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.

New here? The Quickstart sets up the library in minutes.

The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these 41 answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): sl 142,058 · srp 75,102 · be 35,159 · pol 6,942 · chu 5,083 · pl 2,091 · hrv 1,730 · orv 1,026 · mkd 836 · ces 331 … and 15 more (nabu axis slavic lists all).

Carried in by multilingual packs (ud — whole-source members whose other languages ride along, as of 7 November 2026): ota 5 · lzh 4 · cop 3 · egy 3 · frm 3 … and 14 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 desk 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 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.