Bulgarian grammar

Bulgarian is also a part of the Balkan sprachbund, which also includes Greek, Macedonian, Romanian, Albanian and the Torlakian dialect of Serbian.

The plural is formed by adding to or replacing the singular ending, most commonly in the following ways: +ове (monosyl.)

-е +та With cardinal numbers and some adverbs, masculine nouns use a separate numerical plural form бройна множествена форма (broyna mnozhestvena forma).

Thus, Любомире means 'hey, Lyubomir', while the corresponding feminine forms Елено ('hey, Elena'), Маргарито ('hey, Margarita') are today seen as rude[4] or unceremonious, and declining foreign names as in *Джоне ('hey, John') or *Саймъне ('hey, Simon') is considered humorous.

Vocative is still in full and regular use for general nouns such as господине (gospodine "mister"), госпожице (gospožice "miss"), госпожо (gospožo "Mrs"), бабо (babo "grandma"), майко (majko "mother"), сине (sine "son").

[note 2] Old Bulgarian had an extensive system of declension which included seven grammatical cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, locative, instrumental and vocative; of these, only what used to be nominative and vocative cases survives in modern Bulgarian.

Adverbs: сутрин, вечер, зимъс, днес, нощес, есенес, пролетес, лятос, вред.

"with God", from с + бог s + bog); бегом (begom "while running" from бяг (byag – running), посредством, пешком, пълзешком, силом, денем, кръгом, гърбом, редом, тихом, мигом, ребром, цифром, числом, словом.

Adverbs and prepositions: горе, отгоре, долу, отдолу, зиме, лете, утре, вкратце, есени, пролети, върху, срещу, между.

A Bulgarian adjective agrees in gender, number and definiteness with the noun it is appended to and is usually put before it.

So in Bulgarian the sentence "I saw Lyubomir" can be expressed thus: It is clear that the subject is "аз" ("I") (it has been dropped), because the verb "видях" is in the first person singular.

The girls greeted Lyubomir: The clitic doubling (го/ги) is obligatory only when the subject and the object are both in third person, and they are either both singular or both plural, but when the meaning is clear from the context it can be omitted.

Examples: but In the compound tenses, when a participle is used, and when the subject and the object are of different gender or number, the clitic doubling can also be left out.

For example, the following constructions are common in colloquial Bulgarian: The phenomenon is practically obligatory in the spoken language in the case of inversion signalling information structure (in writing, clitic doubling may be skipped in such instances, with a somewhat bookish effect): Sometimes, the doubling signals syntactic relations, thus: This is contrasted with: In this case, clitic doubling can be a colloquial alternative of the more formal or bookish passive voice, which would be constructed as follows: Clitic doubling is also fully obligatory, both in the spoken and in the written norm, in clauses including several special expressions that use the short accusative and dative pronouns such as "играе ми се" (I feel like playing), студено ми е (I am cold), and боли ме ръката (my arm hurts): Except the above examples, clitic doubling is considered inappropriate in a formal context.

'it wants')[note 7] is used to form the (positive) future tense: The negative future is formed with the invariable construction няма да /ˈɲamɐ dɐ/ (see няма below):[note 8] The past tense of this verb – щях /ʃtʲax/ is conjugated to form the past conditional ('would have' – again, with да, since it is irrealis): The verbs имам /ˈimɐm/ ('to have') and нямам /ˈɲamɐm/ ('to not have'): In Bulgarian, there are several conjunctions all translating into English as "but", which are all used in distinct situations.

Some common expressions use these words, and some can be used alone as interjections: Bulgarian has several abstract particles which are used to strengthen a statement.

These are "tagged" on to the beginning or end of a sentence to express the mood of the speaker in relation to the situation.

[note 11] Example phrases include: An interesting phenomenon is that these can be strung along one after another in quite long constructions, e.g. An extreme, albeit colloquial, example with almost no intrinsic lexical meaning – yet which is meaningful to the Bulgarian ear – would be: —Note: the subject of the sentence is simply the pronoun "taya" (lit.