La structure du consonantisme français et bulgare

Proceeding from А. Meillet’s idea of the tripartition of the phoneme systems in the Indo-European languages and from N. S. Trubetskoy’s theory of the three-dimensionality of phoneme units, further developed by A. Martinet, A. Reformatskij and the author of the present paper, a projection is formed which shows and reflects, on a contrastive basis, the inner structure of the relatively simplified French consonantism and of the relatively complete and symmetrical Bulgarian consonantism. The model of the two consonant systems is relevant to the explanation of a number of phenomena.It can interpret and predict all types of consonant changes in the two languages in terms of position and system. Besides, it proves the presence of modality in the French consonants and the absence of palatalism, a common feature of all consonant phonemes in Bulgarian.