Debuts

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.