Eastern Slavic Languages

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.

This paper analyzes two translation choices in the earliest Slavonic version (translation from Greek – from the Septuagint – into Old Bulgarian literary language/ Old Church Slavonic) of the Song of Songs that might have been influenced from the Vulgate as supposed by A. A. Alekseev. This paper suggests two other explanations of these choices: influence of the Christian exegesis and specifics of the language of the translation.

The Vita of St Ivan Vladimir, the first Serbian saint, is contained in the so- called Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea, also known as Gesta Regum Sclavorum. The aim of this paper is to examine one of the more interesting aspects of the Vita: the image of the Bulgarians, Serbs and Byzantines during the troubled times of the Byzantine-Bulgarian war of 976–1018. The picture that emerges from the Life of St Ivan Vladimir holds many surprises for the modern reader and is contradictory to our own perceptions of the two protagonists of the era, Samuel and Basil II.

This article offers textological observations on the Parable of the Unicorn, which is an integral part of the medieval Story of Barlaam and Josaphat. For the purpose, manuscripts that contain the entire work are examined, as well as manuscripts which are part of anthologies of compound content. The aim is to verify the correlation between the complete and the singular traditions of the novel’s dissemination, as well as their relations with the Byzantine text.

The Service of St Alexander Nevsky was written by Monk Michael of the Roždestvenskij monastyr’ (Nativity monastery) in Vladimir. He was one of the writers, belonging with the circle of Metropolitan Macarius, who composed princely services (and sometimes vitas) for new Russian saints. Most of the services are compilations of verses and hymns and more or less exact borrowings (and sometimes compositions according to models). In the Service of St Alexander Nevsky, the most refined of Monk Michael’s works, the hymnographer utilized various models to combine them into one canon, thus giving it the colour of an original work. It is important to add that Monk Michael used Slavic translations instead of original Greek texts, a fact proved by textological comparison. The service, dedicated to a saint prince, canonized in the sixteenth century, was the only one included in the Menaion. Together with the especial respect and veneration of the new saint, it was one of the reasons why his service became a model of other princely services. It is worth noting that instead of hymns, originally borrowed for the new service, exactly the adapted hymns to St Alexander were taken as standard for princely services, thus allowing a double reception of the translated hymns. For the purpose of the investigation the author analyzes the services of St Roman of Ugleč, St Daniel of Moscow, the Service of Finding of his Relics including, as well as the service to St Dowmant of Pskov.

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.

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.