Strokes of compound word formation in the Banat translations of the New Testament

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present one of many possible research aspects in the New Testament translations of palćensći jazić, banátsći balgarsći jazić. There is an old translation from the end of the 19th century and a new one from 1998. The historical circumstances and influences, as well as the relationship between the two translations, remain the subject of a complete separate study. Despite the reduced number of examples in the chosen field of compound word formation, the cultural distinctiveness of the Banat translations of the New Testament is demonstrated. They are not a narrowly dialectal phenomenon, but a supradialectal and linguocultural one. They have both common features and significant differences, which reflect the processes of the intra-linguistic dynamics of the written regional form of the Bulgarian language in the Banat region. They should be studied in a comparative perspective with other representatives of the New Bulgarian spoken language tradition of the Bible. The layers of the Bulgarian dialect language; the influence of Romanian, Hungarian, German, and Croatian; the international vocabulary of Greek and Latin; the Old Bulgarian literary tradition appear in both translations.