Comparative Study of the Lexical and Orthographic Variety in the Mediæval Slavonic Psalter

1. Introduction

1.1. Text variety in mediæval Slavonic texts

The mediæval Slavonic written tradition is characterised by a high level of variety on all linguistic levels. This is usually explained with the use of a vernacular language in the Mediaeval Slavonic texts. The spread of the texts to regions with substantial differences from the language in the region where the text originated reflected the transmission. In this setting, the study of text variety is an important source of information about the synchronic and diachronic development of the Slavonic languages. However, up till now the study of text variety was done by traditional research methods based extensively on human collection and processing of scattered data. Taking into account the substantial number of mediæval Slavonic manuscripts, one can imagine that the bulk of the texts can not be physically covered by traditional investigation.

1.2. Case Study

The Psalter has always had a leading role among the religious texts since its first appearance in the Slavonic countries, representing a very important source in the process of the development of the Slavonic written tradition.

Its importance is also linked to the didactic function it had in the Slavonic lands where a new alphabet was recently introduced. This led to the need to educate the scholars in the new literary environment. Due to its own rhythm, to its diffusion, the Psalter was then studied by heart by people in order to make acquaintance with the written culture.

That is why the Psalter has always been one of the most widespread texts [Karaèorova 89]. Its tradition is considered constant by almost all the researches, besides the structural differences that allow us to speak about different typologies of Psalter (simple, with commentaries, etc.).

In the light of these considerations (wide dissemination and lower variety due to its religious use), we decided to investigate some textual peculiarities of the Psalter's transmission.

1.3. Experimental Setting

We focussed our attention on six manuscripts, choosing the spatial and temporal settings of each manuscript as reference points. The linguistic peculiarities referring to an origination from a certain region are reported using the term 'revision'.

We used the following manuscripts:

Sinaitic Psalter (10th c., written in the Glagolitic alphabet; all other witnesses were written in Old Cyrillic)
Bolonian Psalter (13th c., Bulgarian revision)
Norovian Psalter (13th c., middle Bulgarian revision)
Serbian Psalter (13th c., Serbian revision)
Kievian Psalter (14th c., Russian revision)
Gennadian Psalter (15th c., Russian revision)
We used as text excerpts 15 Psalms scattered through the Psalter (1, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 64, 73, 74, 75, 89, 91, 98, 102, 134; the exception is the Serbian Psalter where the 1st psalm was damaged).
2. Study of the lexical variety

We started with a study of the lexical variety in order to follow the tradition of the Psalter diatopically and diachronically, to set out the lexical variants and to verify the unity of its tradition.

We used for this study the DBT (Data Base Testuale), a program of textual analysis developed at the ICL-Pisa, which produces different types of information in real time. Among its functions, the DBT provides lists of alphabetical frequencies, decreasing frequency order, concordances, co-occurrences, indices locorum, lists of suffixes and endings and lemmatization procedure.

Comparing our witnesses we found the following:

We obtained 115 pairs of variant words. Of these 115 pairs, only 38 times does the word vary in only one manuscript (77 times the same word varies in more then one manuscript).
The variants seem to be linked to some specific words and realia.
The typology of the variant pairs shows that the most frequently appearing are those whose semantics reflect eyesight, desire, law violation (in particular of the divine one), forgiveness, fire (as a symbol of purification), rebirth, oil, and unction. We can think that the scribe inserted these variants since he felt them to be more correct, both dogmatically and linguistically and, in any case, more specific for the different ages and chessboard of the written tradition.
We notice a tendency to use synonyms or words with a very small semantic difference from those of the Sinaitic Psalter.
We can consider the chosen texts divided in 4 blocks: 1) Sinaitic Psalter; 2) Bolonian and Serbian Psalters (the closest in time to the Sinaitic); 3) Norovian Psalter; 4) Kievian and Gennadian Psalters. In 115 variants as regards the Sinaitic Psalter, we noticed that:

78 belong to the Norovian Psalter (67%)
36 to the Serbian Psalter (31%)
29 to the Bolonian Psalter (25%)
57 to the Kievian Psalter (49%)
75 to the Gennadian Psalter (65%)
The Norovian Psalter is the text that more than the others is detached from the Sinaitic and, as Cesko says "it's one of the first trials to normalize the literary language thanks to a correction based on the Greek model" [Cesko o77].
On the other side, the Serbian and Norovian Psalters show a lower level of variants and they were written in a period very close to the creation of the Sinaitic Psalter.

Concerning the two Russian Psalters, the Norovian and Gennadian Psalters have almost the same number of variants (78 and 75). Thus we can think that they belong to the same revision. But this is not true: of the 78 variants present in the Norovian, 54 are different from those of the Gennadian, that only 28 times offers variants different from those of the Kievian. We can verify in this way the big linguistic similarity between the two Russian texts and the atypicality of the Norovian Psalter in respect to this group of texts.

In conclusion, we have the Norovian Psalter vs. all the others, that can be very well accepted if we consider the basic homogeneity of all the examined manuscripts and the declared adhesion of the Norovian to the Greek original.

This confirms the unity of the Psalter's tradition in the Slavonic countries.

3. Study of the Orthographic variety

We studied also a lower textual level - the orthographical one - in order to investigate the correlation between revisions and quantitative data on orthographic features. The traditional approach to the orthographic variety study is a qualitative one. The decision about the time when a text was written and the localization of its creation is based on the occurrences of specific orthographic features. Such features reflect the use of the jers; nasal vowels and groups containing - r - and - l - [OBG, 1993].

We studied the relative frequencies of all letters from the Old Cyrillic alphabet and all strings belonging to such characteristic groups. We aimed to check whether the qualitative characteristics relevant to the text origin lead also to differences in the quantitative study of the texts. The data were processed in STATISTICA for Windows. This data organization allowed us to choose a subset of texts, and some of the letters or groups for analysis. From the view-point of the specialist in Slavonic studies, this would mean that we are able to study the usage of all or selected graphemes in a chosen group of texts. We applied cluster analysis in order to check whether texts belonging to different revisions are grouped correctly.

The cross-study of the texts leads us to the following conclusions:

For experiments with texts from one revision the smallest size of the text excerpt should be 5,000 letters
For experiments with text from different revisions the size of the text excerpt leading to correct clustering is 2,000 letters
The best results are obtained when we use in the study the relative frequencies of 5 experimentally approved vowels
The results showed that the regional differences within texts, which form a common tradition in the mediaeval Slavonic literary history, reflect the orthographic quantitative characteristics of the texts
4. Conclusions
Our study showed the importance of conducting experiments on different linguistic levels.

The first approach was oriented towards a study of lexical variance aimed at investigating the distribution of synonyms in the different witnesses and at forming groups of similarity between the witnesses. This study confirmed the hypothesis about the unity of the Psalter's transmission amongst the mediæval Slavs.

The second approach was oriented towards a study of quantitative data on the distribution of orthographic characteristics.

The comparison of the results shows that the application of both approaches could help the specialists in mediæval Slavonic textual studies to acquire new data about the similarities and dissimilarities of their object of study. Moreover, the complexity of the studied field presupposes the use of methods applied to the different linguistic levels because they enlighten different aspects of the studied written tradition.

References

[Cesko o77] Cesko, E.V. (1982). Ob afonskoj redakcii slavjanskogo perevoda psaltyri v ee otnoshenii k drugim redakcijam, V: Jazyk i pismennost' srednebolgarskogo perioda. Moskva, p. 77 (in Russian).
[Karaèorova 89] Karaèorova, I. (1989). Kym vyprosa za Kirilo-Metodievskija starobylgarski prevod na Psaltira. V: Kirilo-Metodievski Studii, t.6, S., str.15-129 (in Bulgarian).
[OBG 1993] Duridanov, I. et al. (eds) (1993). Gramatika na starobalgarskija ezik, S., 1993 (in Bulgarian).