Kazan — summer 2014

Russian and Bulgarian are both Slavic languages, but they have gone down very different paths. They both descended from Common Slavic, which had complicated verbs and complicated nouns/adjectives. Russian simplified the verbs but kept the complicated nouns/adjectives, and Bulgarian kept the complicated verbs, and simplified the nouns/adjectives.

Russian never developed a definite article ("the"), whereas Bulgarian did. Let's contrast a few sentences.

Curious, eh? There are some atypical northern Russian dialects that also developed a similar definite article. I've always been curious about the why of that.