Composition of the corpus

 

The Old East Slavic corpus includes original and translated texts in the Old East Slavic language, the common ancestor of Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian. The timespan is commonly assumed as before 1400, although Novgorod and Pskov acts included into the corpus may belong to the 15th century (the Middle Russian period).

The corpus comprises the following original Old East Slavic texts:

Old East Slavic chronicles: the Tale of the Bygone Years (Hypatian and Laurentian versions), Novgorod First Chronicle, Kiev/Kyiv, Halician/Halyč, and Volhynian chronicles, and the Laurentian chronicle as continued until 1305;

Hagiography, including the Boris and Gleb cycles in different versions, Kyivan Cave patericon, and other vitae;

Russkaya Pravda and other Rus' legal acts enacted by princes such as Ustav Vladimira;

Canonic rules such as Kirik's Questions and other texts;

Didactic tracts including anti-Pagan and anti-Catholic polemics, often transcribed as pseudepigrapha;

Old East Slavic pilgrimages (such as the one written by the hegumen Daniel who visited Palestine);

Other original literature including such celebrated texts as Hilarion's Sermon on Law and Grace, Vladimir Monomakh's corpus, texts by Kirill of Turaŭ/Turov, The Tale of Igor's CampaignPraying of Daniel the Immured in two variants.

Charters and acts, both official and private, issued in Novgorod, Pskov, Polatsk/Polotsk, other Belarusian and Lithuanian regions, Ukraine, Moldavian Principality, and Moscow, before 1400 (for Novgorod and Pskov also until 1500).

The following translated texts were included:

Collections of quotations and wisdom literature: Izbornik of 1076, translated in Bulgaria and copied in Rus'; Melissa, or the Bee,

Byzantine Hagiography: Life of Andrew the Fool and Life of Basil the New; also Wonders of Nicetas, partly of Southern Slavic origin;

Josephus' Jewish WarAlexandria, a novel about Alexander the Great; Story of Ahikar the Wise, translated either from Greek or Syriac; Studite Monastic Regulations and Dialogue with a Jew.

 

Annotation

All the texts are morphologically annotated with manually resolved homonymy. The annotation is supported by T. Arkhangelsky's Morphy tool that accumulates precedent analyses of word forms. The word-by-word annotation includes as well:

  • information on scribe's errors, conjectures, and dubious readings;
  • the address of the word form in question (page or column in a MS., line)
  • Greek original lemmas and forms (for texts translated from Greek)

The metatextual information includes genres, dates when the original text and the surviving copy were made, and the sources of the text.

Building the corpus

The project's team at the Institute of Russian language was headed by Anna Pichkhadze. The team included Galina Barankova, Maria Ermolova, Anna Fitiskina, Anastasia Glagoleva, Natalia Iordani, Dmitri Krylov, Irina Makeeva, Ekaterina Mishina, Maria Mushinskaya, Pavel Petrukhin, Anna Ptentsova, Dmitri Sitchinava, Veronika Skripka, Irina Yuryeva and others.

Publications

Check out the list of scientific publications on the Old East Slavic corpus via the link: https://ruscorpora.ru/s/dw5lX. In the Publications section, use filters to find other types of publications about the corpus.

Updated on 15.09.2024