Рўhe Transliteration Act of official rules of writing Bulgarian names with the Latin alphabet became effective Sunday. It provides for fines for spelling Bulgarian words "wrongly", i.e. not in accordance with the transliteration rules, the brainchild of Bulgaria's State Administration Minister, Nikolay Vasilev.

Dear Sweet Lord, Virgin Mary, and all saints from all Christian denominations! This whole episode of the activity of the Bulgarian government and of this very Minister in particular is so ridiculously outrageous that I am actually at a loss where to start from here...

To be clear, it is a good idea to figure out a uniform way to spell Bulgarian names in Latin. But this has to be done in a way that: 1) makes sense; 2) respects the specifics of the Bulgarian language and does not threaten to harm it in any way.

The fact of the matter is that the brainchild of the so called Minister Vasilev and of the Institute for Bulgarian Language is not only flawed but is also dangerous for the Bulgarian language.

Its idea is to provide transliteration for Bulgarian based on the anglicized version of the Latin alphabet, i.e. on the English-language alphabet. It is weird then, for example, why the Bulgarian letter "Р¶" is not transliterated with "j" but with "zh". How many English speakers make sense of "zh"?

But such issues are minor compared to what the glorious transliteration system does to the most important and most typical Bulgarian letter/sound "СЉ". This is the first vowel at the beginning of the name "Bulgaria". Minister Vasilev's transliteration system simply pretends this sound does not exist!

A few things need to be pointed out here. First, English is pretty much the only Western language that pronounces Bulgaria's name really close to what it is in Bulgarian - the letter "u" here corresponds 100% to the "СЉ" sound. With Minister Vasilev's lame transliteration system, however, Queen Elizabeth II and President Barack Obama might as well have to start writing "BAlgaria".

But then, the transliteration act, however, stipulates that Minister Vasilev's "rules do not apply to the writing of the country's name as Bulgaria due to the long-running tradition" (?!!!)... Go figure...

Old Bulgarian had 18 vowels! Today's Bulgarian has six. Minister Vasilev's reform is a steady step towards depriving the Bulgarian language of its last typically Bulgarian vowel. Why?

Well, thanks to the wide use of the Latin alphabet in online chats and SMS Text messages thousands of Bulgarian youngsters are already starting to spell words wrongly when writing in Cyrillic as well - more and more often they write "a" instead of "СЉ". With no letter attributed to "СЊ" in the transliterated version of Bulgarian, I can see it just dying off...

The last time we lost vowels was in 1946 when the Soviet-sponsored communists figured they should mess up the language just like they did with the economy and everything else. They removed two vowels including so called "Yat" ("СЈ") which was a transition vowel between the Eastern and the Western Bulgarian dialects...

As a result, Bulgarian became more like Russian, the Eastern dialects started to dominate over the Western dialects, which could not be expressed properly in writing any more... and partly because of that 60 years later we have something called "Macedonian language"... So it is not like these things don't matter especially for a small nation whose language and culture can easily be wiped out by the forces of globalization...

Another example is handy: even such an undeniably Western nation like Germany has to transliterate some of its unique letters into the anglicized Latin. However, it doesn't do it by ignoring them but by crafting reasonable ways to express them. For example, Müller is transliterated as Mueller, not as Muller, as they would have had to do if they used Minister Vasilev's reasoning.

Even the former US Ambassador to Bulgaria and current US Ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle, a man of great integrity, fluent in both Russian and Bulgarian, declared that the Bulgarian "СЊ" should not be transliterated as "a". But apparently Minister Vasilev, who seems to be descended from both Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror, and the dust-covered out-of-touch-with-reality antiquated professors at the Institute for Bulgarian Language know better...

So, dear Minister, why should we spell Veliko "TArnovo" in English when the first syllable is pronounced just like the English verb "turn"? Or what about "KArdzhali", whose first syllable is the same as in "Kurdistan"? Sure no one says "Kardistan" in English...

On top of all that, Minister Vasilev also figured he is going to impose fines on those who don't stick to his system!!!... Well, this is just the tip of the iceberg... Sure, they are not going to sanction the illiterate and incompetent TV anchors, politicians, and other public figures, who make blatant mistakes in their mother tongue all the time... but for this glorious result of Minister Vasilev's titanic thinking efforts they are...

The fact of matter is that the whole "uniform transliteration rules" hype was generated by the glorious Bulgarian "Ministry of State Administration and Administrative Reform" in order to justify their spending of millions of Bulgarian and EU taxpayers' euros, and their very existence... This sure happens quite often in Bulgaria. But most of the time it doesn't deal severe blows to the Bulgarian language and culture...

But this is no wonder as Bulgaria seems to be the land of the most trans-ILLiterate Minister...

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