Bulgarian Trip: Language

I took a 2 week vacation in Bulgaria in October 2006. Here are my impressions of specific aspects of my trip.

Entry status: not proof read

The primary language in Bulgaria is (shock) Bulgarian, followed by Turkish and Roma. From my experience, most also spoke a fair amount of English. Most of Lili's friends were very competent if not fairly fluent in English even if they didn't feel they were (Desy and Veska!)

With today's modern lifestyle, there is usually someway to convey what you need or want, even if you have to just point at it. Restaurants with photos on the menu were very helpful. Most helpful is have someone with you to translate or arrange things on your behalf. Lili handled these situations for me. Many thanks to her for managing the languages where I obviously couldn't.

The largest complexity of my visit, for me, wasn't the spoken word. It was the written word. I didn't realize how much I either read or merely recognized in my daily life when it comes to words. The quickest way to find out how much information you take in as written words is to lose the ability to read.

The Bulgarian language uses the Cyrillic character set. For those that don't know what that means, this blog is written using the Latin character set: 26 letters. Cyrillic uses 30 characters. On the surface, one might mistakenly assume there are just a few extra characters to content with. And one ( "I" ) would be wrong.

Cyrillic and Latin character sets share some of the same or similar symbols but the do not express the same spoken sounds. Case in point: while driving in Bulgaria, you might occasionally see a slow moving driver with a "Y" symbol on top of their car. This was curious until I realized that the "Y" symbol is used to indicate the Bulgarian word for "student driver".

For more information on the Cyrillic alphabet, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_language#Alphabet

As I moved about the airport and later through the cities, surfed TV channels and flipped pages of a newspaper, I clearly was lost without written and verbal translations or good photos. After a few days, the jet lag had pasted but information overload set in. As much as I tried to get information in, not much "stuck" in my mind.

I joked with a friend after I got back:

"I sometimes have dreams where I can't read. As hard as I try, as I read a few letters, the words don't come and the letters start changing until I've lost my place. I realize now that I dream in Cyrillic."