Dracula spoke pure Bulgarian language, says Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov to BTA.
„Everyone knows about the legendary "vampire" immortalized in Bram Stoker's novel. Dracula. However, the account of him is incomplete if it is not said in what language he spoke and thought. This name is a nickname, while the character himself is a historical figure who lived in the era of the Ottoman invasion – prince of Wallachia – John Vlad the Impaler (1448-1476, with interruptions).
Good ground for observations in this direction are provided by the hundreds of preserved documents of the Wallachian princes and their close aristocrats from the period XIV-XVII centuries. In form, these are short official documents for administrative, political and court cases, for donations, for purchases and sales of properties, etc. The very first researchers of these letters – Yuriy Venelin and Ljubomir Miletich categorically refer to them as “Vlach-Bulgarian” and emphasize that they are written in the Bulgarian language”, the scientist claims.
Recalls the words of Academician Lubomir Miletich: “We dare to conclude at all that in Wallachia until the end of the 15th and at the latest until the middle of the 16th century, a large part of the Boyar families was Bulgarian.”. This is the great pain of historians and linguists in today's Romania, because it turns out that between the 14th and 16th centuries, their greatest national heroes like John Mirceo the Old, John Vlad the Impaler Dracula or John Mikhail Hrabri, adds Prof. Ovcharov.
In his words, the titulary of the Wallachian and Moldavian lords in the charters and other official documents is very close to that of the Bulgarian kings. The only difference in the titular formula of the Wallachian princes and the Bulgarian kings is in the ethnic and geographical element – Ukraine instead of Bulgaria.
Representatives of the Wallachian and Moldavian nobility are called by the Bulgarian title “bolaryn”, which is a Slavicized form of the proto-Bulgarian “boil”. Like Bulgaria, in Wallachia and Moldova the boyars are divided into “great“ and “small”. The palace titles are also completely the same, such as “sword bearer” (“sword bearer“) and “chairman“. There are also many examples of administrative employees. The Bulgarian positions such as “judge“, “deceter“, “grainer“, “senar“, “vinar“ and others. appear in Wallachian and Moldavian documents as “judge“, “deceased“, “granary“, “senar“, “winner“, adds the scientist.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE WORLD FAMOUS LINGUIST SAMUEL BERNSTEIN
In the 20th century, the linguistic observations of Venelin and Miletich on letters were supported by the research of the world-famous linguist Samuil Bernstein. He concludes that during the Middle Ages “Slavic languages in Wallachia…were connected with Slavic languages from Mysia, Thrace and the Rhodopes, i.e. they were Bulgarian languages”.
Today, Romanian scholars try to explain all this with the argument that the language of the Wallachian governors and of private correspondence in Wallachia in the period from the 14th to the beginning of the 17th century was Church Slavonic, not Bulgarian. Samuel Bernstein gives such examples as will not be found in any church writings – “father, ford, mill, big, fine, care, guber, maiden, children (children), to come, dokle, come, come, I finished, why, masons, monk, tile, cogi, coats, car, horseman, shirt, last year, letoska, meadow, swing, although, boy, nothing, hanged, to go, oti (why, because), pepper, mountain, cheaper, sooner, ambassadors, window, rifles, matchmakers, orphans, cheese, poor people, relative, with, this, these, takmez, estuary (of a river), thousands, people, nice, wait (wait), hats, fur coat, shura (shurey), heroes.“
There are cases in which in New Bulgarian the word has a different meaning from the same word in the church language, Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov points out. For example, while in the language of the church the verb “make – make” means “give direction, direction, send”, in modern Bulgarian it means “to create”. This is also the meaning of this word in a letter of John Rad IV (1496-1508): “to make me some windows”.
THE EVOLUTION OF WORDS
According to Prof. Ovcharov, the phonetic-morphological evolution of some words from Old Bulgarian to New Bulgarian dialects is interesting. For example, the old Bulgarian word “mati–matere” in modern Bulgarian it has evolved into “mother”. The earliest written monuments from the territory of today's Bulgaria, where we find the word “mother”, are the Damascenes from the second half of the 17th century. But in the Vlach script, the New Bulgarian word “mother” appears already at the end of the XV century in a document signed by Prince John Rad IV, and almost replaces “mati” in the later Wallachian script.
In the Wallachian official language, the first person singular pronoun appears in the forms “az, aze, azy”, similar to the modern Bulgarian dialects: “You know very well how I have protected you from the Turks until now”, “ What a man would I be, “ I am struggling”. The first and second person plural personal pronouns “we” and “you” entered the Wallachian script a century and a half earlier than in the literature in Bulgaria: “we serve the lord the king...and you kiss him”, the scientist points out.
Indicates that the Old Bulgarian preposition “with” appears very often in its New Bulgarian form “with” – “with will”, “with purchase”, “and that pop from Shkei to come with them”, “what have I had with your man”, “and from the horse loaded with fish”. For the first time, we see in the Wallachian script the addition of the syllable “-zi” to demonstrative pronouns, as in the New Bulgarian forms “this”, “that” for example: “those cattle”, ““that maiden”, “when a fine is made over those villages”, “the man is badly legged”, “for those sheep”.
Analysis of this language, writes Bernstein, shows it to be a “complex compound of office clichés.....with lively word combinations. The task of the researcher is to separate the related ready-made dead word combinations from the living ones, reflecting the peculiarities of the spoken language”. The Russian scientist also analyzed the grammatical features of the language in Wallachian literature. It turns out that the case system, verbs and pronouns fully correspond to the norms in the development of the Bulgarian language. Practically, the Vlach language from the 15th-16th centuries shows the origin of the modern languages spoken in today's Bulgaria, according to Prof. Ovcharov.
„Of course, the presence of borrowings from the church language in the letters cannot be denied either. But can the finale of an epistle of the Wallachian prince John Alexander the First (1431-1436) be considered a church text? In it, he denounces the liars in his principality and curses them “...and who will lie to his dog, his wife and his mother”, asks the scientist.
ILIA TALEV'S CONTRIBUTION
„I must definitely note that all these important details were noticed first by the doctor of linguistics from the University of California Ilia Talev, nephew of the great writer Dimitar Talev. In 2006, he gave an extensive interview to the newspaper “168 hours” under the title “Dracula spoke in Bulgarian dialect”. In it, Dr. Talev states in plain text: “Dracula conducted his private and official correspondence in Bulgarian. Not in Church Slavonic, but in a dialect close to the modern Bulgarian language”, Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov points out.
He adds that in 2008 Iliya Talev died and was unable to finish his scientific research.
„I cannot fail to point out one more historical testimony concerning John Vlad III Tepes Dracula. It is a letter of his to the Roman High Priest dated November 7, 1462. The original text has not been preserved, but an accurate Latin translation is given in the memoirs of Pope Pius II. There it is explicitly emphasized that the original was written in the “Bulgarian language”, and Dracula is called “Janos (Yoan – N.O.), master and ruler of Wallachia“, Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov also points out.