging (words like [...]

Last week, we talked about blood relatives, so you should have a handle on basic Bulgarian family terminology. Now it’s time to talk about something a little more complicated, the in-laws.In English, all of these people are named some version of X-in-law, but in Bulgarian, they almost all have unique names. And those names change [...]

Greetings, everyone. You are about to embark on an (at least) two-blog-entry journey of exploration into the ins and outs of the Bulgarian family.  I’m going to warn you know, Bulgarian family terminology is not simple. Things change depending on whom you marry, how old you are, and your gender, and it isn’t made any [...]

A big barrier to language learning (at least for me, I don’t know about you guys), is the fear that when I make mistakes in my non-native language, people will think that I’m stupid. After all, people judge each other based on how well they speak their native language all the time, and people who [...]