Bulgarski dialekten atlas: Obobstavast tom: Fonetika, akcentologija, leksika (review)

In a throwback to the beginning of the last century, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences has published a ‘generalizing’ dialect atlas defining Bulgarian by using the map in Stefan Mladenov’s Geschichte der bulgarische Sprache (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1929), which includes all of Macedonian as well as Serbian south of the Timok and east of a line running north from the southeast corner of Kosovo. Mladenov used six sets of historical phonological criteria and four morphosyntactic criteria, none of which consistently defined his boundaries, while the compilers of the Bŭlgarski dialekten Atlas (BDA) use ten ‘typological characteristics’ of Bulgarian’s ‘historical boundaries’.

Two of these features are based on historical phonology— elimination of Common Slavic pitch and length distinctions—and the other eight are morphosyntactic Balkanisms, that is, features that developed in Balkan South Slavic during the late medieval and early modern periods, but the BDA’s boundaries do not correspond exactly to these phenomena. Most of them are also to be found in the Serbian dialects of southern Kosovo, and some are absent from all or part of eastern Serbia or extend beyond it.

The BDA gives full bibliographic data for Bulgarian sources, but, with the exception of a single atlas cited by title but without compilers (21), it gives no details for the Serbian and Macedonian works by Pavle Ivić(Serbian), Božidar Vidoeski (Macedonian), or other modern scholars, instead writing only ‘printed sources’ and naming a few authors from the turn of the last century. Each map gives a total of 47 points, and a clear plastic insert adds 72 points for a total of 119 in Bulgaria (63), Greece (21), Macedonia (16), Serbia (5), Albania (1), Turkey (12), and Romania (1).

After the table of contents (5–16) and an introductory section (17–55), which is unclear on the difference between phonetics and phonology (23–24), the BDA is divided into three sections: ‘Phonetics’ (172 maps, 57–281), ‘Accent’ (88 maps, 283–392), and ‘Lexicon’ (108 maps, 393–533). Each section concludes with commentary and an index of words and forms, and the end gives details on compilers (536–38). Except for a brief résumé in English, German, and Russian (534–35) describing the atlas as ‘a fundamental project of national relevance’ for providing ‘authentic evidence of the unity of the Bulgarian language continuum’, the atlas is entirely in Bulgarian and can thus be used only by Slavists.

The maps themselves, however, are lacking in the kind of detail that a dialectologist would require, and many contain unclear or faulty formulations. Thus, for example, Map 4 (62) is supposed to give reflexes of Common Slavic initial *vŭ[zŭ]-, but all types of /v/ plus various rounded vowels are given one color, and /v/ plus various unrounded vowels a second color, while the development to /u/, typical of Serbian and also found in northern Macedonia and western Bulgaria, is not specified at all but given a color labeled drugo javlenie ‘different phenomenon’, apparently since giving the reflex is contrary to the project of demonstrating ‘unity’. This drive for unity also causes the authors to label southwesternmost Macedonian vocalic systems ‘eastern’ (24) because they have some peripheral archaisms and isolated developments. Map 157 (215) is not only lacking in detail but it also inaccurately formulates palatal ḱ as a reflex of št. From the presentation of the accentological maps it is impossible to determine general accentological patterns, and no distinction is made among regions with fixed stress, restricted stress, and free stress. The lexical items are interesting, but the motivations for their choice and order of presentation are not given. These are just samples of the problems with this work.

The BDA is beautifully produced on glossy paper in bright colors, but in both content and intent it leaves much to be desired.