_BULGARIAN STORIES._
The Bulgarians do not derive their name from a Slavonic origin, but
from a small and warlike nation of horsemen, which in A.D. 679
crossed the Danube under a chief named Isperich, conquered the
disunited Slavonic tribes that had settled in Mœsia, and
consolidated them into a powerful realm. The conquerors melted into
the conquered, and lost their language, but gave their name to the
state and country. The Slavonic language of the people does not
appear to have been affected by that of their Ugrian conquerors, but
rather by the old Thracian language, which, conjointly with Latin,
has produced the present Roumanian. The peculiarities of the present
Bulgarian language are: (1) the loss of case-inflexions in nouns and
adjectives, while the verbal system is most complete and complex;
(2) the expression of the genitive and dative cases by prefixing the
preposition _na_; (3) the post-positive article, which is also
borrowed from the old Thracian language, which was akin to the
Illyrian now spoken by the present Albanians and Epirots; (4) the
loss of the infinitive mood, which is replaced by _da_ with the
finite verb. Baron Wenceslas Wratislaw, in describing his journey
through Bulgaria in 1591, says of the people: 'They use a Slavonic
language, so that we Bohemians can converse with them.'
The Bulgarian tales themselves are curious, and some of them very
beautiful, as are also the songs, to which considerable space is
devoted by Mr. Morfill in his 'Slavonic Literature' (pp. 125-144).
There are old traditions as to the world and its inhabitants,
apparently of heathen origin (No. 35); a singular fusion of the
history of Abraham and Isaac with some other, probably heathen,
tradition (No. 36); a version of 'Cinderella' (No. 37), which,
involving as it does the transmigration of souls, clearly exhibits
an Indian origin; a beautiful story (No. 38), the latter part of
which is a variant of the latter part of the Russian tale of 'Marya
Morevna' (Ralston, p. 85), and No. 39, in the latter part of which
many people will recognise a variant of an old acquaintance.