Title: Bulgarian Grammar

Description

Notable as the first Bulgarian grammar, this book is also culturally significant because of the role that its author, Neofit Rilski (1793–1881), played in the promotion of secular education in Bulgaria and in the establishment of a modern Bulgarian literary language. Neofit, a priest associated with the Rila Monastery, was a leading figure in the 19th-century Bulgarian National Revival and its concomitant education reform. He was the first headmaster of the Gabrovo School, the first secular school in Bulgaria. In the midst of a national debate in the 1830s–1840s about choosing among competing dialects and creating a standard literary language, Neofit published his landmark grammar and its philological preface, in which he presented his ideas on the standardization of Bulgarian. Even though his work was grammatically conservative—it included, for example, declension, a feature long dead in the spoken language—it laid the foundation for codifying the new literary language and was enormously influential in the development of modern Bulgarian.