[Verginius Rufus]

The Bulgarian name comes from the Bulgars who ruled the area in the Middle Ages but were apparently a tiny minority ruling over unrelated people--the Bulgarian language is Slavic (closely related to Serbian) but probably the Slavs absorbed remnants of earlier populations in the area (Thracians, Romans, etc.).

Bulgarian, Macedonian, Albanian, and Romanian all share the feature of having the definite article as a suffix at the end of a noun--Bulgarian and Macedonian are very similar but Albanian and Romanian are only distantly related languages, so the common feature (not found in Greek or Serbian) is probably inherited from an earlier population in the region...which would suggest that when the Slavs invaded they didn't kill off all the earlier inhabitants but intermarried with them.

[rmlew]

Albanian is a Balkan language like that of ancient Thrace. It is a distinct language group like Romance, German or Baltic languages. Romanian is a Romance language, derived from Latin. It is the language of the Romanized Thracians and Dacians, as well as of the Roman soldiers who were settled there after the conquest of Dacia. Romanians has a lot of Slavic loan words and probably some Balkan loan words. All the Balkan languages form a sprachbund. (I did not wiki Romanian. I know Romanians and studied Latin with one.)