South Slavic Languages

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.

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 paper introduces a project on edition and linguistic annotation of Medieval and Early Modern South Slavic manuscript fragments. The main topic is implementation of various approaches on integration of electronic edtion, manuscript description and linguistic annotation. A corpus will include fragments from parchment manuscripts kept in Bulgarian repositories. We will illustrate the approach with several pieces of texts from various fragments. The representation will be supplied with textual, as well as part-of-speech and basic syntactic annotation. On the basis of it an attempt will be made at experimental anaphora and related morpho-syntactic annotation. The work will offer a discussion on the features that will be useful for such annotation. The project relies on eXist database (http://exist-db.org) and the initiatives: Repertorium (http://repertorium.obdurodon.org/), PROIEL (http://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/ research/ projects/proiel/) and TOROT (http://site.uit.no/slavhistcorp/files/2015/04/Eckhoff.pdf).

The paper discusses problems and points of view related to set up networking between Scripta Bulgarica project (http://www.scripta-bulgarica.eu/bg), Repertorium of Old Bulgarian literature and letters (http://repertorium.obdurodon.org/), and also other corpuses (e.g. Codex Suprasliensis from the 10th century: http://suprasliensis.obdurodon.org/, etc.) for further improvement of linking between data bases. The proposed networking will connect transcribed texts with terminology in palaeoslavistics, and other on-line resources, such as electronic editions of individual sites, electronic dictionaries, encyclopedias, bibliographic arrays and so on. The networking will decided a number of problems that can not yet solve in a satisfactory way. The results will be useful not only for the palaeoslavists but also for librarians, teachers, and students, representatives of mass media and the general public interested in Slavic literacy.

In the Presveta Bogoroditsa Perivlepta church in Ohrid the tombstone of St Kliment Ohridski is preserved. This large stone slab, with several inscriptions from the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, remained there, while the holy relics of St Kliment have been transferred back to its original place – the church, built by the saint himself (completely rebuilt in 2001–2002). Until recently not much attention has been given to the tombstone. The paper offers a new reading of the main inscription, illustrated by the first contemporary picture and a new drawing made out of it, thus correcting many mistakes in the earlier publications.

This article compares the letter frequencies of four old Bulgarian inscriptions: the Samuel inscription of 993, the Samuel inscription of Voden, the Bitola inscription of Ivan Vladislav and the Tărnovo inscription of Ivan Asen II. We establish the proximity of the letter frequencies of these inscriptions and thus obtain an argument in favor of the view that the Voden inscription is a product of the same scribal tradition and orthography, and of the same epoch, to which both Samuel’s of 993 and Bitola’s inscriptions belong. The impressive ‘frequency proximity’ of the Voden and Bitola inscriptions is used to offer the hypothesis that the Samuel Dynasty’s royal administration has had a consistent tradition of writing and orthography.

The paper discusses the translation of Ἄρειος πάγος into Slavonic, which until the late seventeenth century is almost invariably Аріевъ ледъ. It is suggested that although this does not correctly render the original meaning of the Greek, translators (and others, including their Greek contemporaries) did not necessarily perceive place names as literally meaningful. Аріевъ ледъ was thus simply the established Slavonic name for the Areopagus, and known as such to Slavonic writers. The principle place where it occurs is in the Acts of the Apostles, where it is used consistently, and there is a varied body of commentary in Slavonic attached to this passage, which is discussed in detail. The use of the toponym in a number of non-Biblical texts is also traced.

This article discusses the presumable composition of the Service for the Heavenly Bodiless Angelic Powers, which was included in the Old Bulgarian Menaion under the date of 8 November and has no Greek parallel. Taking into account the fact that there are two known kanons of probable Old Bulgarian origin, the author searches in various manuscripts for the rest of the chants that, according to the liturgical rules, might have been part of the service.

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 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).