SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis describes the morphology and lexicon of the dialect of Romany spoken in Kotel, Bulgaria. The introduction shows the position of the dialect within Bulgarian Romany and gives brief details of its speakers (pp 12-15). A phonological transcription is used for the morphology and lexicon. This reveals the relationship between Kotel and other dialects, a relationship normally concealed by its phonetic system. The paradigmatic affixes added to nominals are listed with their variants and specimen paradigms are given (pp 16-31) . Verbs are similarly treated, with special notes on medio-passives and impersonal verbs (pp 32-42). The affixes used in building compound-words are listed with their variants and numerous examples (pp 43-59) o A brief note is included on some non-productive methods of word-formation (p. 60). The changes undergone by loan-words from Turkish and Bulgarian are summarized, together with the paradigmatic affixes used with loans from these languages and Greek (pp 61-66). Two texts are given in phonological transcription with a translation and notes, to illustrate the morphology (pp 67-94). A Romany-English lexicon follows, together with some shorter word-lists(pp 95-202) . The lexicon excludes those loan-words which are freely formed by stated rules from Turkish and Bulgarian, languages with which the people are familiar. Finally phonological rules are given which conver the symbols used up to this point into a broad phonetic transcription (pp 203-211), and a text in parallel phonological and phonetic transcription illustrates the application of these rules (pp 212-219). A concise bibliography concludes the study.