Electronic information storage and retrieval

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 paper proposes several approaches for extending the possibility to write Medieval Slavonic Cyrillic and Glagolitic letters in GNU/Linux environment. This is achived by extension of existing keyboard layout, inclusion of newly defined Glagolitic one and by adding more combinations of keys through the multi key (compose key) technique. The proposal is tested and works in openSUSE GNU/LINUX distributions versions 11.3 through 13.2, the rolling release version Tumbleweed with KDE4, Plasma 5 and GNOME desktop environments.

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.