In these days of darkness in our souls, caused by the uncertainty of the situation in Bulgaria, I don’t care so much about the teachers- their strike and what they will do afterwards. What I’m really concerned about is our language- Bulgarian. I stay at home and listen to people who try to comment some of the events that happen and I certainly doubt if I am in
Bulgaria, if I am listening to Bulgarian? The television fills my head with words as “децентрализация”, “оптимизация”, “диференциация”, “спекулация” and many others. And after a moment, if I think for a while, I, shocked, realize that I’ve heard less Bulgarian than
foreign words. Isn’t this awful? You might consider my position too extreme or strange but I do not want to hear that kind of words in Bulgarian, I want them to become extinct from our language. And that opinion of mine does not mean that I think we should abandon them at
once and deprive ourselves of a quarter of our lexis. No! I’m fully aware that exactly these new words carry the new concepts and complex ideas, they are a product of the development all over the world, of civilization itself. Now in these times when the world changes so fast we can’t do without these new ideas. However that does NOT mean that we should use exactly these words to name them. A simple example- about 100 years ago we didn’t have a word for newspaper- instead we used the Russian word (which is not actually Russian) but people who loved Bulgarian and cared about it thought of a new word to represent this new, for these
times, object. Thus an established in Bulgarian word of foreign origin was substituted by a really native word. This is a proof that in is not impossible to create useable native words. We use that kind of words and we even don’t know that some people employed a lot of efforts to create
them. That’s why I’m really impressed when I read something like: “It is insane to think that we can avoid using borrowings.” or “A borrowed word is a word that has no corresponding word in a language” in a textbook or a scientific article. I wonder whether these people believe
what they say? Every word has its roots it the language it originates and they are basic terms that exist in any language. That’s why we can substitute every foreign word with a native one. We just have to remember that initially this word didn’t exist in its original language.
Someone CREATED it. How can it be impossible to put in use a new word when they actually do this every day? Nowadays it is even easier than a few decades ago- with the television that is present at almost any home. Now it is the main reason for the newly borrowed words in any
language. It is really simple. But no one pays attention. At the end I think that they do this because of the simple, and stupid in its cause, feeling of being superior to someone by using words that he does not understand- that usually happens in the literary criticism but also on the TV. They get ready words mainly from English and they just pronounce them in a Bulgarian way. They misuse some of the words, consciously use foreign words instead of Bulgarian and they think in their pitiful souls that they are sophisticated. Or at least sound this way. That’s certainly not this true- it just shows their laziness (to translate a word), thus the carelessness about their own language (which is a certain reason for disrespect) and their cheap trials to look intelligent.
And at the end we say that our educational system is ineffective- how could it be otherwise when studying even the basic terms of any science is comparable to studying a foreign language. Wouldn’t it be more positive for the students, instead of looking in dictionaries or studying by heart to think for a while, to find the roots of a word in their own language, and
thus not only to develop their thinking but also their love for their native language? Wouldn’t then more people know their language better? (We use the same strategy for studying a foreign language.) People want to do this but they don’t have this opportunity. It is not a reason for laughter when you see that a boy says that in the “мандра” they work with “мандарини”, it is a damned shame. Now tell me that I need not be concerned!