Thats not exactly what I learned while taking Bulgarian history classes,
Piers...:)
The "Byzantine Greek missionaries" actually just started the work on the
Bulgarian alphabet... See, the Bulgarian king at the time, had the desire to
reign over the most powerful empire in Europe. To achieve this, he needed the
following:
Unite all people by establishing common language and common religion. To
achieve the former, he started with the latter. In short: there were some
political maneuvering, but at the end he picked the Eastern Orthodox over
whatever Rome had to offer atthe time...:)
Then he declared Bulgarian as official language, but stripped the power frim
the minority Bulgarian population by declaring that all his sheep is equal...:)
It was a bold move, because no pure Bulgarian wanted to be associated with the
dirty Slavs...:)
The "Byzantine Greek missionaries" came into the picture when the king
recognized that he wont be able to create the greatest empire under the sun if
the books in it were written using foreign alphabet and mass in the churches
carried in Greek...
Cyrill and Metodius work never saw daylight. It was actually finished by
Bulgarian scholars in the Bulgarian capitol. Reason for so many countries
using the Bulgarian alphabet wasthe fact that it really worked and the
Bulgarians were able to marginalize the Byzantine empire to a single city.
Also missionaries were sent in all directions as part of the plan for further
expansion. Thats how Russians got to use it.
The gist is that the "Byzantine Greek" missionaries were part of the plan
(gross oversimplification of which I provided above...:), they werent actually
on a mission to convert barbarians, something that missionaries do in their
selfless missionary work...:)
Boris
.....................
Subject: Re: [OM] [OT] In depth SUV scientific based analysis (was TotallyOT
From: "Piers Hemy" <piers@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 10:29:35 +0100
Believe me, Boris, if we were inventing English now, we wouldn't do it the
way it is (although we would, of course, do it differently from American
English).
Bulgarian has the advantage of using an alphabet to suit the spoken language
which was custom-designed by Byzantine Greek missionaries. Until then there
was no Slav written language (whether Bulgarian, Polish, Russian etc), so
they were starting with a clean sheet (of parchment). The missionaries
needed a written language to translate the Bible, and started with their own
Greek alphabet as the basis, with characters added (invented or borrowed
from Hebrew) for sounds in Bulgarian which were not present in Greek.
That's why the alphabet contains characters to suit every sound.
--
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