When today we say “view“, “activity“, “creation“, “feeling“, “outing“ or “opinion”, we rarely think that these words are part of the purposeful work of one person. Alexander Teodorov-Balan does not just research the Bulgarian language. He tried to give it a scientific order, precise concepts and words that would sound natural in the new Bulgarian state.
The scientist was born on October 27, 1859 in the Bessarabian village of Kubey, today in Ukraine, into a family of Bulgarian immigrants from the Sliven region. He graduated from the Bolgrad Gymnasium, then studied Slavic and Czech philology in Prague and continued his education in Leipzig. In 1884, he settled in Sofia and began working at the Ministry of Public Education.
Just a few years later, Balan found himself among the creators of higher education in post-liberation Bulgaria. In 1889, he was elected the first rector of the Higher School, which later received the name Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski“. He held the position two more times – in 1896-1897 and 1902-1903, and taught history of the Bulgarian language, dialectology, Slavic ethnography and Bulgarian literature.
Language as a scientific task
His main work is related to the description and development of the Bulgarian literary language. Balan studied its grammatical structure, sound system, dialects, spelling and rules of literary speech. His work “Slog i govor“ from 1904 is also dedicated to scientific terminology, which in his opinion should be short, clear and understandable.
In 1909, “Bulgarian Bookwriting for a Hundred Years. 1806-1905“ &ndquo; a large-scale bibliographical work that organizes the literature published in Bulgarian during the first century of the new Bulgarian printed culture. Later, Balan published “Bulgarian Grammar“ and “New Bulgarian Grammar“, published in 1940.
Words That Remain
Balan believed that the development of the language should not be a mechanical rejection of everything foreign, but a conscious enrichment through the living vernacular and the internal possibilities of Bulgarian. Among the words associated with his word creation are „view“, „activity“, „creation“, „feeling“, „decoration“, „threat“, „outing“, „resort“, „communicate“ and „opinion“.
„To love our language, to defend it, to create and enrich it.“This sentence summarizes his attitude towards language – as to a living work, not to a frozen museum. In his works, he insisted that literary speech should maintain its connection with the popular speech, but also be capable of expressing science, education and public life.
Alexander Teodorov-Balan died on February 12, 1959 in Sofia, shortly before his 100th birthday. Since 1939, he has been an honorary doctor of Sofia University and a full member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Today, schools and a hall at the Institute of Bulgarian Language at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences bear his name, and the words he proposed continue to sound like a completely ordinary part of Bulgarian speech.
Sources: archives.bnr.bg, old-news.bnr.bg, banker.bg