Scripta & e-Scripta vol. 18, 2018

Pre-modern Orthodox Slavic texts pose certain difficulties when it comes to part-of-speech and full morphological tagging. Orthographic and morphological heterogeneity makes it hard to apply resources that rely on normalized data, which is why previous attempts to train part-of-speech (POS) taggers for pre-modern Slavic often apply normalization routines. In the current paper, we further explore the normalization path; at the same time, we use the statistical CRF-tagger MarMoT and a newly developed neural network tagger that cope better with variation than previously applied rule-based or statistical taggers. Furthermore, we conduct transfer experiments to apply Modern Russian resources to pre-modern data. Our experiments show that while transfer experiments could not improve tagging performance significantly, state-of-the-art taggers reach between 90% and more than 95% tagging accuracy and thus approach the tagging accuracy of modern standard languages with rich morphology. Remarkably, these results are achieved without the need for normalization, which makes our research of practical relevance to the Paleoslavistic community.

The paper introduces a project on edition and linguistic annotation of Medieval and Early Modern South Slavic manuscript fragments. The main topic is implementation of various approaches on integration of electronic edtion, manuscript description and linguistic annotation. A corpus will include fragments from parchment manuscripts kept in Bulgarian repositories. We will illustrate the approach with several pieces of texts from various fragments. The representation will be supplied with textual, as well as part-of-speech and basic syntactic annotation. On the basis of it an attempt will be made at experimental anaphora and related morpho-syntactic annotation. The work will offer a discussion on the features that will be useful for such annotation. The project relies on eXist database (http://exist-db.org) and the initiatives: Repertorium (http://repertorium.obdurodon.org/), PROIEL (http://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/ research/ projects/proiel/) and TOROT (http://site.uit.no/slavhistcorp/files/2015/04/Eckhoff.pdf).

The paper discusses problems and points of view related to set up networking between Scripta Bulgarica project (http://www.scripta-bulgarica.eu/bg), Repertorium of Old Bulgarian literature and letters (http://repertorium.obdurodon.org/), and also other corpuses (e.g. Codex Suprasliensis from the 10th century: http://suprasliensis.obdurodon.org/, etc.) for further improvement of linking between data bases. The proposed networking will connect transcribed texts with terminology in palaeoslavistics, and other on-line resources, such as electronic editions of individual sites, electronic dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographic arrays and so on. The networking will decided a number of problems that can not yet solve in a satisfactory way. The results will be useful not only for the palaeoslavists but also for librarians, teachers, and students, representatives of mass media and the general public interested in Slavic literacy.

The article discusses the Synopsis Apostolorum attributed to Dorotheus of Tyre, which purports to be a list of the Seventy Apostles. It gives a brief overview of the history of the text in Greek and Slavonic. In contrast to the Greek tradition, where it may be found in miscellanies of various types and also in manuscripts of the Apostolos which are provided with relatively extensive apparatus, in Slavonic it is found exclusively in Apostolos manuscripts. The redaction of the Synopsis, moreover, corresponds to the redaction of the Apostolos; there are discernible differences between the texts in each of the three Slavonic redactions in which it is represented. This indicates that it was translated as part of the accompanying text each time that the Apostolos itself was translated. This means that the Slavonic version (unlike the Greek) exists exclusively as paratext, but that this paratextual status, being dependent on the version, is not intrinsic to the work but a function of its history. This in turn points to the necessity of taking the paratext into account in any study of the text of the Bible.

When we study translations from classical or Byzantine Greek into Old Bulgarian, we usually encounter two aspects of the question how: firstly, the how of the linguistic rendering, the how of the translation techniques used for one term or another. The second aspect is that of evaluating the how: shall we praise or, on the contrary, express regrets in respect of the translator’s work. Besides these two inherent aspects of the question how, a third one has arisen in the last three decades in Bulgaria. We have a long tradition of translating Old Greek and Byzantine texts into Old Bulgarian, but with respect to the philosophical and theological terminology used nowadays, are we obliged to follow the patterns of the past, the forms of the language, suggested by this millennium long tradition? With respect to the formation of the Bulgarian philosophical and theological language, the Symeon’s Miscellany is an extremely important source because from f. 222 to f. 237 a range of issues is discussed as answers to questions 29 and 30. This section of the writing includes clarification of terms, categories and concepts from the classical Greek and/or the Christian philosophy and demands profound interdisciplinary research.

The article is devoted to the research of the Revelation of John the Theologian text editions. The main source of this aspect of text study is the peculiarity of the text structure: names, intsipits, explicites. The features of the three known scientific editions of the Apocalypse are determined and presented in the table. The methods of work on revealing these signs is described.

The article provides metadata on the descriptions of hymnographic terms exposed on the Scripta Bulgarica electronic portal (http://www.scripta-bulgarica.eu). The purpose of the analysis is to take the first step towards building a detailed digital ontology of all hymnographic terminology for the needs of specialized web products. All the hymnographic concepts included in the portal are arranged in a hierarchical system which comprises as well some of the most closely related concepts of other kinds (generally liturgical and literary). The selection of terms involves several of the basic musical and musicological hymnographic concepts too, but focuses on the verbal side of the chants. The proposed hierarchical model is based on two types of relationships: category/subcategory and whole/part, the second of which ranks the hymnographic terminology in five levels from the highest (Books) to the lowest (Genre components).

The article defines the concepts related to the naming of written monuments in the Slavonic-Russian manuscript tradition. The definitions of basic concepts: name, self, complex nominative, nominative unit. Identified the causes, the appearance of names in different parts of the same manuscript books associated with the execution name and the self of different functions: nominative, informative, hermeneutics, didactic, testoobraznaja, aesthetic. A comparison of the concepts of title and self-title on the example of handwritten books stored in the manuscript Department of the Russian state library, the Fund of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. It is revealed that the self-name is more extensive and informative than the name, but the name, in turn, differs in structural and semantic variability. Variability of names in the composition of nominative complexes is characterized.

The article deals with the review of prologue vitae (sinaxariа), which are short hagiographic (narrative) texts for saints and festivals, which are contained in two calendar liturgical books – Prologue and Menaia. They are founded in the composition of two types of hagiographic sinaxaria, in the Slavic literature called Simple and Verse Prologue. The first is distinguished by the verses (the two- or the three-verses), written before the sinaxaria vitae. A comparison is made between the prologue vitae from the Simple and the Verse Prologue of three popular Christian saints – George, Demetrius, Nicholas. To them are added the vitae from the Simple and the Verse Prologue for St Petka (Parasceve of Epibatae), St Ivan Rilski (John of Rila) and St Simeon and Sava (of Serbia) – emblematic South Slavic saints.

The article has two main focuses – first, it follows the most significant and important Antichrist myth researches, and secondly, the Greek tradition of De Christo et Antichristo by Hippolytus of Rome and the Slavonic versions of the text. The Slavonic witnesses are examined according to their omissions, additions, grammatical and morphological variations, and also some of the changes in the Bible quotations are highlighted. This work does not pretend to present new information on the Greek sources but to demonstrate how important the Slavonic translation is to the interpretation of the Greek original. The most interesting results are pointed out in the relation with the Greek text itself, where the proximity between the Greek fragment of Meteora Monastery 573 and the Slavonic tradition is presented.

The study of the Euchologia (singular: Euchologion), the prayer books to be used by the clergy, has long been neglected by medieval historians. This is beginning to change, as more and more scholars discover the potential of the Euchologia as a source for social history. Indeed, Euchologia contain besides Eucharistic and sacramental liturgies also prayers for various occasions of the daily life of women, men and children from various strata of society and every geographical region of the Byzantine world. Thus, the Euchologia offer a different perspective than most Byzantine written sources, which concentrate on urban, male, often ordained elites. In 2015 a new research project dedicated to the study of Euchologia was initiated at the Division of Byzantine Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The project seeks to study Greek-language Euchologia copied up to the year 1650 and the prayers they contain.

In memoriam: Elena Kotseva (1936–2018)

Ivan Iliev. The Commentary on the Book of Daniel by Hippolytus of Rome in the Old Church Slavonic Translation. Sofia: Institute of Literature, BAS, 2017, 425 pp., ISBN 978-954-509-580-1

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