ON SOME LEXICAL PECULIARITIES IN ODESSA MODERN BULGARIAN DAMASKINS

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present some results of a dissertation study dedicated to the peculiarities of the Modern Bulgarian Odessa Damaskins of the 18th century. The manuscripts are part of a collection known in science as the collection of Grigorovich. They were discovered during the scientific journey of the Slavist scholar to the Bulgarian lands (1844–1845). Today, they are stored in a book depository outside Bulgaria, which makes their research difficult. At the same time, the excerpted lexical material offers rich linguistic material for characterizing important aspects of the Old Bulgarian lexicon. The theoretical analysis and the practical work with the manuscripts show that the peculiarities of the Modern Bulgarian language and the trends of development in the 18th century need to be considered more broadly. There are a number of specific issues related to the Damaskin literature of the 18th century which have been little developed in the scientific literature and have not previously been the subject of description and analysis. The aim is to outline the general picture of the word composition of the studied manuscripts, taking into account the external and internal linguistic factors and phenomena that were important in the process of creating the written texts. All this, together with other lexical characteristics, allowed outlining sustainable trends in the linguistic specificity of Damaskin literature during the period. To build the concept of the article, various universal methods such as descriptive, analytical, comparative-historical methods were used.