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Unit 4 · Stress and spelling · Read
Stress and spelling
Understand why the course adds accents.
Pitch shows questions and feeling, not a new word
No tones, unwritten stress
Bulgarian has no lexical tones. Stress is normally unwritten and can move between related words.
ма́мавълна́
MA-ma · vǎl-NA: the accent marks the strong syllable
Teaching accents
This course adds acute accents to multisyllable teaching words, such as ма́ма and вълна́, wave, then fades them in everyday reading. The final check uses normal print.
ма́ма
mum
вълна́
wave
Bulgarian whole-word recordings are the model
Weak vowels keep their letters
Unstressed vowels can weaken, especially а and о: in вода́, water, the first vowel is unstressed, but the spelling keeps о. Whole-word Bulgarian recordings are the model; Russian audio is not a substitute.
вода́
water
ѝ
The grave accent belongs to the word
An accent that stays: ѝ
Ѝ/ѝ, meaning her or to her in context, carries a written grave accent that is part of the spelling. Unlike the teaching accents, it never fades.
Bulgarian whole-word recordings are the model
LernLaterne