On libraries, databases and the advancement of knowledge in the field of language history

Abstract

Recalling her past conversations with G.K. Venediktov, a leading specialist in 19th-century standard Bulgarian, the author reflects on the correlation between the methodology of linguistic research and its outcomes. The recollections pertain mainly to the Moscow stage of the author's life (1981–1992). It was a time of transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet era in Russian history, when computers were just entering researchers’ daily routine, and when one had to sign up in advance to get access for a certain short time slot to one of the institute’s computers. Back then, there was a state monopoly on copying technology, scholars wrote their papers by hand or on typewriters, and then copied the final drafts on the office computer, using first 5.25-inch and later 3.5-inch floppy disks, and the text editor Chi-Writer for MS-DOS with encoding for Cyrillic KOI-8. Researchers spent a large portion of their time reading in libraries and checking data in index card collections, handwritten by several generations of scholars. The academic Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies was first located in a two-story mansion, built in 1860 in 30a Trubnikovskii Pereulok and after 1990 it moved to the building of the Academy of Sciences on 32а Leninskii Prospekt. The advent of the Internet, e-mail, cell phones, digital cameras, and the national corpora of the Slavic languages was not far off, which, together with the mass employment of personal computers, was to lead later to a revolution in the methodology of philological research that no one yet foresaw.

Keywords

• g.k. venediktov
• language data
• methodology
• standard bulgarian
• bulgarian dialects