Vocabulary in flux: Multilingual dictionaries and lexical change between Early Modern Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Irina Podtergera
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 527792400

The project aims to put forward a new understanding of the mechanisms of linguistic and cultural interaction in Early Modern Eastern Europe. The main objects of research are two large multilingual dictionaries: (1) the Greek–(Church) Slavonic–Latin dictionary compiled by Epifanii Slavinetskii, a Kievan scholar active in Moscow in the mid-17th century; (2) Fedor Polikarpov’s Slavonic–Greek–Latin Leksikon treyazychnyi (Moscow, 1704), a reworked and partly Russified version of Epifanii’s dictionary. Both dictionaries will be digitized and linked together in a dictionary portal as part of the project. On the basis of these data, the impact of Ruthenian literati on the development of the written language of Muscovy will be analyzed in depth. It will be shown in amply illustrated case studies how Russian intellectuals took up Western European (Latin and Greek) vocabulary, via men of letters from Poland-Lithuania as intermediaries, and thereby made the intellectual heritage of Western European their own. Using approaches from modern contact linguistics to ascertain how lexical change occurred, and what lexical items were borrowed and how, will facilitate a more fine-grained analysis of (East) Slavic reciprocal relations in the Early Modern era. At the same time, East Slavic lexicography will be examined as a cultural practice that travelled from Poland-Lithuania to Moscow and which was an amalgamation of the Greek/(Church) Slavonic, Latin/Polish and Ruthenian/Russian traditions. In order to achieve these ambitious goals, the latest computer technologies will be put to use alongside traditional methods from philology and linguistics. Handwritten text recognition tools (Transkribus, eScriptorium/kraken) will be used to process the texts. A database consisting of both dictionaries and sample texts from the same cultural context will be created and tagged according to the XML/TEI standard. Tools will be developed to link the dictionaries and texts, opening up possibilities for automatic comparative study of the vocabulary in them. The digital versions of both dictionaries will be made available for further scholarship on a lasting basis via the online dictionary portal. A separate print edition of Polikarpov’s dictionary with be prepared with an extensive research portion. The dictionary portal will be designed to allow additional dictionaries and other sources to be added in the future, which will afford for a wide-ranging analysis of trends in the development of vocabulary in the East Slavic language space and open up new perspectives for research into Ruthenian (Ukrainian/Belarusian) influence on the development of written language in Russia.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants