Historical Linguistics

The present study offers a comparative evaluation of the performance of different AI-based digital tools for handwritten text recognition (HTR) on historical manuscripts and prints. The focus is on generic models capable of transcribing a range of texts in a similar script. The training dataset for these comprises Old Cyrillic ustav and poluustav manuscripts, on the one hand, and early Glagolitic printed books, on the other. We give an overview of the performance statistics for the HTR platforms Transkribus and eScriptorium as well as for the command-line tool Calamari. In each case, we additionally offer a close, qualitative analysis of select examples in order to convey a sense of the models’ real-world performance. In this way, our study supplies comparative data on the respective capabilities of these technologies that ought to be of interest to scholars working with them in digital humanities projects.

The article discusses theoretical and practical issues of creating tools for demonstrating medieval Slavonic text corpus at the “Manuscript” website (http:// manuscripts.ru/). The specific features of the historical corpus and its sources are: the limited number of manuscripts, variability of medieval graphics and orthography, complex structure, and composition of original documents. They require special instruments and techniques for data preparation (information about a text and its physical media, analytical tagging of fragments, variability, and other), and visualization of data sampling, including texts. The article focuses on the ways of solving two opposite tasks: the texts’ demonstration in a form as close as possible to the original and their simplified form, and, consequently, the possibilities of their transformation. The first task should be solved by preparing a transcription via a specialized editing tool, which interacts with the full-text database with a complete set of required characters, text formatting, and make-up to fit the original page. To solve the second problem, analytical tagging (chapters and verses, authors of texts, structure of manuscript, main text and marginalia, and so forth) and linguistic tagging (including lemmatization) are performed to make data search and data transformation available when displayed. The latter allows users to see a text in modern Cyrillic or Latin, syllables, meaning of analytical fragments, links between the main text and its marginalia, and so forth. The ability to data search based on deep tagging and the digital edition (LIM, MS 37, 13th c., 291 f.) which has been included in the “Manuscript” historical corpus (http://manuscripts.ru/mns/main?P_TEXT=94065041&p_lang=EN).

The earliest attestation of the Slavonic translation of the Scala Paradisi is not furnished by the excerpts in the Simeonov Sbornik, but by those in the Scaliger Patericon, which can reliably be dated before the removal of library resources from Pliska to Preslav, i.e. ‘after 887 but before 893’. It contains 59 excerpts (ca. 1210 words) from twelve chapters (1 through 30), which provide a convenient base to examine the relationship of versions a and b of the translation. Both versions have protographs written in Glagolitic, which discredits the claim that version b be a 14th century Athonite work. Both versions vary in 21%, but share 79% of the text, i.e. one of them served as an exemplar for the other. The proposal to consider a co–author of 21% is based on the following: a corrects deficiencies in b, but b not in a; recurrent variation shows patterning in a, not in b; a is ignorant of Cyrillo–Methodian monastic terminology. The most probable dating of a is to ‘before 887’ and of b correspondingly to ‘before a’.

No Horologion (“Book of the Hours”) has survived in the Old Church Slavonic corpus. Since early Russian sources, however, tend to retain South Slavic liturgical traditions, the authors attempt to reconstruct such a book for daily prayer on the basis of Russian manuscripts from the 13th–14th centuries. A key factor in the reconstruction are the so-called kata stichon hymns, an archaic genre of Byzantine hymnography used for night prayer. The authors analyze the text and meter of these hymns, including one hymn originally composed in Slavonic in imitation of the Byzantine genre, and argue that the later Russian sources reflect an Horologion translated in Bulgaria in the late 9th or early 10th century.

The current Bulgarian-Austrian project on the investigations of the manuscript Zograf No. 105 and its fragment No. 3070

The paper represents edition and introductionary words about the copy of the Proverbs of Solomon as found in the Slavic manuscript No 105 from the Zograf monastery of Mount Athos. The text is compared with the earliest Slavic copies of Prophetologia and the full text of this Old Testament book. The paper discusses the contents and structure of this copy. A conclusion is made that this is a draft copy of the Slavic text of Proverbs, com

The paper discusses a medieval South Slavonic text referring to the Book of Daniel in the framework of the Chronicle of Johannes Zonaras contained in manuscript No. 105 which is kept in Zograf Monastery. The author believes that this Slavonic version of the Chronicle was compiled by Konstantin Kostenečki. The author compares the version of the Book of Daniel in the Zograf manuscript with older Slavonic translations and versions of the Book of Daniel known to him to highlight the differences and the specific Constantine’s approach that is somewhat unique for this book from the Bible. This comparison makes it evident that Zograf 105 preserves a unique version of this biblical book which is not known to medieval Bulgarian and Greek written traditions. The juxtaposition is carried out on structural and lexical levels.

A 16th c. manuscript of truly remarkable content is kept at the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA) – No 88, Op. 1, Obolensky Collection (f. 201). It includes an excerpt of the Life of Stefan Lazarević by Konstantin Kostenečki and a Rodoslov (Genealogy) of the Serbian rulers designed as a Loza Nemanjića-type family tree scheme. The genealogical work replicates part of the facts from the hagiographic one, but complements the vita and enriches the information it provides. The excerpt from the Life of Stefan Lazarević is an account about the rulers of the Nemanjić dynasty, from Stefan Nemanja to Uroš V and from Vukan to Stefan Lazarević. The Genealogy does not overlap with any of the known Serbian chronicles. It has a larger chronological scope and deals with the so-called second branch, which is presented briefly in most related texts. While the hagiographical part talks about the descendants of Stefan Prvovenčani (the “First-Crowned”), the second part emphasizes the descendants of his brother Vukan. There are included those representatives of the dynasty who were rulers or wives of rulers. Considered as a whole, the two texts show a different conception of power and this distinguishes them from other Serbian Genealogies.

The publication brings into scholarly circulation the recently identified interpretation of the liturgy under the title Протль лургїи, и црк҃ви, и чи́н сщ҃енничьском, which is known in two manuscripts of Serbian origin, 16th century: RGADA 88 (84r – 87r) and in Bogisic 52 (122v21, 133r-v, 124r-v. Based on specific differences in the text, it has been established that the work is a summary translation of the treatise ‘Ἑρμηνεία περὶ τοῦ θείου ναοῦ’ by the Byzantine theologian Simeon of Thessalonica (1381/1387–1429). The Slavic translator did not leave his name. It is assumed that the prototype of the codices is a medieval Serbian manuscript from the first half of the 15th century, created in the circle of scribes under the patronage of the despot Stefan Lazarević and that Konstantin Kostenečki, also called the Philosopher, made the translation of the text. He was a Bulgarian intellectual in exile, who worked in the court of the mentioned despot. The main argument in favour of this assumption is that the interpretation of the liturgy in the two collections appears in the context of works confirmed in paleo-Slavic studies as coming from the pen of Constantine.

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 article discusses the currently available information on the extant copies of Filip Stanislavov’s Abagar, printed in Rome by the Propaganda Fide in 1651. Starting from Božidar Rajkov’s 1979 edition, which lists fifteen known copies and their presumed location, the article offers information on several copies that are not reported by Rajkov. These include copies in London, Paris, and Uppsala, the latter in the form of a scroll. In addition, the current location of most of the earlier known copies has been verified, and new information on a number of copies is presented: for example, the copy formerly located in Brussels is currently preserved at the Bibliothèque Diderot in Lyon, whereas the two German copies seem to have been lost.

The paper argues that the debate with John Grammaticus in the fifth chapter of the Vita Constantini was a historical event. It is placed in the narrative immediately before Constantine’s participation in the mission to the Saracens, which is identified with that which took place in 855/856: this requires the emendation of a single character in the Vita, giving Constantine’s age as 29, not 24. (This also means that he could have been appointed chartophylax, and deacon, at 25.) It is suggested that the debate took place at the very end of 855, when it would have been relevant to political circumstances.

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).

The aim of this article is to provide a basis for evaluation of the place of a new Greek witness in the manuscript tradition of a major source for the history of Byzantine Law – the Synopsis Basilicorum major. The author describes exhaustively the main texts and scholia in cod. Kiev, National Library of Ukraine, Φ. I № 137/2. His new comprehensive description supplements and corrects the one published in a recent catalogue by Ievhen Chernukhin.

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 publication opens for discussion an approach to macrostructural analysis of certain calendar miscellanies with selected readings which belong to the Medieval Balkan tradition. The author proposes that the selection of feasts and saints’ commemorations, as well as the order of the corresponding texts might be interpreted as determined by certain overall theme(s) / thematic fields and could be „read“ on the level of the book’s content. This approach was encouraged by the outcomes of a study on the calendar-thematic composition of Damaskenos Studites’s Thesauros and its transformations in Bulgarian literary tradition in the 16th-18th century. Aiming at a search for similar preceding models, the survey makes comparison on macro-compositional level between some panegyrica, such as Mihanović Homiliar and Jagić Zlatoust of the late 13th – early 14th century, the 1358/59 Miscellany of German, and the 16th-century Panegyricon No. 85 from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. In addition, the study explores the relevancy of a method for visualisation, which can be supportive of a thematic analysis.

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.

The goal of this paper is to examine the use of participles in the Eninski Apostol. The analysis is realized according to the use of the relative participles: 1) in the attributive function, 2) in the appositive function and 3) in the predicative function. Besides I turn my attention to the participles that are used in other functions. By the research the aim was not only to describe the functions of the participles, but also to show their possible substitution with different clauses. Besides I turn my attention to the phenomena which can be connected with the decline of declension endings of the short participles.

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.