Cultural and Linguistic Specifics of a 19th Century Manuscript from the National Library “Ivan Vazov” in Plovdiv

Abstract

The present article explores a short Bulgarian manuscript preserved in the National Library “Ivan Vazov”. It dates back to the early 1830s and contains 12 pages. Eleven of them are written in Turkish with Cyrillic script and includes over 100 Turkish prov-erbs. The last 12th page contains a marginal note that is written in Bulgarian. The manuscript precedes the appearance of the first editions of printed books in Turkish with Cyrillic script in the early 1840s and is one of the earliest written representations of 19th century Bulgarian-Turkish bilingualism. Several problems are addressed in the article – the authorship and exact date of the manuscript, the specifics of the lan-guage, structure and content of proverbs.