Do you know this country? (49)

Yes, the Ancient Thracians had been living on this land thousands of years before the Ancient Romans qonquerred them. They left behind quite a lot of beautiful things to admire, now found at the National Museum of History in Sofia and also in other local museums. Pure 24-carat gold feast vessels of transcendent beauty, some older than the so famous Egyptian pyramids, are what the Thracians are mostly known for today.

To manufacture these exquisite marvels of human spirit, some 7-12 thousand years old, they used quite an innovative technology known today as sintering. That is to put a metal in a powdered form in a die and heat it until all the fine grit is caked in one piece. Thus using much lower temperatures, than it takes for an ordinary metallurgical process, they had big solid pieces!

The Ancient Thracians washed gold grit from the rivers using furs, packed stone carved dies and had these pieces heated in the fire. Then engraved them just as much as needed, and finally brushed and polished these vessels to shine as Suns.

Yes, Bulgarians are as bad in languages as Englishmen are. It is officially stated that at most 40% of young Bulgarians know English - a figure that is much exaggerated. What is probably meant is that they have studied English at school for some time opting it for the far more easy Russian that every Bulgarian can understand without much study as both use the Cyrillic alphabet and much of the vocabulary - at least 79 percent, is the same or too very similar!

Bulgarian language has evolved from old Slavic, so as to drop all cases. That are the different endings of the same words according to their role in the sentence. Thus Bulgarian uses only the prepositions for this purpose, just as English does. It turns Bulgarian as the easiest of all Slavic languages to be learned, yet the closest to Russian, which is of course spoken by far more people, but has 6 cases - a nightmare for a Bulgarian that tries to speak it! Yet one can understand it quite fine!


And finally using the Cyrillic alphabet simplifies spelling to just what you hear is what you write.

Oh, I forgot to mention: One can always know what is the gender of a word by the way it ends. So there is no need to stuff that info, that makes French or German so difficult for a foreigner to learn.

Oh, at last but not least! If you are a German, French or even an Englishman you may want to ask about a very important matter - what about the indefinite and the definite articles.

Well, we simply don't complicate things with the former but still use the the latter by putting it at the end of the words!
It's a very important issue! Why? Just wait to discover!

For the last 2 weeks (4 if we watch BBC ) I was toiling on the problem how a foreigner can make good friends with a Bulgarian the easy way. Of course, it's the funny way too! And I have had some fun alongside these so important achievements! So if you are interested show it! I may publish it for free. Why keep it just for me?