site.bta165th Аnniversary of Birth of Alexander Teodorov-Balan, Scholar of Bulgarian Literary Language

Alexander Teodorov-Balan was born on October 27, 1859 in the village of Kubei, Bessarabia (today's Ukraine). He graduated the Bolhrad high school and in 1878 he came to Sofia. 

Alexander Teodorov-Balan worked in the field of the modern Bulgarian language, Bulgarian grammar, phonetics, dialectology, the construction of the Bulgarian literary language, the structure of Bulgarian spelling, language culture, the euphony of speech, dialectology, the dictionary purity of the Bulgarian language. He is the author of about 900 articles, reports, studies and books.

Alexander Teodorov-Balan was the first theoretician of the Bulgarian literary language, Bulgarian phonetics and grammar. He wrote the first Bulgarian scientific phonetics in 1930 and а scientific grammar in 1940. Alexander Teodorov-Balan actively participated in the debate on spelling issues and advocated for the facilitation of spelling and its approach to living literary pronunciation. 

Alexander Teodorov-Balan was also the founder of Bulgarian bibliography.

He has been an honoured figure of science since 1949. In 1954, for his 95th anniversary, he was awarded the Order of Georgi Dimitrov.

Alexander Teodorov-Balan died on February 12, 1959 at the age of 99.

On his 95th birthday, celebrated at Sofia University, Teodorov-Balan said: "I studied to know and be able; I studied, and I'm still learning, to teach others who don't know or don't know yet. I studied not to be a scholar, but to be a teacher; and being a teacher, I spread light not from above, but through listeners and readers."

"A beautiful language in itself is degraded in beauty by bad speaking or pronunciation, and also by a bad voice... We can extract from the Bulgarian language many means to beautify our personal speech and that which we want pass on for posterity. Let's listen to its beauty among the people where it exists," he said.