Pr. Dennis P. Hupchick as regards the Slavmacedonian nationality and language*

Saturday, September 18, 2010

An interesting historical argument arose in support of an independent (Slav) Macedonian nationality that ultimately reached its maturity only after World War II and Tito's construction of a federated Communist Yugoslavia composed of six independent "historic" republics, of which one was Macedonia. The (Slav) Macedonian nationalists quite simply stole all of the Bulgarian historical argument concerning Macedonia, substituting "Macedonian" for "Bulgarian" ethnic tags in the story. Thus Kuber formed a "Macedonian" tribal alliance in the late seventh century; Kliment and Naum were "Macedonians" and not "Bulgarians"; the medieval archbishopric-patriarchate of Ohrid, which Kliment led, was a "Macedonian," not a "Bulgarian" independent church, as shown by the persistence of Glagolitic letters in the region in the face of the Cyrillic that were spawned in Bulgaria; and the renowned Samuil led a great "Macedonian," rather than a "western Bulgarian," state against Byzantium (giving Slav Macedonia its apex in the historical sun). Under control of the revived Bulgarian state, and later under the Serb Dusan, the (Slav)Macedonians had maintained their ethnic differences from their "foreign" masters, as demonstrated by their "king" VukaSin, who had died attempting to keep an independent Macedonia free from the Ottoman Turks. When ethnic-national consciousness reawakened among the Macedonian Slavs in the nineteenth century, the cultural revivalists, such as the Miladinov brothers, were consciously "Macedonian" and not "Bulgarian," in their efforts.

The obviously plagiarized historical argument of the (Slav)Macedonian nationalists for a separate (Slav)Macedonian ethnicity could be supported only by linguistic reality, and that worked against them until the 1940s. Until a modern (Slav)Macedonian literary language was mandated by the socialist-led partisan movement from Macedonia in 1944, most outside observers and linguists agreed with the Bulgarians in considering the vernacular spoken by the Macedonian Slavs as a western dialect of Bulgarian. In the interwar period (1918-39) the official language of... 
(Slav)Macedonia had been Serbian by compulsion, with the use of Bulgarian forbidden. The World War II socialist partisans in (Yugoslav) Macedonia proceeded to establish a commission to create the new "official" (Slav)Macedonian literary language, which was presented to the world the following year (1945). From then on, it became the legal first language of the Macedonian Slavs, with Serbo-Croatian a recognized second language and Bulgarian officially proscribed.

The new (Slav) Macedonian literary language was based intentionally on a dialect spoken in the central Vardar area of the region, so as to be removed as far as geographically possible from both Bulgarian and Serbian linguistic contaminations. Moreover, a separate (Slav) Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet was devised to make the new language as unnecessarily different from Bulgarian as possible, with the inclusion of wholly new letters found nowhere else and a few Serbian characters thrown in for good measure. Since the (Slav)Macedonian vernacular was primarily primitive in its native development, most of the words used were better related to folktales and songs than to the modern age. "Bulgarianisms" were replaced by folk substitutes, and modern Bulgarian, Serbian, or Russian terminology for technical and other twentieth-century expressions were intentionally avoided in favor of Western, including American, terms. The result not only made literary (Slav) Macedonian as different as humanly possible from its brother Slav languages, but it created a veritable linguistic hodgepodge, which approached the French meaning of macedoine when referring to a mixed salad. Led by the Skopje socialist linguist Blaze Koneski, and given international recognition in 1952 by Yale-produced Harvard Slavic professor Horace Lunt, the artificially created and structured (Slav) Macedonian literary language ultimately provided the socialist-mandated ethnic validity for an independent (Slav) Macedonian nationality. Over four decades of state socialization and education of Macedonian Slav children in that concept may have succeeded in creating such a creature in actual fact.

*This text is from the book of “Conflict and chaos in Eastern Europe ” and the pages42-144. In order to segregate the Greek Macedonian cultural identity from the Slav one, I add for understating purposes the words “Slav and Yugoslav” with blue font  in the front of the English  adjective “Macedonia (n)” at the text. Also in the book you can find the original notes and bibliography that used in the specific text.