Debuts

The poet Palladas of Alexandria is one of the most curious figures of Late Antique literature. In his ca. 160 epigrams preserved as a part of the Greek Anthology and dating from 4th c. AD, he assumes the poetic persona of a poor schoolmaster equally distanced from the crowds of Christian monks flooding the streets of his home city and from the teachings of his contemporary pagan philosophers. It seems probable that he might have been indeed a italicized by trade, since many of his poems abound in linguistic puns, word plays (successful or less so), and parodies of the great poets from the literary canon, especially Homer, as well as of their commentators, the famed Alexandrian grammarians, Palladas’ colleagues. In several of his works, he even goes beyond the realm of the Greek language in order to make jokes about Latin loanwords used by his fellow citizens. The present paper will examine the attitude of the poet towards language reflected by such linguistic puns and jokes in his works.

This paper is dedicated to a bilingual manuscript from the 1660s, conserved at the Library of the Romanian Academy as ms. rom. 312, which contains, between folios 217v and 254r, a copy of Meletius Smotrytsky’s Slavonic Grammar and its Romanian translation by Staico the Grammarian (who taught Slavonic in Târgoviște). The Romanian text, titled Tâlcuirea sau arătarea gramaticii slovenești („The Interpretation or the Expression of the Slavonic Grammar”), is on the pages opposite to the Slavonic text. The aim of this paper is to provide a preliminary comparison between this grammatical text and the first grammars of the Romanian language from the 18th century, namely the one penned by Dimitrie Eustatievici Brașoveanul in a manuscript from 1757 and the one published by Ianake Văcărescu in 1787. By comparing them, it is possible to illustrate the different mechanisms used to render the corresponding terminology for parts of speech and nominal cases, ranging from direct translations and calques to neologisms.

This article focuses on the Slavonic reception of Methodius of Olympus, a Greek patristic author who flourished in the second half of the third and the beginning of the fourth centuries. Most of his writings have not survived in their Greek original; however, most of them have been preserved in a full Slavonic translation. Most probably, this translation was produced in the First Bulgarian Kingdom at some point between the end of the ninth and the eleventh centuries. The present article focuses exclusively on one of the writings of Methodius of Olympus, viz. the exegetical letter De cibis ad Chilonam (CPG 1814), presenting – for the first time in a systematic manner – some preliminary observations on the question of transmission of this text in the Slavonic manuscript tradition. Furthermore, it explores how the study of the Slavonic hermeneutical terminology in this text can shed more light on the biblical patristic exegesis of Methodius of Olympus, in general.

In the text, an attempt is made to establish the origin of a dialectal form of a noun isolated in the Bulgarian linguistic territory. Based on its formal connection with another literary lexeme in the Bulgarian language, the question is raised not only about the etymology but also about the existence of such a word in general.

The oldest Romanian translations of the work of St. Symeon the New Theologian circulated in two ways: a corpus of 24 discourses and in a fragmentary form. The first one consists of 6 Catechesis, 16 Hymns, 62 Practical and Theological Chapters and the Pseudo-simeonian Method of prayer. Six sermons and the Method survive in the oldest Romanian manuscript: Prodromos No. 1 (3674), issued in 1766. These were selected from the newly translated corpus of the 24 slovo, as attested by Staretz Basil of Poiana Mărului’s letter of 1766 to his apprentice Alexios. According to the same letter, the work of St. Symeon had been already known to the monks from Poiana Mărului Skete (Buzău county) but in a fragmentary form. This is a different translation produced, therefore, ante 1766. The oldest Romanian manuscript that preserves this translation is Rom. MS Slatina Monastery II-1 from 1763. In this case, the manuscript witnesses a process of selecting excerpts from some of the Catechesis, Hymns and Practical Chapters.

The last decade has brought an upswing in research on natural language processing. However, it is well known that historical language stages are largely underrepresented. Middle Bulgarian Church Slavonic, a language variety with a significant literary productivity, is a prime example. In the current paper, it is shown how annotated texts of related language varieties can be used to annotate texts written in Middle Bulgarian Church Slavonic, such as the 14th-century translation of the Dioptra. In particular, I present a way of adapting the available training data and of reducing the differences between training and test data, thereby improving the result of the automatic morphological annotation. Moreover, it is demonstrated that a comparison with the original work, written in Byzantine Greek, can further increase the results of the annotation by carefully disambiguating homonymous word forms. The presented results can benefit research on Middle Bulgarian Church Slavonic as it shows how texts in this variety can be annotated without authentic training data. The proposed method may be of use not only for Slavonic Studies, however. The method of using training data from genetically related language varieties in combination with translations may be used to annotate other underrepresented language varieties as well.