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Professor Dr. Olga Mladenova Conferred Doctor Honoris Causa by Sofia University

Prof. Olga Mladenova, PhD

The Aula Magna of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” held the solemn ceremony of the conferment of the Doctor honoris causa degree on Professor Dr. Olga Mladenova, lecturer at the University of Calgary, Canada. The proposal for the conferment of the honorary title of the oldest and most highly reputable high academic institution in this country came from the Faculty of Slavic Philology at Sofia University and it is given for the overall scientific contribution of Professor Olga Mladenova to the domain of Slavic studies and to mark her anniversary.

The ceremony was opened by Professor Dr, Panayot Karagyozov, Dean of the Faculty of Slavic Philology, who started with the facts that the Doctor honoris causa degree is the highest distinction that our Alma mater confers and it was in 1902 that such a degree was conferred for the first time on Exarch Yosif I. The first Doctor honoris causa in the philological domain was the national poet Ivan Vazov who received the distinction in 1920. Professor Karagyozov added that Professor Olga Mladenova was joining that honorary club and was the 359th Doctor honoris causa of Sofia University.

“Professor Olga Mladenova is a scholar of world caliber both for her scientific achievements and her movement in the world,” remarked the Dean. Professor Dr. Olga Mladenova graduated Bucharest University in classics. She defended her Ph. D, thesis at the Institute of Bulgarian Language at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, where she worked as a research worker and senior scientist. Later, she joined the staff of the Institute of Russian Language at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1994 she has been a lecturer at the University of Calgary and since 2014 has held the Chair of the Department of Linguistics, Languages and Cultures.

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She has specialized in the domains of Slavic and Balkan languages and cultures, textlinguistics, historical linguistics, ethnolinguistics, semantics, pragmatics and ethnology. In 2013 she won the Best Scholar Award of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Calgary. In 2010 she won the Humboldt scholarship of Humboldt University, Berlin, and in 1992-1993 a scholarship at Berlin Free University. She has also been awarded many research grants in Canada. Professor Mladenova was a visiting scholar at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1986 and at the University of Vienna in 1983-1984.

Professor Dr. Olga Mladenova has launched and supervised many projects focusing on the study of the Bulgarian language, its history and contacts with other languages. In those projects she included both Bulgarian scholars, and undergraduates and Ph. D. students from the Faculty of Slavic Philology and from the Faculty of Classical and Contemporary Philology of Sofia University.

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She is a member of the editorial board of Linguistique balkanique (eight issues for the period 2003-2007), Balkanistica (vol. 23, 2010), Selected Works of Maxim S. Mladenov (1930-1992): Dialectology, Balkan Studies, Ethnolinguistics. Sofia. Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” Press, 2008.

Professor Dr. Olga Mladenova ranks amongst the Bulgarian scholars abroad who have dedicated all their scientific activities to the study of the Bulgarian language and have published works of high academic standard. She is a member of the North American Association for the Study of South Eastern Europe and has been a chairperson of the latter for the past six years. She is also a member of three commissions of the International Committee of Slavists and the Executive Committee of Canadian Association of Slavists.

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After the Doctor honoris causa conferment ceremony had been performed by Professor Dr. Ivan Ilchev, Rector of Sofia University, Professor Dr. Olga Mladenova thanked for the bestowed high honour.

The topic of her academic lecture was “A retrospective view from the XXIst to the XVIIth century through the wilderness of Bulgarian damaskini”.

In her lecture she spoke about her predilection for Bulgarian manuscripts dating from the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries and commonly known under the name of damaskini. “It all started about Christmastime, in 2000, with the casual observation that I myself, a native speaker of Bulgarian, could identify the system of the use of the articles, presented in the publication of the Bulgarian Tihonrav damaskin by Evgenia I. Dyomina, as being very similar to my own, and yet there were some differences. I came across cases whereby I would use the noun phrase with an article whereas in the text of the damaskin the article was missing.”

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Professor Mladenova talked about her growing interest to come to grips with the problem of what exactly was taking place to bring about the change in the use of the article in Bulgarian over the four centuries that had passed since the creation of the text of the damaskin. She told the audience how she had come up with the idea of the history of the category of definiteness in Bulgarian, the focus of her book. The latter concept models the systems of the use of the article in the XVIIth and in the XXth – XXIst centuries within the framework of a wider grammatical category of “definiteness” and also traces the processes whereby the earlier system has been transformed into the later one. Then, she sketched out the hypothetical starting point of the category of “definiteness”. The book was published in English in 2007.

Professor Mladenova outlined her own scientific way of development by working on the sermons in the damaskini. She pointed out that what most attracted her first was their content, and it was only later that she started looking for answers to questions of a different type (philological, and cultural and historical): who was the creator of those texts, what were his criteria in the choice of a topic, what ancient texts were the source of his inspiration, what exactly was his creative approach to the task and what were his aims; who was meant to read those sermons and on what kind of occasions; who copied them, how did the copyist view his task and why did he decide to put so much effort into it? “I had ever so many questions, and hardly any answers. For as you know, the copyists of the damaskini did not sign their works, neither did they keep diaries, nor wrote autobiographies; their contemporaries did not leave any memoirs about them,” Professor Mladenova added.

While sharing her experience of her research on the texts of the damaskini Professor Mladenova dwelt on the different damaskin centres going to the latest one at the end of the XVIIth and the beginning of the XVIIIth century.

She introduced the audience to her research work on the texts of the damaskini. “Textlinguistics and paleography, two new scientific disciplines for me, came into my life. It was time to start collecting whole manuscripts. The process has been going on.”

Professor Mladenova specifically pointed out that it is not correct to look for the so-called cultural “lagging behind” of the Bulgarians, when, not in a fair way although quite understandably so, we start comparing the Bulgarian development using the highest West European cultural yardsticks. She drew the attention of the audience to the fact of what would happen if, as of tomorrow, we started measuring our cultural achievements in comparison with those of the ancient Chinese civilization. “Then, the lagging behind factor will no longer be a problem of centuries, but of millennia,” said Professor Mladenova and then posed the rhetorical question: was it not high time that we had accepted the change of the cultural coordinates as a fact, a fact specific not only to Bulgarian history, and then turn patiently to solving the problems of our everyday life of today, without looking for excuses and illusionary explanations of them in our fatal and insurmountable lagging behind from Western Europe and lay the blame for that on our forbears?

In her lecture Professor Mladenova mentioned the important role played by the Bulgarian damaskini as languistic monuments and the objectives of the research and analysis of those texts. “Are all these efforts worth it? I am fully convinced that they are. Is it not true that the standard language we use today and the language of modern Bulgarian literature, the latter widely different from that of the damaskini, comes originally from the efforts of our humble forbears from the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries who in their dynamic everyday life of work and toil never thought of leaving their own names for us?”

At the end of her academic lecture Professor Olga Mladenova extended an invitation to the youngest generation of intellectuals to join the comprehensive line in the research of old Bulgarian literature which still keeps many of its hidden secrets under lock and key.