The new system is not always used in a proper way and sometimes leads to incoherences. These signposts in Sofia show the name of the district of Lozenec written according to the international scientific system of transliteration (c = ts), while the name of the Irish journalist James David Bourchier has been "relatinised" according to the official Bulgarian system (Dzheyms Baucher), although the system does not apply to names that have authentic Roman spellings.

Romanization of Bulgarian is the practice of transliteration of text in the Bulgarian language from its conventional Cyrillic orthography into the Latin alphabet. Romanization can be used for various purposes, such as rendering of proper names and place names in foreign-language contexts, or for informal writing of Bulgarian in environments where Cyrillic is not easily available. Official use of romanization by Bulgarian authorities is found, for instance, in identity documents and in road signage. Several different standards of transliteration exist, one of which has been chosen and made mandatory for common use by the Bulgarian authorities in a law of 2009.^[1]

[edit] Features

The various romanization systems differ with respect to 12 out of the 30 letter of the modern Bulgarian alphabet. The remaining 18 have constant mappings in all romanization schemes: а→a, б→b, в→v, г→g, д→d, е→e, з→z, и→i, к→k, л→l, м→m, н→n, о→o, п→p, р→r, с→s, т→t, ф→f. Differences exist with respect to the following:

• letters involving the glide sound /j/, where some systems use Latin <j> and some Latin <y>: й→j/y, ю→ju/yu, я→ja/ya; also ь→’/j/y.
• letters denoting palatal/alveolar fricatives and affricates. Here, the choice is mostly between Latin letters with diacritics, as used in many Latin-based orthographies of other Slavic languages, and digraph combinations, as used in English: ж→ž/zh, ч→č/ch, ш→š/sh, щ→št/ŝ/sht. Also, Cyrillic x may be rendered as either <h> or <kh>, and Cyrillic ц as either <c> or <ts>. The rendering of щ as <št> or <sht> is specific to Bulgarian and differs from the conventions for most other Slavic languages, where it is rendered mostly as <šč> or <shch>.
• the letter ъ, which in Bulgarian (unlike other Slavic languages, where it is known as the "hard sign") denotes a special schwa-like vowel. This sound, which occurs in the first syllable of the country name Bulgaria (България), is variously rendered as <ă>, <ŭ>, <a> or <u>. Moreover,Cyrillic у, which is mostly rendered as Latin <u>, is sometimes rendered instead as <ou> to distinguish it from ъ.

[edit] Standards

Three different systems have been adopted officially by Bulgarian authorities at overlapping times. An older system in the tradition of common Slavic scientific transliteration was adopted by the Council of Orthography and Transcription of Geographical Names in Sofia in 1972 and subsequently by the UN in 1977.^[2] It is identical to that codified in the ISO norm ISO/R 9:1968. This system uses diacritic letters (<č, š, ž>) as well as <j> and <c>). It was adopted in 1973 as the Bulgarian state standard BDS 1596:1973, which, while no longer used in practice^{[citation needed]}, is formally still valid^[3] and yet to be replaced by a new standard conforming to the new Bulgarian practice and legislation.

The second system was a French-oriented transliteration of personal and place names in the documents issued by the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior for travel abroad, used until 1999.^[4]

Systems based on a radically different principle, which avoids diacritics and is optimized for compatibility with English sound-letter correspondences,^[5] have come into official use in Bulgaria since the mid-1990s. These systems characteristically use <ch, sh, zh> rather than <č, š, ž>, and <y> rather than <j>. One such system was proposed in Danchev et al.'s English Dictionary of Bulgarian Names of 1989.^[6]. A similar system (differing from the former in the treatment of ъ and у), called the "Streamlined System" by Ivanov (2003)^[5] and Gaidarska (1998),^[7] was adopted in 1995 for use in Bulgarian-related place names in Antarctica by the Antarctic Place-names Commission of Bulgaria.^[8] Another system along similar lines, differing from the Antarctic one only in the treatment of ц (<ts> vs. <c>), was adopted by the Bulgarian authorities for use in identity documents in 1999;^[5] after an amendment in 2000, the official Bulgarian system became identical with that of the Antarctica Commission. A further modification was made by the Bulgarian authorities in 2006, when an exception rule was introduced that mandated transliteration of word-final -ия as -ia rather than -iya in names such as Bulgaria, Sofia, Trakia.^[9] In 2009, a law passed by the Bulgarian parliament made this system mandatory for all official use and some types of private publications.^[1]

The new official Bulgarian system does not allow for unambiguous mapping back into Cyrillic, since unlike most other systems it does not distinguish between ъ and а (both rendered as a). It also does not distinguish between the digraph values of <zh=ж>, <sh=ш> and the value of the same Roman strings in rendering accidental clusters of separate Cyrillic letters <zh=зх> and <sh=сх>, as they occur in words like изход (izhod) or схема (shema).

Systems along similar lines to the new official Bulgarian system, though with differences regarding the letters х, ъ, ь, ю and я, have also been in use in the ALA-LC Romanization scheme of the Library of Congress, and the BGN/PCGN romanization of the United States and British governments.

The ISO 9 standard, in its 1995 version, has introduced another romanization system that works with a consistent one-to-one reversible mapping, resorting to rare diacritic combinations such as <â,û,ŝ>.

The archaic Cyrillic letters ѣ and ѫ, which were part of the pre-1945 orthography of Bulgarian, are variously transcribed as <i͡e, e, ya, ě>, and <u̐ , ŭ, ǎ>, respectively, in the ALA/LC, BGN/PCGN and ISO 9 standards.

[edit] Comparison table

[edit] Romanization sample

Differences in the romanization of the letters "ч", "ж", "я" and "ъ" are underlined.

[edit] See also

• Romanisation of Macedonian
• Romanization of Russian
• Romanization of Ukrainian

[edit] Notes