Boris Parashkevov (1938-2021)

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Boris Parashkevov, born in 1938 in Sofia, is Professor for Historical Grammar and History of the German language. He studied German Language and Literature and from 1964 to 1967 was a Ph.D. student at the University of Leipzig. After completing his studies he became an Associate Professor at the St. Clement of Ohrid University of Sofia, where he taught until 2005. He was also a Lecturer in Bulgarian at Helsinki University (1974-1978) and Guest Professor at the University of Delaware (1989). At the beginning of the Eighties he received a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which awarded him the AvH-Prize in 1994. Boris Parashkevov has translated well-known authors, including Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Martin Luther, Hans Jakob Christoph von Grimmelshausen and Rudolf Steiner. In 2005 he published a free adaptation of the Middle High German original of the Nibelungenlied.

Prof. Parashkevov’s scientific achievements are not only in his main scientific field – history and historical grammar of the German language, but also in the field of diachronic research related to the development of the German language, the study of German and other borrowings in the Bulgarian language. etymology, dialectology, word formation, lexicology, lexicography, transcription of German and other foreign names in the Bulgarian language, etc.

Prof. Parashkevov is the author of over 200 publications, printed at home and abroad as independent publications or in representative magazines and collections. Prof. Parashkevov’s versatility and depth of linguistic knowledge are most evident in his monographic studies and in the encyclopedic dictionaries of which he is the author.

 Prof. Parashkevov has made an outstanding contribution to the study of etymological doublets in Bulgarian and German with his monograph “Etymological doublets in Bulgarian” (1987) and “Lexicon of etymological doublets in German” (2004). Other valuable works of Prof. Parashkevov are “German elements in the speech of the Banat Bulgarians” (2007) “Vocabulary in the dictionary of the Bulgarian language” (2011), “Folk etymologies” (2013), “Bulgarian transcription of German names” (2015). ), “German vocabulary in the Bulgarian language” (2021) and others.