Fresco from the Sopoćani monastery (1265) |
The sub sample of Serbian written language from the 12th to the 18th century consists of 5,00000 words and is compiled from 18 literary works by 7 authors, two manuscripts by anonymous authors and official and private correspondence of Serbian kings and noblemen. The language and orthography are in their original form (Serbian-Slavonic). The whole material has been transferred into an electronic format. Lemmatization and proofreading of the material are in progress. The subsample consists of two types of material: a. the lives of Serbian saints and b. the old Serbian charts and letters. There are also few examples of Serbian medieval church poetry. | |
| a. Practically all preserved manuscripts on
lives of saints are included in the sample, meaning that all significant
authors of that period are included in the Corpus (St. Sava, Teodosije,
Domentijan, Archbishop Danilo II, Stefan Prvovenčani, patriarch Pajsije
and Grigorije Camblak). The lives of saints constitute a distinct genre
of Serbian medieval written language and could be considered as an interesting
(although not always reliable) historical source and precious testimony
of Serbian literary language between the 12th and the 18th centuries.
In the 19th century, most of the preserved manuscripts were edited and published by Đuro Daničić, Serbian philologist who had standardized Serbian-Slavonic orthography. The material in the Corpus is based on Daničić's editions. In the second part of the 19th century Đuro Daničić, reputed Serbian philologist and expert on old Serbian literature, edited and published manuscripts of the most important Serbian medieval writers (Domentijan, Teodosije and archbishop Danilo II). Daninčić had not only published those manuscripts, but through comparing their available medieval transcripts, but had also standardized the Serbian-Slavonic orthography. The material that constitutes the sample is in most part based on Daničić's editions, as well as on editions of Janko Šafarik, Stojan Novaković and on extensive editorial endeavor of historian Vladimir Ćorović (St. Sava and Stefan Prvovenčani). b. The old Serbian charts and letters encompass written documents that span five centuries of Serbian history. They include correspondence and charts of Serbian kings and noblemen, as well as contracts and other administrative documents and could be treated as valuable and reliable historical source. Unlike the lives of Serbian saints, the language in which they were written (also Serbian-Slavonic) is much closer to popular Serbian language of that period. The old charts and letters were collected and edited at the beginning of the 20th century in their original form by Ljubomir Stojanović, one of the most prominent Serbian philologist. The material in the Corpus is based on those editions. * Transcript and grammatical tagging of the material was carried out in the mid 1950's by Prof. Đorđe Sp. Radojičić, at that time the most prominent expert in medieval Serbian literature and the Serbian-Slavonic language, and by a group of experts in Serbian-Slavonic from the University of Novi Sad. * The grammar (i.e. the inflected morphology) of Serbian-Slavonic is somewhat different from the grammar of the contemporary Serbian language, although those differences are not as great as might be expected given a time lag of almost eight centuries. The most conspicuous and common differences are in grammatical number (dual, which does not exists in contemporary Serbian language), use of participle and some pronouns. The constraint in the grammatical tagging of Serbian-Slavonic was that no radical change of coding system is permissible in order to enable comparisons with the contemporary language. Therefore, the system of tagging for the contemporary language has been projected on Serbian-Slavonic, with few minor changes that do not disturb the overall system. |
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