Linguistic Expertise 1502 and 2019. The First Russian Embassy Books [Лингвистическая экспертиза 1502 и 2019: посольские книги внешних сношений Руси]

This is an extended presentation of my talk given at the International Conference on Linguistic Expertise. I argue that some corpus methods established in the field of linguistic expertise and authorship attribution can be applied in historical text corpora consisting of philologically relatively homogeneous text collections that nevertheless may contain more than one dialect form. As a case study, I discuss two memorably incidents reflected in the first Russian Embassy Books of Ivan III (the texts from 1474 to 1505), dated back with 1502 and 1505. The first episode is reflected in the negotiations with the Envoy of the Kefe Sultan. I argue that the Crimean embassy book contains genuine incoming letters written in the city of Kefe (Feodosia) in an Old Ukrainian dialect ca. 1500-1501. These texts were not edited by the Muscovites. The second episode tells the story of the Emperor Maximiliane I messenger who suddenly appeared in the boarder fortress Jaanilinn (Ivangorod) and requested an interpreter. I argue that this interpreter was of Novgorod origin. He can be identified with the well-known Russian author Dmitry Gerasimov. In the initial section, I also discuss the perspective of identifying Serbian-speaking people in the corpus of Valachian XV century letters, mostly written in Middle Bulgarian. Comments. The language of the First Embassy Books and the relation between the Great Eastern and Western idioms of the Embassy Books is discussed in detail in my publication "Восток есть Восток? Переводные и оригинальные грамоты посольских книг Ивана III" = Zimmerling 2020a. Dmitry Gerasimov's aliases are specially addressed in my publication "Толмач немецкий: Дмитрий Герасимов и посольские книги" = Zimmerling 2020b. See the "Related works" section. Some aspects of the language of Wallachian letters written by people who were L2 speakers of Middle Bulgarian are discussed in Zimmerling 2022. See the "Related works" section.