ON THE BULGARIAN-POLISH ASYMMETRY IN TERMS OF ARCHAIC VOCABULARY

Abstract

The study uses as its basis a collection of 237 words categorised as archaic in Bulgarian which are nevertheless actively used in Modern Polish. The aim of the research is to determine the origin of these units and the degrees of similarity between Bulgarian and Polish words regarding their lexical form and semantic properties. The analysis demonstrates that the examined material is mainly of the Slavic origin, but it also includes words of French, Latin, Italian, Romanian, German and English origins. Three Bulgarian-Polish lexical pairs can be distinguished with relation to their form: 1) identical pairs, 2) pairs of minimum difference, 3) pairs of larger formal difference. By investigating their semantic properties, the lexical pairs can be grouped into: 1) words with identical or similar meaning, 2) words with distant semantic similarities, 3) words with no semantic similarities. Research on the Bulgarian-Polish lexical asymmetry regarding lexical archaisation contributes to an in-depth description of the factors that determine the lifespan of a word – i.e. whether it remains in use or wanes in time. These factors may be of linguistic or extra-linguistic nature and are specific to each of the reported cases.