Avgustinova, Tania; Stenger, Irina
Russian-Bulgarian mutual intelligibility in light of linguistic and statistical models of Slavic receptive multilingualism [Russko-bolgarskaja vzaimoponjatnost’ v svete lingvističeskich i statističeskich modelej slavjanskoj receptivnoj mnogojazyčnocsti]
Marti, Roland; Pognan, Patrice; Schlamberger Brezar, Mojca (Ed.): University Press, Faculty of Arts, pp. 85-99, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2020.
Computational modelling of the observed mutual intelligibility of Slavic languages unavoid-ably requires systematic integration of classical Slavistics knowledge from comparative his-torical grammar and traditional contrastive description of language pairs. The phenomenon of intercomprehension is quite intuitive: speakers of a given language L1 understand another closely related language (variety) L2 without being able to use the latter productively, i.e. for speaking or writing.
This specific mode of using the human linguistic competence manifests itself as receptive multilingualism. The degree of mutual understanding of genetically close-ly related languages, such as Bulgarian and Russian, corresponds to objectively measurable distances at different linguistic levels. The common Slavic basis and the comparative-syn-chronous perspective allow us to reveal Bulgarian-Russian linguistic affinity with regard to spelling, vocabulary and grammar.