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Foreword by the Guest Editors

Предговор от гост-редакторите

  • Summary/Abstract

    The publications in the e-Scripta section are selected, reviewed and revised papers delivered at El’Manuscript 2021 (Freiburg/online) in April, 2021 (www. elmanuscript2021.uni-freiburg.de). El’Manuscript is a series of biennial international conferences entitled “Textual Heritage and Information Technologies” that brings together linguists, specialists in historical source criticism, IT specialists, and others involved in publishing and studying our textual heritage. It is the official conference of the Special Commission on the Computer-Supported Processing of Mediæval Slavonic Manuscripts and Early Printed Books to the International Committee of Slavists. In the 2021 iteration, it coincided with the meeting of the Humboldt research group linkage program DigiPalSlav (Slavic Department at Freiburg University and Institute for the Russian Language, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) devoted to developing and applying digital tools for pre-modern Orthodox Slavic such as neural taggers and Handwritten Text Recognition models. These issues are also reflected in the thematic focus of the 2021 iteration of El’Manuscript and, consequently, in the topics of the papers submitted and accepted for publication. We would like to thank our external reviewers for their thorough work and for meeting our tight deadlines. Furthermore, we thank Elena Renje for her valuable support. Many thanks are due to the Humboldt Foundation for financing the publication of this volume. Finally, we are grateful to the editor of Scripta & e-Scripta, Anissava Miltenova, for her tireless work and support.


From Annotation to Modeling: Computational Horizons for Medieval Slavic Studies.

От анотиране към моделиране: компютърни хоризонти за славистичната медиевистика

  • Summary/Abstract

    This paper is a write-up of a keynote from El’Manuscript 2021, reflecting on the ways in which the field of computationally-supported medieval Slavic studies has and has not changed since the mid-2000’s. Looking towards developments in the broader fields of digital humanities and natural-language processing, it explores the ways that recent improvements in the tools at our disposal for mass digitization of manuscripts and text analysis at scale open up possibilities for working with manuscripts that have received very little attention. For these advancements to be feasible, however, scholars will need to prepare and share their digitized texts and annotations in ways that are not currently the norm, though a number of projects provide exemplary models of how these new conventions could be put into practice.


Interdisciplinary Analyses of the Codex Marianus, Vienna Part (Cod. Vind. slav. 146).

Интердисциплинарни анализи на Мариинското евангелие, виенската част (Cod. Vind. slav. 146)

  • Summary/Abstract

    The article contains some results of analyses of the Vienna part of the Codex Marianus (ÖNB, Vind. slav. 146), undertaken by an interdisciplinary group of scholars and scientists from the Centre of Image and Material Analysis in Cultural Heritage (CIMA ‒ www.cima@or.at) within two Austrian Science Fund-projects devoted to the ancient Glagolitic heritage. The investigation consisted of four parts, codicological, multispectral, chemical and philological. While the codicological survey served to get as much information as possible about the writing material (source of parchment, methods of preparation, writing process, deletions, condition), color and multispectral recordings had been made to preserve the manuscript at its best and to provide an apt basis for further investigations. The chemical analysis was executed with two portable spectroscopes (XRF and rFTIR) and aimed to get exact information on the parchment, the inks, paints and binders, and to collect data for a comparative study of parchment degradation. The philologists analysed the fragment comparatively with all other Old Church Slavonic-Glagolitic manuscripts preserved to get as much information as possible about their scribes.


Towards Fundamental Principles for Creating Electronic Corpus of Serbian Medieval Charters and Letters Scripta & e-Scripta vol. 21, 2021 floyd Sat, 11/20/2021 - 08:15
За основните принципи за създаване на електронен корпус от сръбски средновековни грамоти и послания

The paper defines the elementary principles for creating an electronic corpus of Serbian medieval charters and letters. The commitment to the principle of maximum representativeness of the corpus of medieval charters and letters, determined entirely by the preserved written legacy (based on manuscripts, microfilms or photographs), excludes the indispensability of applying the principle of balance, while simultaneously satisfying the principle of reliability, since charters and letters known solely by the edition are not included in the corpus. The selection of texts is done according to the diplomatic criterion by excluding the transcripts and copies of documents already available in the original, as well as later transcripts, chronologically and linguistically distant from the assumed original. This approach to the selection of texts is justified by the size of the corpus, as well as by the exceptional cultural and historical significance of medieval charters and letters. The definition of the metadata about corpus texts is determined by their general diplomatic properties, as well as the corpus search needs for diatopic, diachronic and genre variations. Conversion of texts into electronic form strives for fidelity to the original, encompassing the preservation of abbreviations, superscript letters and original punctuation, as well as the absence of accent marks and contemporary rules of capitalization.

Subject: Digital humanities Keywords: Historical Corpus Linguistics Old Serbian language Serbian Church Slavonic Serbian Medieval Charters and Letters 12th–16th century
On Sentence Segmentation in Diachronic Texts Scripta & e-Scripta vol. 21, 2021 floyd Sat, 11/20/2021 - 08:11
Върху сегментирането на изреченията в диахронните текстове

The article discusses a proposal of a minimal set of criteria for sentence segmentation (an obligatory stage in the corpus processing and annotation, especially with respect to the syntactic annotation) of medieval texts. In the context of a review of different definitions of a sentence (unit) and approaches to sentence segmentation, various criteria are discussed: structural, thematic, graphic, on the basis of sample sentences in order to define the minimal criteria. The discussion of the different factors is illustrated by sample sentences from two texts from 14th and 17th c. The proposed criteria aim at considering mainly structural characteristics while trying to avoid textual and semantic interpretation though these can also present challenges because the interpretation of the (syntactic) structure is inevitably related to the interpretation of the (semantic) content.

Subject: Digital humanities Keywords: corpus annotation sentence sentence segmentation

Content structuring in St Petersburg Corpus of Hagiographic Texts (SCAT)

Структуриране на съдържанието на Санкт-Петербургския корпус от агиографски текстове (СКАТ)

  • Summary/Abstract

    The St Petersburg Corpus of Hagiographic Texts (SCAT) has launched two new mark-up formats. The first innovation is the comprehensive format developed for the division of hagiographic texts into parts, which are both explicitly marked as section headings and extrapolated through comparison with texts of the similar genre. The second innovation is an elaborate format representing the full range of various types of biblical, patristic and liturgical quotations occurring in the lives of saints. For the time being, three morphologically annotated manuscript texts have been marked up according to these guidelines, and we are planning to add two more texts in the near future. Close cooperation with the IHRIM research laboratory (Lyon) and wide use of their techniques and technology makes it possible to obtain some illuminating cross- format statistical data and thus offer new insights into the canons and rules of the Old Russian hagiography.


Neural Morphological Tagging for Slavic: Strengths and Weaknesses

Морфологично тагиране на стари славянски текстове с помощта на тагер, използващ невронни мрежи: предимства и недостатъци

  • Summary/Abstract

    The neural network tagger CLStM has been applied to the Old Russian Žitie Evfimija Velikogo (GIM, Chud. 20), a copy of the second half of the 14th century. The strengths of this tagger consist in its ability to automatically annotate an orthographically non-normalized text with dozens of pages within a few minutes, yielding a high accuracy with respect to part of speech and morphological features. Moreover, the tagger is capable of disambiguating case syncretism to a large extent, even in split constructions. Manual correction of the automatic tagging will result in a correctly tagged text considerably faster than when using a rule-based tagger or tagging completely manually. The weaknesses of the CLStM-tagger comprise certain examples of incorrect POS-tagging, sometimes incomplete or incorrect attribution of morphological categories to some parts of speech. Superscript letters and punctuation can pose special problems, normalization of punctuation will achieve better tagging results. The proportion of correct tags is higher when the token has been seen during the training process; unknown words (OOV) show a higher error rate. In the paper, we analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the tagger by providing specific examples. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to use automatically tagged, uncorrected data for quantitative analysis.


Integration of the Old East Slavic Epigraphical Databases, Corpora and Indices

Интегриране на бази данни, корпуси и индекси на стара източнославянска епиграфика

  • Summary/Abstract

    The paper presents results, including work in progress, related to two databases of “non-bookish” / vernacular Old East Slavic writing, viz. the databases of birchbark letters and epigraphy. The aim of the project is the interlinking of visual, archeological/ historical and linguistic information. The epigraphical database represents different interpretations of a single inscription, providing the outline of versions proposed in the existing literature. These sources, an archeographical database and a linguistic corpus making part of a larger Russian National corpus, are intended to be easily synchronized, expanded, and updated. An online work station for the morphological annotation of texts is a part of this project. An important function performed by this platform is creating an index to the corpus that can be used in the linguistic description of the dialect, verifying the index and the data of the book Old Novgorod Dialect. Addenda by Andrei Zaliznjak that is being prepared for a posthumous publication. New linguistic discoveries have been made during the implementation of the project.


Eliminating variation of linguistic units of the Slavonic historical corpus to facilitate search, demonstration and statistical analysis Scripta & e-Scripta vol. 21, 2021 floyd Sat, 11/20/2021 - 07:34
Елиминиране на вариативността на лингвистичните единици в славянския исторически корпус с цел улесняване на търсенето, визуализирането и статистическия анализ

The work demonstrates the methods and techniques of elimination of variation of linguistic units in the transcriptions of the medieval Slavonic manuscripts of the historical corpus “Manuscript” (manuscripts.ru). The textual corpus, the material of which is presented by the machine-readable copies which resemble the original most closely, provides the user with such tools of transformation (modification) of linguistic units which enable the creation of queries and getting of retrievals corresponding to the task to be solved. In case of an inexact search the user has the possiblity to delete titlos and diacritics, reduction of the versions of letters to their basic form, indication of the mask of the linguistic units being searched in the form of a regular expression, use of the letters of the contemporary Cyrillic alphabet. To ensure operations over lemmas by means of the statistic modules of the corpus, it is necessary to automatically assign a given textual form to exactly one lemma. Due to grammatical homonymy, incorrect lemmatization would result in a situation where quantitative data based on word forms and data based on lemmas do not match each other. In order to assign word forms to the correct lemma, we apply a rule-based approach, taking into account the formal and quantitative characteristics of the linguistic units (such as their morphological variation or invariation, their frequency in the sub-corpus, the matching or mismatching with the lemma form, the frequency of relationships between the textual forms and dictionary paradigms of variable words, the results of manual elimination of the homonymy). The reduction of textual forms to unified, normalized, transliterated or initial forms is a necessary procedure for extracting of data from the historical corpus for the distributive-statistical analysis of the semantics of linguistic units.

Subject: Digital humanities Keywords: historical corpus search and demonstration of data LINGUISTIC STATISTICS

The annotation of verbal aspect in diachrony: parameters, algorithms and problems

Анотиране на глаголния вид в диахрония: параметри, алго- ритми и проблеми

  • Summary/Abstract

    Digital annotation of verbal aspect in Old Russian and Church Slavonic texts is a challenging and quite complicated task that requires a complex approach. While studying Slavic aspect systems synchronically, we always know whether the verb is perfective, imperfective or biaspectual, however, this is often not the case for the research of aspect in a diachronic perspective. The determination of the aspectual status of a particular verb for earlier stages is possible only after considering together different parameters such as: actionality, lexical semantic, morphology, functional distribution, syntactic restrictions, collocations, statistics etc. All essential parameters should be annotated sufficiently for an effective use of a corpora. That would enable a researcher to collect quickly the information necessary to build aspectual profile of a verb. It is also important to understand the hierarchy of the parameters, as they might have different degrees of importance, and for this purpose a special algorithm should be developed. The preliminary results, related to the parameters of annotation and the algorithm for aspect determination (using ‘Morphy’, the System for digital morphological annotation of Old Russian and Church Slavonic manuscripts, developed in Vinogradov Russian Language Institute RAS), are discussed in the paper.


Administrative documents of the Don Cossack Host in the 18th – 19th centuries: the issue of the creation of a linguistic corpus

Административните документи на Донската казашка армия от XVIII–XIX век: проблемът за изграждане на лингвистичен корпус

  • Summary/Abstract

    The article presents basic principles of designing the diachronic linguistic corpus of documents of the Don Cossack Host offices from the State Archive of the Volgograd region, Russia, including collecting documents for the text corpus, arranging the technical base of automatic processing and text editing, scheduling automated tagging, morphological annotation, and corpus software tools. The authors explain some technical aspects of corpus processing and text corpus constituency. It is considered reasonable to add any document to the corpus, the draft texts with the crossed-out fragments included, as it ensures accurate registration of grammar and vocabulary of the language at a certain historical period. A set of language marker types is worked over for automated meta-tagging. The corpus software tools are defined to enable accurate annotation of obsolete fonts so that they can be processed in a pair with regular language units and expressions in morphological and genre meta-tagging; in cases of partial text adaptation, the authentic old graphic symbols may have to be preserved.


Collocations with a component -ьн(o) in Russian Chronicles: the quantitative-statistical analysis (based on the corpus of Russian Chronicles of the IAS “Manuscript”)

Колации с компонентьн(o) в руските летописи: количествено-статистически анализ (върху подкорпуса на руските летописи в ИАС «Манускрипт»

  • Summary/Abstract

    The article is dedicated to the quantitative and statistical research of linguistic units in the ancient Russian chronicles. The relevant samples were obtained by using the n-gram module of the information-analytical system (IAS) «Manuscript», which allows identifying textual combinations with various numbers of components. The module makes it possible to carry out a statistical analysis of linguistic units using measures of association. It is the aim of this work to prove that the remainder of an indivisible noun that has preserved semantic and grammatical unity is present in the chronicles. This gives insight into the formation of the part of speech system of the Old Russian language. The tools of the IAS “Manuscript” allowed the conclusion that the analyzed suffixal forms in -о perform predominantly a predicative function in the syntagmas. Within the framework of this research, collocations with a component in -ьн(о) were identified that are not lexically stable (not idiomatic) but grammatically stable, that is, they represent colligations. On the whole, this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of statistical measures in extracting collocations from Old Russian texts in order to perform a complex analysis.


Texts of corpus of Russian dialects of Udmurtia as a source of linguistic and culturological information

Текстовете от корпуса на руските диалекти от Удмуртия като източник на лингвистична и културологична информация

  • Summary/Abstract

    The corpus of Russian dialects of Udmurtia, created on the platform of the linguistic and geographical information system (LGIS) “Dialect” (URL: http://dialect. manuscripts.ru/), contains recordings of oral speech of residents of 166 localities of the Udmurt Republic in the 1970s–1990s. The texts are presented mainly in the form of scanned copies of the pages of notebooks, in which transcription of the conversations of the collectors with the informants is given. There are 9300 scanned copies of pages, all records are certified. The existing markup provides the creation of token samples and visualization of contexts at the user’s request (http://dialect.manuscripts.ru/Lexical/ FindQuestPage), which allows us to analyze the features of the lexical composition, as well as some phonetic and grammatical features of the Russian dialects of Udmurtia. Dialect words from texts of the corpus can be mapped in lexical, word building and semantic maps of Russian dialects of Udmurtia. At present, the texts of the corpus are available in the public domain http://manuscripts. ru/dialect-test/notebooks. Recordings of dialect speech can serve as a source of non- linguistic information, namely about historical events and personalities, material and spiritual culture, customs and traditions of the local population, national composition and interethnic relations in Udmurtia of the 20th century. In the paper examples of texts of the corpus in Russian transcription with all lexical, phonetic and grammatical features of dialects, information about speakers, time and places of recordings are given.


A Bilingual Digital Edition of La Belle et la Bête and its Russian Translation by Kh. Demidova

Двуезичното дигитално издание на La Belle et la Bête и неговият руски превод от Х. Демидова

  • Summary/Abstract
    This paper presents a digital edition of the manuscript of the first Russian translation of Leprince de Beaumont’s The Beauty and the Beast fairy tale (1756), aligned to its French original. The translation was made in 1758 by a twelve year-old girl, Khionia Demidova (1746-1792), and dedicated to her elder brother. Its original manuscript is conserved at the scientific library of Saratov State University (no. 456). This document is interesting from several points of view: the “naive” translation made by a young girl allows us to understand how the French literature was perceived in the 18th century Russia, what aspects of the French language and socio-cultural phenomena of the Western Europe were difficult to understand, and how the socio-cultural phenomena of the Western Europe were perceived. The peculiarities of Khionia’s spelling and punctuation provide data on her knowledge of Russian grammar and orthography. The digital edition includes a multi-layer transcription of the source document aligned with a digital fac-simile and the original French text. It is published online on the TXM-IHRIM web portal (https://txm-ihrim.huma-num.fr). The workflow of the edition Microsoft Word, Oxgarage and TXM may be reused for similar editions and text corpora.

Scribe vs. authorship clustering in historic manuscripts with LiViTo: A case study with visual & linguistic features

Групиране по преписвачи и авторство на ръкописи с историческо съдържание с помощта на LiViTo: казус с анализ на визуалните и лингвистичните особености

  • Summary/Abstract

    In cases where there is a larger collection of manuscripts, the scribe or author of which is unknown or in doubt, analyzing such manuscripts can take a lot of time and effort. The more pages and potential writers are involved, the more complicated it is to get tangible results. LiViTo is a free tool2 that requires a minimum of experience with the command line and allows a simplified search for keywords, revisions, and clustering of historical manuscripts. We present the application of LiViTo on the “lab case” of the biographies of Czech Protestant refugees from the 18th–19th century. Most of these manuscripts include stories of farmers’ and craftsmen’s families who fled to Berlin because of their religious beliefs. The examination of this type of biographies and manuscripts using the methods of Digital Humanities takes place for the first time for Czech. Using extracts from the research project in which LiViTo was developed, individual functions of the tool are explained. In addition, individual findings relating to the manuscripts and the potential further development of the tool are presented.


Deep Mining of the Collection of Old Prints ‘Kirchenslavica digital’

Цифровизиране с извличане на семантични данни на сбирката от старопечатни книги Kirchenslavica digital

  • Summary/Abstract
    The article deals with various efforts of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB) to make its collection of about 250 Church-Slavic prints from the 17th to the 19th century accessible in terms of content using the methods of modern information technology from the Digital Humanities sector. The focus is on full-text indexing of the heterogeneous Church Slavonic prints using HTR+ language models from the programme Transkribus. Depending on whether they are Moscow, Kiev or Old Believer prints, these models require different approaches and corresponding adaptations that take into account the printing area and printing period. Prints such as Kirillova kniga (1644) or Gistorija Ioanna Damaskina (1637) and many others are processed at large scale, whereby the developed character recognition models are constantly refined by training new verified data. The full texts generated in this way are permanently stored in various XML formats (ALTO, PAGE) on the one hand in a central repository for subsequent use, and on the other hand they are merged with original digital copies in the IIIF-compatible Digital Library of the SBB. As a further element, the Church Slavonic full texts will be indexed using special SOLR analyzers for efficient searches (Tokinising, Translit, N-Grams) and made searchable in subject portals (including the Slavistik-Portal) using modern text-image web design.

Using Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) Tools to Transcribe Historical Multilingual Lexica

Използване на приложения за разпознаване на ръкописни текстове (HTR) при транскрибиране на многоезични исторически лексикони

  • Summary/Abstract
    The paper discusses some results obtained as part of an ongoing project at the Slavic Institute of Heidelberg University to produce automatic transcriptions of an early 18th century trilingual printed dictionary (Fedor Polikarpov’s Leksikon trejazyčnyj) and, on a preliminary basis, of a 17th century trilingual manuscript (Epifanij Slavineckii’s working copy of his Greek–Slavic–Latin dictionary) using the handwritten text recognition (HTR) platforms Transkribus and eScriptorium. It is argued that there are considerable advantages to employing such tools in terms of the simplification and acceleration of work on multilingual edition projects. Moreover, a comparison of our experience working with Transkribus and eScriptorium is given, along with an overview of the practical benefits and challenges of working with each of these platforms.

Using Handwritten Text Recognition on bilingual Evenki-Russian manuscripts of Konstantin Rychkov

Използване на инструменти за разпознаване на ръкописни текстове (HTR) върху двуезични евенкско-руски ръкописи от колекцията на Константин Ричков

  • Summary/Abstract

    We report on applying Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to manuscripts from the archive of Konstantin Rychkov preserved at IOM RAS, St. Petersburg, within the INEL project. Folklore texts in Evenki (Tungusic) were collected in Western Siberia in 1910s. We used services provided by the Transkribus platform. The necessary step of Layout Analysis proved to be time-consuming due to the organization of the parallel Evenki- Russian text on the page without following a strict separation line. HTR models have been trained successively on different amounts of data up to 521 pages. The best Character Error Rate attained on validation data for the largest dataset is 4.50% for models trained on all characters. The distribution of errors is non-uniform: most errors are due to just a few problematic issues, especially diacritics such as the accent marking stress. It is written high above the line and frequently cut off from the line images at the preprocessing stage. After excluding the stress mark from training data and recognition, the lowest CER dropped to 2.90%. We compared two recognition engines, HTR+ and PyLaia. The HTR+ model trained without stress marks made less errors in letters, while PyLaia performed better with respect to diacritics.


The origin of the literal translation of Athanasius of Alexandria’s “Orationes contra Arianos” in the manuscript of Gavrilo Stefanović Venclović’s ‘Razglagolnik istinogo života’

Оригиналът на литертурния превод на Orationes contra Arianos от Атанасий Александрийски според ръкописа на Razglagolnik istinogo života’ на Гаврило Стефанович Венцлович

  • Summary/Abstract

    The author compares the marginal glosses in the book of Epifanij Slavinetskij’s Sbornik perevodov, 1665, with the text of Athanasius’ Third Oration against the Arians in Gavrilo Venclović’s Razglagolnik, 1734. The marginal glosses in Epifanij’s Russian Version are taken from a South Slavonic manuscript that has a common origin with the protograph of Venclović. The Orationes contra Arianos in Razglagolnik are written in South Slavonic koine and their source has the features of an Athonite translation related to the Council of Ferrara-Florence and the disputes over the filioque.


The Christological Cycle in the Naos of the Prophet Elijah Church (1550) in Sofia: Non-Traditional Elements and Athonite Influences

Христологичният цикъл в наоса на църквата „Св. пророк Илия“ (1550 г.) в София: нетрадиционни елементи и светогорски влияния

  • Summary/Abstract

    The paper is a continuation of the article “The Last Judgment Scene in the Prophet Elijah Church (1550) in Sofia: Untraditional Elements and Athonite Influences” (Rousseva 2020) and analysed the frescoes in the naos of the church. There is a problem with the overall iconographic programme in the naos: the obligatory scenes illustrating the Annunciation, the Transfiguration and Pentecost are absent, but there are illustrations in separate scenes of secondary and rarely encountered episodes. The scenes in the naos provide a wide field for interpretation, as it is ‘mediate’ between the art of Macedonia of the 14th–15th century and the art of the Cretan school of the 1530s and the 1540s. Beyond the large monasteries of Mount Athos, the island in the Lake of Ioannina and the Meteora, the murals in the Iliyantsi are among the first where the “new” scenes and images are interpreted, and in some respects, the first monument, e. g the kneeling Virgin in the scene of the Nativity, the Flagellation, The Apostles at the Grave has been included. For the first time in a Bulgarian church are illustrated the Sundays of the Pentecostarion. Of the works published so far, the scene Christ expels seven demons from Mary Magdalene is the earliest example in Balkan art. There are visible similarities of the scenes in the naos with the later examples, the work of the atelier of St Pimen. His teacher, Tomas, could possibly have worked at the church in Iliyantsi.


Bilingual dictionaries on Hippolytus’ De Christo et Antichristo – problems, approaches and solutions Scripta & e-Scripta vol. 21, 2021 floyd Fri, 11/19/2021 - 14:55
Двуезични речници на De Christo et Antichristo от Иполит Римски – проблеми, подходи и решения

The text transmission of the Slavonic translation of Hippolytus’ De Christo et Antichristo presents a stable and well-testified tradition. It gives a base for possible reconstruction of the Greek original from which this translation was made. The article demonstrates some omissions, additions, and reconstructions on the Greek text compared to the Slavonic one. Also, the paper addresses significant problems that occur in the scholars’ work on bilingual dictionaries discussing possible approaches and solutions. Still, some questions remain, and it is not easy to suggest a definite answer to them. The author underlines the importance of the fragmentary copy of the Greek text, presented in the manuscript of Meteora 573, bearing in mind its significant correspondence to the Slavonic tradition. Unfortunately, this manuscript preserves only trifling fragments of the whole work by Hippolytus of Rome.

Subject: Philology Linguistics palaeoslavic studies Keywords: HIPPOLYTUS OF ROME text-critical editions SLAVONIC TRANSLATION GREEK TRADITION dictionaries Greek-Slavonic Slavonic-Greek

Meta-Terms of the Euthalian Apparatus in Old Church Slavonic Acts and Epistles Manuscripts from the 12th– 16th centuries

Maria Novak. Перевод метатерминологии аппарата Евфалия в древнеславянских списках Апостола XII–XVI веков

  • Summary/Abstract

    The article focuses on Old Slavonic versions of Euthalian chapter-lists to Acts and Epistles considering meta-communicative terms, such as παραίνεσις or προοίμιον. The author aims to evaluate the level of accuracy of Slavonic translations and their exegetical potential, which makes the content of the main text of Acts and Epistles clear. The analysis reveals two tendencies prevailing in Slavonic sources from the 12th–16th centuries: first, there are phenomena of lexical variability, as results of applying various translation strategies, more or less successful in terms of the accuracy and clarity of the resulting text (calques, periphrastic constructions, and text expansion). Second, there is a tendency towards unification, suggesting a universal Slavonic term for several Greek correlates. Authoritative dictionaries, including academic ones, do not record some lexemes. There is no dependence of the chapter-lists lexicon on the main text vocabulary.


On the Interpretation of the Liturgy from the South Slavic Manuscripts RGADA 88 and Bogišić 52

За Тълкувание на литургията в южнославянските ръкописи РГАДА 88 и Богишич 52

  • Summary/Abstract
    The focus of this report is the still-unexplored Interpretation of Orthodox liturgy, attested in two copies: first in manuscript No. 88 from the collection of Obolensky (201), State Archive of Russian Federation (Moscow), the second in manuscript No 52 of 1567, from the Archive of Baltazar Bogisić in Cavtat. The two manuscripts contain proven original works of Constantine of Kostenets (1380–1431). The author analyzes the structure and content of the interpretation and comments on it as a source for the history of Liturgy – from the point of view of the data concerning the liturgical features described in it. It can be concluded that the basis of texts in MS No 88 and MS Bogishić 52 is a late composition of Byzantine mystagogy, which, in turn, means that the time of implementation of the South Slavic translation should be dated no earlier than the end of the 12th century. This is one of the many short epitomes created during the Second Bulgarian Kingdom as a result of the secondary reduction of the original extensive commentary. A detailed investigation and the text-critical edition will be forthcoming.

Healing Practices Performed by St. Gregory of Agrigentum in his Vita by Leontius

Лечебните практики, прилагани от св. Григорий Акрагантийски в неговото житие от Леонтий

  • Summary/Abstract

    Christian hagiographic literature chooses as its heroes’ people whose feeble flesh is in stark contrast to the greatness of the spirit. The saint is endowed with supernatural knowledge, works miracles, foretells, protects and heals people. The author discusses the healing practices in the Slavic translation of the Vita of St. Gregory of Agrigentum, as presented in a 15th-century copy of a Reading Menaion composed according to the Jerusalem typikon (Tărnovo type orthography, Moldavian provenance, kept in the Dragomirna monastery (Drag 706/1795), Romania). St. Gregory of Agrigentum is a senior clergyman and the goal of his healing skills is to show God’s grace and the power of Christian teaching from one side and the authority of his position as bishop from the other.


On the Copies of the Russian Chronograph in Bulgaria

За преписите на Руския хронограф в България

  • Summary/Abstract

    The only copy of the Russian Chronograph kept in Bulgaria – NBKM 774 – is of Russian origin and has a special composition. The text bears the date 1627, but the miscellany is composed later, end of 17th – the beginning of 18th c. The only marginal note indicates that in 1787 MS was kept in Vidin. There is information, although rather scarce, that there might have been another copy of the Chronograph in possession of Dimitǎr Jocov from Vratsa which had been lost and with assumed characteristics indicating that it had been a copy of NBKM 774. The assumed characteristics of the two copies may be interpreted as evidence of the existence of a weak tradition related to this manuscript in the Bulgarian historical literature as opposed to the Serbian one.


Cynthia Vakareliyska аt 70

Синтия Вакарелийска на 70 години

  • Summary/Abstract

    Cynthia Vakareliyska is a remarkable scholar who has significantly contributed to the fields of mediaeval Slavonic studies and the history of the Slavic languages. She was born in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. In 1973 she became BA in Russian magna cum laude at Princeton University and in 1976 received the degree of J.D. from the School of Law at Columbia University. For five years (1985–1990) she was a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where in 1990 she obtained a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures. In 1986 she was awarded the Certificate of Distinction in Teaching by the Danforth Institute at Harvard University. Later she worked as Assistant Professor in Russian at Georgetown University (1990–1994) and Assistant Professor in Slavic Linguistics (1994–1997) at the University of Oregon, Eugene, where she became Associate Professor in Slavic Linguistics (1997–1998), Associate Professor of Linguistics (1998–2008) and from 2008 to 2018 she was Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at that university, and since 2018 Professor Emerita. She read courses on Old Church Slavonic, historical phonology of the Slavic languages, computer collation of mediaeval Slavic Menologies, the structure of Lithuanian and Russian, neuro- and gender linguistics.


Catherine Mary MacRobert at 70

Катрин Мери МакРобърт на 70 години

  • Summary/Abstract

    Catherine Mary MacRobert, M.A., D.Phil., formerly University Lecturer in Russian Philology and Comparative Slavonic Philology at the University of Oxford, is presently Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, and Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College. Her main research interests have been in the history of mediaeval Slavonic translations from Greek and comparative grammar. A great deal of her work is devoted to the textual tradition of the mediaeval Slavonic Psalter. It would be not an exaggeration to say that nowadays she must be esteemed as one of the best experts on the subject.


Johannes Reinhart at 70

Йоханес Райнхарт на 70 години

  • Summary/Abstract

    Professor Johannes Reinhart is one of the most outstanding figures in palaeo­ slavistics, the author of more than 100 articles and studies, a man who discovered hitherto unknown Slavonic texts, an untiring researcher into the Slavonic manuscript heritage and a noted etymologist. He was born on March 2, 1951, in Vienna, where he graduated, defended his doctoral thesis and lectured. With his erudition and precision Professor Reinhart, a disciple of the remarkable scholar František Mareš, is a typical representative of the famous Viennese school of Slavonic studies, the foundations of which were laid by the great Vatroslav Jagić.

    Keywords: Johannes Reinhart

Anatolij Turilov at 70

Анатолий Турилов на 70 години

  • Summary/Abstract

    The Russian historian, manuscript specialist and Slavonic mediaevalist Anatoly Turilov has earned a classic reputation in the field of research into mediaeval Slavonic manuscripts and Slavonic literatures. Born in Yaroslavl’ in 1951, Turilov graduated from the Faculty of History of Moscow State University, specialising in the study of primary sources (1973). He was a doctoral student at the Institute of Slavonic and Balkan Studies (1973–1976). Turilov worked as a senior librarian at the Manuscript Department of the Lenin Library (now the Russian State Library) in Moscow (1977–1979). In 1980 he successfully defended his dissertation on the topic of „Болгарские и сербские источники по средневековой истории Балкан в русской книжности конца ХІV– первой четверти ХVІ вв.“ This continued to be a leading topic throughout his academic career. Turilov worked as a research associate and a senior research associate at the Archaeographic Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, today the Russian Academy of Sciences. Turilov currently holds the position of research associate at the Institute of Slavonic Studies.

    Keywords: Anatolij Turilov

In memoriam Francis J. Thomson (1935–2021)

In memoriam Франсис Дж. Томсън (1935–2021)

  • Summary/Abstract

    Professor Francis J. Thomson, one of the most remarkable scholars in the field of the Byzantine and Slavonic cultures, passed away on 21 May 2021. A medievalist with an outstanding erudition and intellectual rigor, he shaped the studies of medieval Slavonic written cultures in the last six decades.

    Keywords: Francis J. Thomson

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