The Lexeme сажèн in the History of the Bulgarian Language

This study traces the origin and distribution of the lexeme сажен from the Old Bulgarian period to the present day. Although modern dictionaries classify this lexeme as a borrowing from Russian, it was already attested in Old Bulgarian in a phonetic form consistent with the language’s phonological rules. The lexeme appears in the Apostle and in a fifteenth-century apocryphal prayer. During the Bulgarian National Revival, the widespread circulation of printed liturgical books in Church Slavonic contributed to the gradual replacement of the native form by the Russian variant of this common Slavic word. However, dialectal variants preserve the original Old Bulgarian form, and therefore should not be classified as Russian loanwords in dictionary entries for сажен.