The Psalm 77 corpus is the result of a pilot project carried out in autumn 2022 which aligns all sixteenth-century Romanian versions of psalm 77 as well as the Slavonic and the Greek texts of the same psalm. The corpus was compiled thanks to the technical support of the Institute of the Czech National Corpus ( David Lukeš and Pavel Vondřička in particular) and the financial support of the CLS INFRA Translational Access Fellowships (TNA) scheme by Constanța Burlacu. Overall, the project deals with 72 verses of text per source and 10 thousand tokens in total. The project’s aim was to create a corpus that allows the visualisation of multiple sources at the same time, being they Romanian, Slavic or Greek, and to annotate linguistically the Romanian material. Much attention was given to the textual processing of the Romanian materials and the following decisions were taken:
To explore the corpus, the user can either search by its lemmas (written with Latin letters and modern Romanian orthography) or by the transcribed, transliterated, or normalized versions of specific words (in the default attribute box labelled as word, trans, norm). The search will return the transcribed version of the text with Cyrillic script.
The current version of Psalm 77 corpus does not offer a linguistic annotation and lemmatization of the Slavonic and Greek versions. The reference point for the Slavonic version of Psalm 77 has been the Tomić Psalter (Tomic in the corpus); while the Greek text (Gr in the corpus) was taken from critical edition of the Septuagint curated by Alfred Rahlfs and Robert Hanhart. Additionally, for each bilingual Church Slavonic-Romanian source (Voroneț and Ciobanu manuscripts and the printed edition of 1588 circa), the Slavonic counterpart was transcribed and used as an additional textual source (the same sigla as for the Romanian sources was used, to which -Sl was added. See for example PCbSl). It should also be pointed out that among the list of sources used for the compilation of the corpus, the printed edition of the bilingual Psalter of 1577 (PC1) was not included. This edition is fairly similar to that of 1570 (PC) and the Ciobanu Psalter.
The Romanian textual sources and their sigla used in the project are the following:
| PC | First printed edition of the Psalms in Old Romanian: Brașov, deacon Coresi, 1570. |
| PC2 | Second bilingual edition of the psalter: [Brașov, Șerban Coresi, 1588?]. |
| PCb | The Ciobanu Psalter, late 16th century, MS 3465 of the Romanian Academy Library; digital copy available at https://medievalia.com.ro/manuscrise/item/ms-rom-3465. |
| PH | The Hurmuzaki Psalter, early 16th century, MS 3077 of the Romanian Academy Library; facsimile edition published by Gheție and Teodorescu (2005); digital copy available at https://medievalia.com.ro/manuscrise/item/ms-rom-3077. |
| PV | The Voroneț Psalter, mid-16th century, MS 693 of the Romanian Academy Library; digital copy available at https://medievalia.com.ro/manuscrise/item/ms-rom-693. |
| PS | The Scheia Psalter, mid or later 16th century, MS 449 of the Romanian Academy Library; digital copy available at https://medievalia.com.ro/manuscrise/item/ms-rom-449. |
Overall, there are 11 sources (6 Romanian, 4 Slavonic, 1 Greek) that make up the Psalm 77 parallel corpus. The texts can be searched either as monolingual or parallel corpora with any combination of sources using the KonText query interface, e.g. like this.
For additional question, contact Constanța Burlacu at: constanta.burlacu8 at gmail.com.