THE LINGUISTIC CHARM OF HIGH SOCIETY (USING DATA FROM THE YEAR 1850)

Abstract

In the year 1850 the almost unknown Thomas Michailovich Kralevsky published in Constantinople a French-Greek-Bulgarian dialogs and a small trilingual vocabulary. Alongside the French and the Greek texts, the Bulgarian part of the book presents examples of conversations which involve well-educated people who are interested in theatre, music, fashion, the beauties of Bulgarian places and so on, as well as some examples of small-talks. The strategies of the polite conversation are well-developed, the synonymy is rich, only a few words are borrowed from Turkish, but there are also some English borrowings. Some phonetic and morphological features indicate that Thomas Kralevsky was born in Macedonia. For example, the vowel /u/ as a result of the development of /ą/ is most common elsewhere in the texts, but it is used as a mark of prestige and the native dialect of Kralevsky had the vowel /a/ as a result of /ą/.