Russian and Macedonian languages. Learning Macedonian language

Macedonian is spoken as a primary language by about 2-3 million people. It is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia and has minority language status in Albania, Romania and Serbia. Standard Macedonian became the official language of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1945. At the same time, the main codification of the Macedonian language took place, after which literature in it began to appear. According to 1964 data, about 30% of Macedonians (approximately 580 thousand people) live outside the Republic of Macedonia - mainly in Australia, the USA and Canada.

The Macedonian language is part of the Indo-European family and belongs to the eastern subgroup of South Slavic languages. Its closest relative is the Bulgarian language, with which the Macedonian language has a high degree of mutual understanding. Macedonia has long been part of Bulgaria, and although Bulgaria was the first country to recognize Macedonian independence in 1945, most Bulgarian scholars still consider the Macedonian language to be a dialect of Bulgarian.

The language spoken by the Slavic population of northern Greece is today classified as a dialect of Macedonian. True, Bulgarian linguists consider it a Bulgarian dialect - like the Macedonian language as a whole - but this point of view is rather politically motivated. Unlike the Republic of Macedonia, many speakers of Macedonian in Greece identify themselves as Slavic-speaking Greeks.

The Macedonian language was declared the official language of the Republic of Macedonia at the first meeting of the National Liberation Assembly of Macedonia, held on August 2, 1944. The author of the first official Macedonian grammar was Krume Kepeski, and Blaze Koneski played a leading role in standardizing the literary language. The first document in the literary standard Macedonian language was the first issue of the newspaper Nova Makedonija (1944), and in 1946 the first issue of the newspaper of the Macedonian diaspora, Makedonska Iskra, was published in the Australian city of Melbourne.

In terms of phonetics, the Macedonian language is practically no different from Bulgarian. One of the few differences is the devoicing of final plosives. Another difference is the emphasis. In the Macedonian language it is placed strictly on the antepenultim, i.e. penultimate syllable (except for recent borrowings), and in Bulgarian it can stand on any syllable.

Compared to other Slavic languages, Macedonian stands out for its frankly analytical grammatical structure: it does not have a case system. Literary Macedonian is the only South Slavic literary language to have three forms of the definite article, based on the degree of proximity to the speaker, as well as a past tense form formed by combining the auxiliary verb "to have" and the neuter passive past participle. Like Bulgarian, Macedonian uses double objects and mediatives.

Since the Macedonian language is a close relative of the Bulgarian and Serbian languages, their lexicon has many common words. The Macedonian language has quite a lot of borrowings from Turkish, English and Russian, because at different periods of its history Macedonia was occupied by Turkey, the USA and the Soviet Union.

After 1945, Macedonian linguists began an active struggle to cleanse the language of Serbian, Russian and Bulgarian borrowings. To do this, they took Church Slavonic words from ancient written monuments as a basis and designed them in accordance with the rules of modern Macedonian morphology. True, this struggle was not crowned with particular success, and now in the Macedonian language a wide layer of vocabulary is presented in two versions - archaic (based on the Old Church Slavonic language) and modern (based on the Bulgarian and Serbian languages): deјtsie/deјstvo (“action”), persuasive /persuasive (“convincing”), winner/winner (“winner”), etc.

The question: which of the three languages ​​is closer to Russian is just a reason to speculate about these languages. Well, where do we start?

Let's start with Bulgarian. In principle, it is the Bulgarian language that can be called closest to Russian for several reasons. Firstly, this is the only one of the languages ​​under consideration in which there are no characters that would be absent in the Russian alphabet. This greatly facilitates communication over the Internet. There is, however, one “dirty trick” - this is the fact that some characters are written the same way as in Russian, but are pronounced differently. So, “E” is pronounced like “E”, “Sh” is pronounced like “Shte”, “Ъ” is pronounced like a short “Y”.

Secondly, the words are quite similar. Most of the difficulties arise due to the fact that almost all words have minor differences. As an example, let’s take connectives like “a Russian word is its Bulgarian analogue”: “you work - work”, “Bulgarian - Bulgarian”, “Russian - ruskite” and so on in almost 60% of the vocabulary. There are also cases, and there are many of them, when the same word in Russian and Bulgarian means completely different things. There is a good article on this subject “Caution! Bulgarian language" . The main difference from the Russian language is that the Bulgarian language has no cases. Bulgarian is a fairly rational language, not replete with exceptions, which makes it quite simple to learn.

Now let's look at the Serbo-Croatian language. It is spoken by almost half of the Balkan Peninsula, namely: , (Bosnians have their own dialect, which is slightly different in softness of pronunciation). The Serbo-Croatian language already has characters that are missing in Russian.

There are variants of the alphabet in Cyrillic (Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic differs significantly from Russian and Bulgarian) and in Latin. All of the above countries use both. The argument that in and the Cyrillic alphabet is used, and in and - have no basis. Rather, Croatia and Bosnia use only the Latin alphabet, while Serbia and Montenegro use both. In the Serbo-Croatian language, just like in Russian, there are cases. Unlike Russian, there are seven of them. A vocative is also added (used when addressing someone). By the way, the vocative case used to be present in Russian as well. A typical example is “father - father”. As far as vocabulary is concerned, Serbo-Croatian has less overlap with Russian than Bulgarian. It is objectively more difficult to teach it.

Now Macedonian. This is the newest language of the three listed. For a long time it was considered a dialect of Bulgarian (Bulgarians still think so). There is a version that it “grew” from Bulgarian in the following way: in personal correspondence, the Bulgarians and Slavs inhabiting Macedonia (let’s call them that, since the Macedonians are a fairly young people, not to be confused with the ancient Macedonians, with whom modern people have no connection, about We will speculate on this further), they used the same symbols, the same grammar, but pronounced what was written differently. By the way, knowing Bulgarian, you can communicate with Macedonians almost without difficulty. Those. Macedonians understand Bulgarian phrases, and the answer in Macedonian can be understood without difficulty. The Macedonian alphabet contains characters that are not found in Russian. This is explained by the fact that it was both Serbian and Bulgarian. The Bulgarians and Serbs could not divide this territory among themselves for a long time, and since the formalization of the Macedonian language took place only in the 20th century, some Serbian symbols “crept” into the language and, for some reason, their own were added.

By the way, the formalization of the Macedonian language was carried out with the active participation of linguists from Russia (then the USSR). Perhaps this explains why the language is extremely easy to learn. In any case, you can learn to read Macedonian texts quite quickly. Many people note this. Macedonian, like Bulgarian, has no cases.

As a conclusion, we can state that Bulgarian is close to Russian in its alphabet, Serbo-Croatian in the presence of cases. The basic level necessary for communication in restaurants, hotels, and airports can be mastered fairly quickly if desired. As for the advanced level, Serbo-Croatian will require more effort than Bulgarian or Macedonian.

The Macedonian language is the language of the main population of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, one of the six constituent republics of Yugoslavia, and the youngest Slavic literary language. According to the 1981 census, there were 1,340 thousand Macedonians, while the total population of the SRM was 2 million people. The literary Macedonian language, based on the dialects of the Vardar part of the historical region of Macedonia, took shape during the Second World War and was established as the official language with the proclamation of the People's (from 1963 - Socialist) Republic of Macedonia as part of the FPRY (from 1963 - SFRY) in 1945 -1946

The historical region of Macedonia, the idea of ​​​​the geographical boundaries of which has changed. in ancient times it was inhabited by a mixed population - Thracians, Illyrians, Greeks. In the V - II centuries. BC e. there was a slave state here, which achieved in the 4th century. hegemony over all of Greece. In the VI - VII centuries. n. e., like a significant part of the Balkan Peninsula, Macedonia was inhabited by the Slavs, who in the 7th century. were partially conquered by Byzantium.

The first major Slavic state formation in the south of the Balkan Peninsula was in the 7th century. The first Bulgarian kingdom. In the middle of the 9th century. almost the entire historical region of Macedonia became part of it. From this moment on, Slavic writing spread throughout Macedonia. The historical region of Macedonia was in the 10th century. the core of the Western Bulgarian Kingdom that was formed at that time. After the Byzantine conquest in the 11th - 13th centuries. during the restoration of Bulgarian statehood in the 13th century. it is part of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom, but in the middle of the 14th century. was conquered by the Serbian king Stefan Dusan, and from the end of the 14th century. underwent long and difficult Turkish-Ottoman enslavement. Together with all the Slavic peoples of the Balkans, the inhabitants of the historical region of Macedonia offered heroic resistance to the Turks, but only in the 19th century. Conditions began to emerge for the success of the liberation movement, which developed mainly in line with the Bulgarian national revival. Enlighteners acted within this framework - folklore collectors brothers D. and K. Miladinov, poet R. Zhinzifov and others. However, by the end of the 19th century. Along with the tendency to form a single Bulgarian language, taking into account the characteristics of Western Bulgarian dialects, a tendency towards the formation of a special Macedonian literary language began to appear on the territory of the historical region of Macedonia, which found expression in the book of K. P. Misirkov “On the Macedonian Question”, published in Sofia in 1903. As a result of the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. The historical region of Macedonia was divided between Serbia (Vardar Macedonia), Greece (Aegean Macedonia) and Bulgaria (Pirin region).

Vardar Macedonia did not have autonomy, and only in 1943 it was proclaimed that New Yugoslavia would be built as a federation of equal peoples, including the Macedonian one. Clandestine mass literature was published in the Macedonian language. Poems by Macedonian poets who began their activities in the 1930s, such as K. Racin, who died in a partisan detachment, as well as K. Nedelkovski, V. Markovski and others, appear in the underground press, and problems of literary language are discussed. As a result of the victory in the liberation war of the peoples of Yugoslavia, achieved with the fraternal assistance of the Soviet Army, conditions were created for the development of the Macedonian national community, its culture and language. The first official codification (legalized standardization) of the Macedonian literary language occurred in 1945.

A significant role in the development of the Macedonian literary language, close to living folk speech, is played by writers A. Shopov, S. Janevski, V. Maleski, writer and linguist B. Koneski, author of the first school grammar K. Kepeski, linguist B. Vidoeski and others. An important cultural role in the development of Macedonia is played by the University in Skopje, established in 1949, and the Academy of Sciences and Arts, founded in 1967. In 1961-1966. A three-volume explanatory-translation dictionary of the Macedonian language was published (with translations into the Serbo-Croatian language), in which Macedonian vocabulary was collected and normalized. Clarifications have been made in spelling standards (most recently in 1970). Research is being conducted in the field of studying grammar, vocabulary, word formation, and dialectology of the Macedonian language.

Macedonian graphics are based on the Serbian version of the Cyrillic alphabet. There are no Russian letters in it th, shch, b, b, s, e, yu, e. As in Serbian, to indicate a sound like th sign used j, for transferring soft l And n- letters љ And њ , to convey a voiced hissing affricate ( j) — sign џ; to convey a voiced sibilant affricate ( dz) the letter was introduced into the Macedonian alphabet s. Specific sounds, denoted by the letters ѓ and ќ, arose in place of Proto-Slavic combinations *dj And *tj in pronunciation these sounds vary from very soft ѓ and ќ; to soft midpalatal affricates, close to Serbo-Croatian ђ and ћ.

The Macedonian language belongs to the eastern (Bulgarian-Macedonian) subgroup of South Slavic languages. Among the features characteristic of the Macedonian language, the following should be noted: 1) loss of declension and analytical methods of conveying those meanings that are conveyed in other languages ​​using case forms: the result on dejnost‘result of activity’; 2) postpositive article (member) with names (cf.: belly'life', posterity‘descendants’), some norms and forms of its use differ from Bulgarian, in particular, in Macedonian, in addition to the article - T- there are articles on - V- And - n-: chovekov‘person (close)’, chowkon‘a person (far away)’; 3) loss of the infinitive; 4) the comparative degree of adjectives is formed using a prefix By-: in the dark‘darker’; 5) unstressed (enclitic) forms of personal pronouns are used ( sister mu‘his sister’), including for reprise (repeated indication) of an object: I tell him‘(I) told him’;. 6) stress on the third (in two-syllable words - on the second) syllable from the end; 7) strong ъ moved to o: dream; 8) nasal O turned into A: cancer'hand', stalemate‘way, time’; 9) sound X is lost or sometimes replaced by V: leb'bread', vetov‘dilapidated’.

On the territory of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, three groups of dialects are distinguished: northern (delimited from others approximately along the 42nd parallel - the city of Skopje), western and eastern (separated approximately along the Vardar and Crna rivers). North Macedonian dialects are characterized by a coincidence of strong ъ And b in one sound ъ, loss X in all positions, transformation o, V at; in Western Macedonian dialects there is a replacement X at the end of a word f, o, turned into A; in Eastern Macedonian dialects one can note the appearance before the initial o,, turned into A, prosthetic V (waglen‘coal’), there is no fixed stress point. Of course, there are many other characteristic dialectal features of the named groups and individual dialects.

Literature

Kovalev N.S. Macedonian language. Ivanovo, 1977.
Koneski B. Grammar in Macedonian literary jazik. Skopje, 1967.
Koneski B. History in Macedonian jazik. Skopje, 1965.
Usikova R. P. Macedonian language. Skopje, 1985.
Vidoeski B. Macedonskite dialekti vo svetlinata na lingvističkata geografija // Macedonian language, T. 13-14 (1962/3).
Riverman in Macedonian jazik / Ed. B. Koneski. Skopje, 1961-1966. T. 1 - 3.
Tolovski D., Illich-Svitych V. M. Macedonian-Russian dictionary: With a short grammar reference attached. M., 1963.
Vidoeski B. Prilog con bibliographijata na Macedonian jazik. Skopje, 1953.
Story Yugoslavia: In 2 vols. M., 1963.
Makedonska bookishness Beograd, 1961.

A. E. Suprun

MACEDONIAN LANGUAGE

(Suprun A.E. Introduction to Slavic philology. - Minsk, 1989. - P. 103-110)

http://www.philology.ru/linguistics3/suprun-89e.htm

Macedonian is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia. It belongs to the eastern branch of the South Slavic languages ​​and is very closely related to Bulgarian. Before codification in 1945, the dialects of the Macedonian language were classified mostly as Bulgarian, and some linguists still consider them as such, but this is politically incorrect. Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian are also closely related to the Macedonian language.

Macedonia is located on the Balkan Peninsula. The Macedonian language originated from the language of the Slavic people who settled on the Balkan Peninsula in the 6th-7th centuries AD. e. In the 9th century, the Slavic enlighteners, the brothers Cyril and Methodius, whose homeland was the Byzantine city of Thessaloniki (Thessaloniki) - at that time the cultural center of Macedonia, developed the first writing system for the Slavic languages.

The Slavic dialects were so close to each other that it was possible to create a written language based on the dialect of one region. There is disagreement regarding the establishment of this region, but most likely it was Thessalonica. In the 14th century, the Turks invaded the Balkans and conquered most of it, incorporating Macedonia into the Ottoman Empire. Due to the dominance of the Turkish language, the development of the written language (now called ancient Church Slavonic) of the Slavic population stopped, which cannot be said about the spoken dialects that existed separately from it. As the national self-awareness of the Balkan Slavs grew, standards were created for the Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian languages. When the influence of the Turkish language in Macedonia began to weaken, schools began to open in areas where the Bulgarian population predominated, in which literary Bulgarian was studied. The version of defining Macedonian dialects as Bulgarian is confirmed in early texts from Macedonia, written in the local dialect. The authors of these works of the 18th - early 19th centuries considered their language Bulgarian.

Despite the fact that works of literature in the Macedonian language date back to the 18th century, the Macedonian language was only codified in 1945, when it became the official language of the People's Republic of Macedonia within Yugoslavia. Today, approximately 2 million people speak Macedonian. It is the native language of a large part of the Macedonian population and a second language for numerous national minorities in the country. The Macedonians themselves, as ethnic minorities, live in neighboring states: Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia. Some Macedonians settled outside the Balkan region: in Australia, Canada and the USA. The Macedonian language is studied at universities in Australia, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, Russia, Serbia, the USA, and Croatia.

The dialects of the Macedonian language are divided into three main groups: Western, Eastern and Northern. The Northern dialect, spoken north of Skopje and Kumanovo, as well as in Dalni Polog, is close to the Serbo-Croatian language. The southern dialect is quite heterogeneous. The Western Macedonian dialect, or rather its central dialects, widespread in the cities of Bitola, Prilep, Veles, Kichevo, where the influence of the Serbian and Bulgarian languages ​​was relatively weaker, is taken as the basis of the literary language.

Additional information about the Macedonian language:

The main lexical fund of the literary Macedonian language, like other Slavic languages, is the common Slavic vocabulary. A significant amount of vocabulary in Macedonian belongs to the Bulgarian and Serbian languages. In political and scientific terminology, the main source and mediator is the Serbo-Croatian language. Since 1991, when Macedonia became an independent state, a language policy has been pursued to replace words of Serbian origin. As a result of the centuries-long mutual influence of the peoples living in the Balkans, numerous Balkanisms - borrowings from Greek, Romanian, Turkish, etc. - joined the vocabulary of Macedonian dialects.

The modern Macedonian alphabet was developed by linguists after World War II. Before this, the Macedonian written language used the Old Slavic alphabet (Cyrillic), and later the Cyrillic alphabet with local adaptation from the Serbian or Bulgarian alphabets. The stress in the Macedonian literary language always falls on the third syllable from the end of the word (with the exception of gerunds, where the stress is placed on the penultimate syllable, as well as borrowings); In phrases, more complex rules for stress placement apply.

Unlike other Slavic languages, the grammar of the Macedonian language is analytical, having lost the case system common to Slavic languages. The Macedonian language has some special and even unique characteristics due to the country's location in the central Balkans. Literary Macedonian is the only South Slavic literary language in which the definite article has three forms depending on the degree of proximity to the speaker, and the past tense is formed by the auxiliary verb "to have" followed by the neuter passive participle in the past tense.

The orthography of the Macedonian language in practice is quite consistent and phonemic and is close to the principle of “one grapheme per phoneme” - a principle expressed in the saying of the German thinker, linguist and translator of the Enlightenment I. K. Adelung: “Write as you speak, and read as you speak.” as it is written."

The terms "Macedonia" and "Macedonian" have been criticized by Greek citizens, who have openly opposed their use in relation to the former Yugoslav republic, its language and people. The Greeks even consider the current situation offensive. For Greeks, Macedonian is the ancient Macedonian language, a dialect of ancient Greek. In addition, the majority of the Greek population associates the term "Macedonian" with the northern dialect of modern Greek. Claims by Greek citizens that Macedonia is a historically Greek name and should remain an exclusively Greek term have caused significant problems for Macedonia. For example, in 1994, Greece imposed an economic blockade on the new state, and Greek objections to its entry into the European Union made this task much more difficult for Macedonia.

Macedonian language(self-name: Macedonian Jazik) belongs to the South Slavic languages ​​and has about three million speakers. Approximately two million Macedonian speakers live in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and almost a million more in other countries, including Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, the United States, Australia and Canada. Macedonian is recognized as an ethnic minority language in Albania, Romania and Serbia. In addition, the language is taught in a number of countries, including Australia, Canada, Croatia, Italy, Russia, Serbia, the USA and the UK.

Macedonian and the languages ​​are largely mutually intelligible. Less noticeable are the similarities between Macedonian and Serbian.

The varieties of South Slavic spoken in what is now the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Poranesna Jugoslovenska Republika Macedonia (PJRM)) were classified as Macedonian in 1940, and it became the official language of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia (Socialistka Republika Macedonia) in 1945.

The modern standard spelling of the Macedonian language was formed in 1945. Since then, a large number of literary works have been published in the Macedonian language. The literary Macedonian language is based on the dialects of the west-central region (Prilep, Kičevo, Bitola, Krusevo and Lerin).

Notes

The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (Poranesna Jugoslovenska Republika Macedonia (PJRM)) is the name that is used in relation to Macedonia by international organizations, Greece and a number of other countries. The constitutional name of the country, the Republic of Macedonia (Republic of Macedonia), is recognized by more than 100 countries. Some countries use both names under different circumstances.

The Constitution of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia calls its official language the Macedonian language (Macedonski, makedonski). The same name is used by international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO), and Slavic scholars. In addition, other names for the language are also used to avoid ambiguity and to emphasize its difference from the Old Macedonian language, a dialect, or language closely related to or influenced by Greek, which was used in what is now northern Greece until about the 4th century. BC.

In Greece, the modern Macedonian language is called Slavic Macedonian, Slavic Macedonian/Sloveno-Macedonian (Macedonian Slovenian, Slavomacedonian, Σλαβομακεδονικά).

Macedonian alphabet (Cyrillic)

Macedonian alphabet (Latin)

A a /a/	B b /b/	V v /v/	G g /ɡ/	D d /d/	Ǵ ǵ /ɟ/	E e /ɛ/	Ž ž /ʒ/	Z z /z/	Dz dz /dz/	I i /i/
J j /j/	K k /k/	Ll /ɫ, l/	Lj lj /l/	Mm /m/	Nn /n/	Nj nj /ɲ/	O o /ɔ/	P p /p/	R r /r/	Ss /s/
T t /t/	Ḱ ḱ /c/	U u /u/	F f /f/	H h /x/	C c /ts/	Č č /tʃ/	Dž dž /dʒ/	Š š /ʃ/