Second Bulgarian State

Yugo, can you please post the rest? I am not sure why everything they said means that Choniates refers to Bulgarians as "Vlachs".

sorry for the jokes but I couldn't hold myself listening to Carpathian Wolf and his almost religious conviction that Vlachs equals Latin speakers / Romanians by definition and throughout history. I wish things were that simple and we had Greek speaking Greeks, Bulgarian speaking Bulgarians and Latin speaking Romanians/ Vlachs. Everyone likes definitions :) but when it comes to the Balkans and the mess of the late middle ages in particular all definitions fail because we are not talking about the 5th century ...in the 12c  the names Roman, Bulgarian, and Vlachian represent peoples speaking completely different languages and there is really nothing left from their original meaning. Greek speaking Romans, Slavic speaking Bulgarians and Bulgarian speaking Vlachs and thats only the surface because if we take into consideration that some of these names are used as exonims and self identification by different ethnic groups the mess becomes total. One has to be extremely careful when trying to interpret the medieval sources because the precise meaning of the words Roman Bulgarian and Vlachian depends on who is using them, when, and in what context. All attempts for generalizations to be made regarding the identity of the language and the ethnic group involved are simply doomed. Why? Because Bulgarians call Greeks people who self identify themselves as Romans, the Romans call Vlachs people who self identify themselves as Bulgarians and the Bulgarians call Vlachs people who self identify themselves as Romani. On top of all that we have the fact that none of these groups is geographically or linguistically isolated, with a very high degree of bilinguism and shared vocabulary. The case with Bulgarians and Valchs is particularly clear. May be Carpathian wolf will have no problem to distinguish the citizens of Bukurest and Sofia today, after decades of purging the languages from the undesired Turkish/Slavic/Latin admixtures, but he is deeply mistaken to think that the same thing applies to medieval Bulgarians and Vlachs. How can someone confuse them? Hahaha Well seriously, I can't imagine how a Greek or Frankish knight without any modern linguistical education could tell the difference between the speech of one Bulgarian Tzar and Vlachian Voevode. Just look at their titles. Who is slavic and who is the latin speaker? :) People whose vocabulary is at least 50% identical and even curse in the same language (remember the letters of 14-15c Vlachian rulers ..written in colloqial Bulgarian rather than Church Slavonic). Well may be a modern linguist would be able to say easily who speaks Bulgarian language with Latin admixtures or Latin based language with Bulgarian admixtures but trust me... for all foreigners and non-native speakers 12c Bulgarians and Vlachs were absolutely the same thing :) ...so it would be very stupid to think that the mess about Bulgarians/Vlachs in all contemporary Latin and Greek chronicles is some kind of mistake. It is no mistake. Thats the reality of the 12c.