SEMANTICALLY ORGANIZED BULGARIAN-CHINESE DICTIONARY OF ZHAN SONGFEN (SOFIA, 1969) – A RESEARCH BASE FOR LINGUISTIC STUDIES

han Songfen (张荪芬女士) was a co-founder of the teachings of Modern Chinese and the founder of the teachings of wenyan in Sofia University. In 1969 she published a semantically organized Bulgarian-Chinese Dictionary 、保汉分类词典。This dictionary can serve as a very useful base for linguistic studies. Some words for domestic birds are examined in the paper as an example of a possible analysis. As is known, natural objects are presented through linguistic taxonomies differently in different languages. With the designation of poultry, the Bulgarian language offers separate names for birds of the same species, specialized by sex and age. This is also a characteristic of the linguistic taxonomy of domestic animals and of animals in general as well. For example, in the Chinese language, there is a general term 鸡 jī which has the meaning `hen` as a biological species. There are no gender difference in this concept (i.e., the narrower term 'cock' is included here), nor age differences (i.e., the narrower term 'chicken' is included here). However, if a more specialized term is needed, it is expressed via composition妈鸡 mā jī - `hen`, literally `mother hen`; 公鸡 gōng jī 'cock', literally `male hen`; .小鸡 xiǎo jī `chicken`, literally `little hen`. The formations with the main word-designation of the duck鸭yā and of the goose 鹅é as a biological species are parallel. These differences in the presentation of biological taxonomies in the language distinguish Chinese from Indo-European languages and not only from them.