Comparative Linguistics

This article provides a description of the Tromsø Old Russian and OCS Treebank (TOROT), which, along with its parent treebank, the PROIEL corpus (built by members of the project Pragmatic Resources in Old Indo-European Languages), is the only existing treebank of Old Church Slavonic, Old East Slavic and Middle Russian texts. The TOROT is a part of a larger family of treebanks of ancient languages which all use the PROIEL open-source annotion web tool and annotation schemes. In this article we present principles and selected problems at several levels of analysis in the TOROT, and then briefly discuss ways that corpus linguists and edition philologists can fruitfully collaborate and complement each other.

We describe the creation of the Velikie Minei Čet’i (VMČ) Corpus supplementing the latest volume of the printed edition of the Macarian Great Menaion Reader. Instead of an independently compiled historical corpus, the VMČ corpus is entirely based on the paper edition, thus following the principle of multiple use (‘recycling’) of textual data and the work invested in edition projects. We briefly describe the procedure of extraction from the edition text, dwell on the search interface designed to facilitate sophisticated yet intuitive queries, and give examples of issues that can be much more easily researched with this resource than with the paper edition. We conclude that such a supplementary corpus is both feasible and useful and hope that in the future, more editions will be accompanied by an electronic version.

The author of the article describes the features of diachronic corpuses, created on the base of medieval Slavic codices. Their specificity in terms of compliance and transcription of the original objects is presented and the ratio of the markup standards and characteristics of Old Church Slavonic texts, specialized forms for searching and for displaying samples as well. The formation of a new applied section in medieval studies: corpus palaeoslavitic with computer tools is argumented and defined.

The present article provides a critical edition of some of the scholia interpolated in the 14th-century South Slavonic translation of Basil of Caesarea’s Homiliae in Hexaemeron (CPG 2835), viz. six fragments from Gregory of Nyssa’s Apologia in Hexaemeron. These fragments correspond to marginalia in a number of Greek text witnesses from the 10th and 11th centuries. The Slavonic evidence is analysed in the light of the Greek manuscript tradition, viz. on the basis of the Apologia edition of H. R. Drobner (2009) and a collation of the Greek manuscripts Codex Florentinus Laurentianus gr. IV.27 (A3) and Codex Oxoniensis Bodleianus Baroccianus gr. 228 (E6).

This paper examines correspondences between unusual saints’ commemorations in the 9th-century Latin Neapolitan Wall Calendar and medieval Slavic calendars of saints, focusing on the menology to the Bulgarian Apostolus No. 882, the Zograph Trephologion (Draganov Menaion) and Palauzov Menaion, and the menology to the Ohrid Apostol. The analysis is based on data from Archimandrite Sergij’s collation of Slavic and Greek calendars of saints, and from the author’s electronic menology collation, for which Professor David J. Birnbaum developed the digital blueprint.

In this paper the text of the questions in the Longer Rules (Ὅροι κατὰ πλάτος, Regulae fusius tractatae, PG 31, 901–1052) and the text Shorter Rules (Ὅρoι κατ᾿ ἐπιτομήν, Regulae brevius tractatae, PG 31, 1052–1305, CPG II 2875 Asceticon magnum sive quaestiones) of St. Basil in their medieval Slavonic version are presented according to Zografou 3, a manuscript, dating from the 14th century. Some observations are made about the text of the questions on the basis of comparison on orthographical and lexical level between Zografou 3 and three other manuscripts: British Library Additional MS 27442, National Library in Sofia 1045 (Slepčenskij sbornik) and Zografou 126, dating from the same period. The quotations from the Scripture in the text of the questions are an object of special interest. The results of the comparative analysis give a good reason to suppose that Zografou 3 preserves the oldest text in comparison to the other three witnesses.

The present article provides an analysis of transmission of apocryphal Story about the Handsome Joseph and a critical edition of the text (unpublished MS No. 1161 CHAI–Sofia) with readings from Tikveš copy (MS 677 NBKM Sofia) and Prague copy (No. ІХ.H.16 National Museum, Prague). The “dialogue” between a separate text (article) and its environment in miscellany manuscripts is presented, which is very important for the method of compilation and re-editing. The alterations in the separate text correspond with alterations in the macrostructure of the miscellany. The coexistence and interweaving of texts is indicated as an important process, particularly for the chronology of

The article draws attention to two lesser known lines written in Glagolitic which are part of the Epilogue to Pamvo Berynda’s Triod Cvetnaja, printed in Kiev in 1631. Thanks to their typographic realisation, these two lines seem to have been mainly considered „an ornament“ or a „cryptographic“ element of the text in older literature. The article presents the Glagolitic text in standard Unicode encoding, so it becomes electronically searchable as such, along with a transliteration and a translation. It turns out that the Glagolitic text is nearly identical to the self-descriptions famout printer Pamvo Berynda had used before (although in Cyrillic). Another question put forth in the paper is the provenience of the actual printing types used in Kiev in 1631. A comparision shows that the letters look similar – but not identical – to printing type used around the same time Italy (Rome, Venice) or by Primož Trubar in the century before. The typographic quality of the Kievan types is, however, inferior.

This paper offers a critical edition of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Crysostom according to manuscript D. Gr. 143 from the collection of the Ivan Dujčev Centre for Slavo-Byzantine Studies. The leitourgikon (from the Kosinitsa Monastery near Drama) was copied by Konstantinos Hazoropoulos in 1368, which makes the Chrysostom formulary a reliable source of a liturgical rite from the initial period of the establishment of Philotheos Kokkinos’ Διάταξις της Θείας λειτουργίας. The fragment contains archaic elements that were due possibly to an influence from peripheral eucharistic practices.

This paper is part of a more extensive study on the medieval Georgian writer and translator Ephrem Mtsire who continued the traditions with his works that gradually acquired clearly Hellenophile character, thus beginning the formation of Hellenophilism as a trend in Georgian literature. Hellenophilism is not considered in this paper only in its narrower linguo-literary aspect which meant attaining the formal equivalence to the original. Hellenophilism is regarded here in its wider sense of special interest of non-Greek scholars towards the thinking processes of Byzantine culture of different periods. The study of both aspects reveals the positive influence of Hellenophilism on Georgian literature. Hellenophilism as cultural orientation begins with Ephrem Mtsire‘s literary activities.

Two manuscripts discussed in this paper – the Homilies of Gregory the Theologian GIM Syn. gr. 63 (Vlad. 144) and the Four Gospels ÖNB Theol. gr. 240 – were examined for a special study, the results of which were published in 2009 and 2013. They both are unique examples of tenth-century Byzantine book illustration, remarkable for their unusual ornamental style. The study revealed the decoration, datable to the 940s, as a work of one and the same artist, conditionally referred to as the ‘Master of the Arabesque Style’. His ornamental style is unique in the history of the Byzantine manuscript book, only existing for a short period and evidently corresponding to the activity of this one illuminator. The manuscript Berlin, Phillipps 1538, which contains a Treatise on Horse Medicine, has appeared in many publications. However, its artistic decoration has not yet received the elucidation it merits. After a new research using colour reproductions it transpired that many of the Berlin codex folios were actually decorated by the same artist as the Vienna and Synodal manuscripts. The assumption that one artist devised the three manuscripts under scrutiny brings to the conclusion that the Vienna Gospels should be classed among manuscripts from the Imperial scriptorium and dated to the period from 945 to 959. With regard to the development of minuscule script, the scribe responsible for the Hippiatrika obviously was regarded as a distinguished calligrapher, whose earliest activities should be sought in the first quarter of the century. The archaic characteristics found in the codex are in accordance with the illumination. Therefore the Berlin manuscript should be used as a reference for the attribution of manuscripts from the second half of the tenth century.