Bulgarian language is the third written European language after Greek and Latin. It is a pre-Indo-European language that was formed at the time when Bulgarians (known by different names in the contemporary Greek and Latin literature: Thracians, Illirians, Getians, Dacians, Sclavini, Skythians, Bulgars) were formed as a people. According to Academician Nikolay Derzhavin, Bulgarians began to form as a people even before the formation of the Indo-Europeans (9800 years ago).[26] He reached these conclusions on the basis of paleolinguistic analysis. Recent genetic and genomic studies confirm his concepts.
Bulgarians are Bulgarians, not Turks, not Tatars, not Finns, not Huns, not Chuvash, not Slavs, and by their origin they belong to the most ancient pre-Indo-European peoples.
Until the 15th century, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs did not call themselves "Slavs". Until the Middle Ages, the Slavic language was defined as the language of the Bulgarians, not the language of Russians, Poles, Slovaks, Slovenes, etc. In 9 . and 10th century, the Bulgarians spread their writing among these peoples. From the Bulgarian books, these peoples adopted the Old Bulgarian language as their own. But after the conquest of Bulgaria by the Ottomans, these peoples did not want it to be known that they were writing and reading in the language of an enslaved people. That's why they renamed the Old Bulgarian language to Church Slavonic
. In the 9th and 10th centuries, when the Preslav and Ohrid book schools spread Bulgarian books throughout Europe, there were no Slavs then. There is no written document from the 7th to the 12th century that speaks of Slavs. Slavs began to be talked about in the 17th century by Peter I and especially Catherine the Great. She could not bear the thought that someone else had given writing to the Russians and embraced the idea of the Benedictine monk of Dalmatian/Croatian origin, Mavro Orbini, that all peoples with similar languages should be called "Slavs". These are practically all the communities that received reading and writing from the Bulgarian literary schools. Thus the Bulgarian merits for the enlightenment of this vast sea of neighboring peoples were displaced and replaced. But then there was no Bulgarian state and there was no way for the Bulgarians to protect the truth.[26]
