SOURCE: Cooper, Henry R., Jr. “Kopitar and the Beginning of Bulgarian Studies.” Papers in Slavic Philology 2 (1982): 55-64.

In the following essay, Cooper argues that Kopitar was foremost among early nineteenth-century Slavic philologists in acknowledging the uniqueness of Bulgarian language and culture.

If we define Bulgarian studies not only as the scientific investigation of the Bulgarian people (that is, their literature, language, ethnographic culture, and history), but also as the introduction of things Bulgarian to the international scholarly community, so that bulgarica might be integrated into the larger disciplines of Slavic linguistics, European history, comparative literature and so on, then Jernej Kopitar played a vital, if not indeed crucial role in the foundation of Bulgarian studies. More than Josef Dobrovský, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Konstantin Kalajdovič, Jurij Ivanovič Venelin or the Bulgarian revivalists of later years, Kopitar deserves the credit for initiating and promoting the scholarly examination of the...