Historical and Typological Linguistics
Research in this broad area addresses the nature of variation
in human languages, either as variation emerges from diachronic
change or from the array of naturally possible linguistics structures.
At Oregon, research in historical linguistics and typology covers
a very broad array of topics: language reconstruction, historical
syntax, comparative studies, historical corpora, and typological
surveys.
Curzon Gospel Project (Vakareliyska)
This project is a two-volume study of an unusual 14th-century
Bulgarian gospel manuscript known as the Curzon Gospel. The project
consists of an annotated transcription edition of the manuscript,
and a commentary volume analyzing the linguistic, orthographic,
and textual features of the manuscript, including its calendar of
saints, which is based largely on a very archaic Greek tradition.
A number of graduate students from the UO Linguistics Department
and the Russian and East European Studies Center have worked as
research assistants on this project for course credit, as a practicum
course.
On-line Medieval Slavic Calendar Collation (Vakareliyska)
This humanities computing project consists of the development
of an on-line computer collation of medieval Slavic menologies (calendars
of saints), which will consist eventually of a corpus of over 400
mostly unpublished texts. The project arose from the need to find
an efficient way to create a typology of medieval Slavic calendars
traditions, since the contents of medieval Eastern Orthodox menologies,
most of which are unpublished manuscripts, vary widely according
to century, country, and local tradition. The project will allow
researchers worldwide to search the corpus on-line by specific lexeme,
by century or date, by country of origin, by calendar date, and
by saint's name, in order to compare the features of any one calendar
against the entire collection of calendars. The data that makes
up the corpus has been collected from archives in Bulgaria, Russia,
and England, and from published 19th- and early 20th-century sources.
Undergraduate and graduate students who have taken a term of Old
Church Slavonic have contributed to the data entry and electronic
for this project for course credit, in the Slavic Calendars humanities
computing practicum. The search program for the collation is being
designed by Prof. David J. Birnbaum, at the Department of Slavic
Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh.
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