The Comma Before «и» in a School Announcement
A school's deputy head drafts a notice for the staff room board and the school website: «Утре, в 8:00 часа, учениците от 11-и клас, които участват в олимпиадата, и техните ръководители, се събират във фоайето, а останалите класове, започват часовете по обичайното разписание.» A Bulgarian teacher says there is at least one punctuation error and possibly a second, and that one of the commas is optional rather than wrong. The deputy head insists that commas before «и» are always wrong in Bulgarian and wants to delete every one. There are 240 students and 14 teachers affected, and the notice must be printed in 40 minutes.
1. Identify the punctuation problems in the sentence and state which comma before «и» is required, which is optional, and which is wrong. Justify each decision by the syntactic structure, not by a memorised rule about «и».
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The sentence contains two coordinated predicates sharing one subject group, so we must first decide where the subject ends.
Required comma before «и»: «...учениците от 11-и клас, които участват в олимпиадата, и техните ръководители...». Here the relative clause «които участват в олимпиадата» sits inside the subject, and the subject is compound: «учениците ... и техните ръководители». The closing comma of the relative clause falls immediately before «и», so it is obligatory - it closes the subordinate clause, it does not separate coordinated parts. Deleting it would merge the clause with the second conjunct and change the meaning (it would suggest the leaders also participate in the olympiad).
Wrong comma: «...останалите класове, започват часовете...». Subject «останалите класове» and predicate «започват» are not separated by a comma in Bulgarian. This is a plain subject–predicate boundary; the comma must go.
Optional/contextual comma: «Утре, в 8:00 часа, ...» - the comma after «Утре» is not an error; an adverbial of time at the head of the sentence may be set off, especially when a second adverbial («в 8:00 часа») follows. Keeping it is stylistically defensible; removing it is also correct. The teacher's «optional» verdict fits this one, not the others.
The deputy head's blanket rule is false: commas before «и» occur whenever «и» is preceded by a closing comma of an inserted structure (relative clause, apposition, parenthesis), and also in some enumerative and contrastive patterns.
2. Rewrite the notice so it is fully correct and unambiguous, and explain in 2–3 sentences why your version avoids the ambiguity you identified.
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Corrected version: «Утре в 8:00 часа учениците от 11-и клас, които участват в олимпиадата, и техните ръководители се събират във фоайето, а останалите класове започват часовете по обичайното разписание.»
Why this works: the relative clause is now clearly bracketed by its two commas, so the reader parses «учениците ... и техните ръководители» as one compound subject and does not attach «ръководителите» to the olympiad participants. Removing the comma after «Утре» and after «класове» eliminates the two non-syntactic commas that invited the deputy head to think all commas before «и» were suspect. The sentence still keeps the one obligatory comma - the clause-closing one before «и» - which is exactly the comma the deputy head wanted to delete.