CHURCH SLAVIC AND PHONETICALLY WRITTEN NEW BULGARIAN LANGUAGE IN THREE LETTERS FROM THE PERIOD 1813-1821, KEPT IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE "CARACAL" MONASTERY OF MOUNT ATHOS

Abstract

The article analyses three recently published by the author Bulgarian documents kept in the archives of the Athonite monastery of Karakallou, which date from the period 1813-1821. According to these documents, the plenipotentiaries (epitropoi) of Karakallou in the Bulgarian town of Sevlievo, Hristo Chatzirainov and his brother Minko, following instructions given to them by the abbot of Karakallou, Nektarios, visited the city of Yassy in Moldavia and met there a monk of Karakallou named Serapheim, who was then acting as a hegoumenos of the monastery of the Holy Three Hierarchai in Yassy. They delivered to him letters signed by the abbot of Karakallou, but Serapheim was unable to provide any support for them, so they left Yassy as soon as possible. After returning to their native town, the two epitropoi sent a report to the abbot of Karakallou, Nektarios, notifying him that they were planning to visit him in Mount Athos in order to discuss with him what should be done next as far as Serapheim was concerned. The three letters are written in a mixture of Church Slavonic and colloquial modern Bulgarian language. The author scrutinizes this mixture and concludes that the two epitropoi were not sufficiently trained in Church Slavonic and used only standard epistolary clichés, while their usage of modern Bulgarian strongly depended on the phonetic features of their local dialect, which belonged to the group of the eastern Bulgarian dialects with a strong reduction of the non-stressed vowels.