Slavic — The Slavicist

The Slavicist — Cyril and Methodius to the damaskini, canon to vernacular.

Old Church Slavonic and its daughters: the OCS/Old Russian treebanks, the gospel and monument corpora, Freising, the Slovenian historical lane with PriLit’s earliest narrative prose (1643–1866), Balkan damaskini, and the Church Slavonic dictionary shelves.

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The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these eleven answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Source	Holds	License	Status	Holdings (as of 19 September 2026)
`ud`	treebank	nc	wired · manual	76 docs / 325,533 passages
`proiel`	treebank	nc	wired · frozen	12 docs / 51,321 passages
`torot`	treebank	nc	wired · manual	40 docs / 33,085 passages
`ccmh`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	19 docs / 28,786 passages
`goo300k`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	89 docs / 8,397 passages
`imp`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	658 docs / 404,897 passages
`damaskini`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	46 docs / 12,072 passages
`wiktionary-cu`	dictionary	attribution	wired · manual	4,615 entries
`freising`	texts	research_private	wired · manual	27 docs / 2,037 passages
`sl-lexica`	dictionary	attribution	wired · manual	139,405 entries
`prilit`	texts	attribution	wired · manual	43 docs / 8,526 passages

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 19 September 2026): sl 140,207 · chu 4,644 · orv 43 · eng 26 · bul 20 · lat 20 · grc 12 · ota 5 · got 4 · lzh 4 … and 16 more (nabu axis slavic lists all).

The desk’s instruments

Gold-lemma languages: chu (Old Church Slavonic) and orv (Old Russian) — PROIEL (Codex Marianus), TOROT (Zographensis), the four CCMH gospel codices, plus the Slovenian historical lane (goo300k, IMP, 1584-1899).
Dictionaries: the Wiktionary OCS shelf (wiktionary-cu) and the Slovenian historical shelf (sl-lexica, Pleteršnik and the 16th-c. inventory).
Alignment work: nt. The chu witnesses are PROIEL’s Marianus plus the four CCMH codices — so align --collate builds a real apparatus.

Working the slavic desk

The generic axis surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable slavic               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync slavic                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis slavic          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis slavic                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis slavic   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu align "MARK 2.3" --collate       # the CCMH gospel apparatus beside the Cyrillic Marianus column
nabu etym богъ --lang chu             # the reflex chain back through Proto-Slavic
nabu define *bogъ                     # the reconstruction shelf, with its descendant reflexes
nabu search въста --axis slavic       # cross-script fold — Cyrillic finds the Latin-diplomatic vъsta
nabu list sl-lexica --entries --prefix bh  # headword-prefix browse into the Slovenian shelf

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

“Show me MARK 2.3 in every witness — Greek against all four OCS codices.” → nabu_align "MARK 2.3" (work: nt) — Fourteen witness columns in one reply: PROIEL Greek, Vulgate, Gothic, Armenian, Codex Marianus beside the CCMH Assemanianus / Marianus / Savvina / Zographensis diplomatic transcriptions, the West-Saxon Gospels, Sahidic Coptic, SBLGNT, WEB. collate: true turns the columns into a witness apparatus.

Terminal setup

Cyrillic OCS (chu): nabu strips the titla (titlo, pokrytie, superscript letters) and keeps the points; --display translit romanizes via Nabu::Cyrl (ѣ to ě, щ to št, оу to u). Noto Sans Mono covers the combining range in the terminal’s non-ASCII slot.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the twenty-five research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.