Linguistic Analysis of Church Slavonic Documents: A Mixed-Methods Approach

Abstract

The study is concerned with Church Slavonic manuscripts and early printed books at the threshold of modernity. It has the methodological aim of applying and evaluating a quantitative and qualitative mixed-methods approach for analyzing pre-modern Slavic textual culture. With respect to the quantitative part of the study, the authors make use of the Handwritten Text Recognition tool Transkribus in order to transcribe manuscripts and early printed books automatically and use these transcriptions for quantitative analysis. Qualitative analysis is conducted using established philological methods and visual inspection of the (digital) sources. The sources selected for this study are an East Slavic manuscript of the Church Slavonic Menology (March volume, first quarter of the 16th century) and the South Slavic Cyrillic Služebnik printed in Venice in 1519. Our study shows that quantitative and qualitative methods, when combined in a mixed-methods approach, complement each other in a way that leads to a deeper understanding of the sources investigated and thus of the linguistic development of Church Slavonic.