Life in BG mark on 17 Oct 2006 06:16 am
Long Overdue
I probably should have written about this much earlier. The time has come….to teach you the basics of the Bulgarian alphabet. It looks NOTHING like ours. And to this day, I am unsure of which letters really are vowels. There are characters that look like triangles with legs and an “n” with a curly tail. But those are not the hard letters to learn. The hardest ones are the ones that look like our letters, but sound different. Here are some examples:
Our “n” is their “p”
Our “i” is their “u”
Our “t” is their “m”, unless it is a capital, and then you use T, so these are the same letter: Tm
Our “p” is their “r”
Our “sh” is their “w”
And there are two letters that look like Bb. If it looks like a capital B, then it sounds like v, but if it looks like lowercase b, it sounds like b. And not like Spanish, where the b and v sound almost the same. Oh no. These are two very distinct sounds.
So you can see where this could be a little confusing. The first few days, the hound and I would stop for long periods of time, staring up at a sign, just trying to decipher what it says. People would walk by and snicker, but we were determined. And now, we’re pretty good. We can figure out what the signs say, but we don’t always know what they mean.
For fun, I give you these decoding activities (use the link above to see the Bulgarian alphabet):
Words in Bulgarian (find out what they say in English):
pectopaht
cnopt
takcu
Here’s my name in Bulgarian: Kpucmu. And here’s Mark’s: Mapk
What’s yours?
on 17 Oct 2006 at 6:13 pm # David
David
on 17 Oct 2006 at 10:46 pm # Kristy
No, David, that’s your name in “Ramonan”, I said Bulgarian.
on 18 Oct 2006 at 6:15 pm # Mark
Hmmmm…. interesting… I finally got placed on the Mapk. Can someone please Google Mapk me and let me know where I am?
Hello? Could someone tell me where I am?