Lietuvos istorijos institutas

During the preparation of the publications of the edicts of the Prussian authorities for the website of the Database of Old Lithuanian Writings of the Lithuanian Language Institute, the only currently known copy of the Prussian government’s edict forbidding the burning of fences in winter, issued by the Prussian authorities on 9 August, 1724, was discovered in the Library of the University of Leipzig (UBL : 01E-2015-25). Two copies of the German edict from which it was translated were found in the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences (LMAVB : E-343). Up until now, the 1878 transcript of the Lithuanian edict, prepared and published by Hugo Weber on the basis of a copy owned by August Leskien and lost during World War II , has been used. The supplement to the article presents transcripts and photographs of the edicts and a word index. Documents from the Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin show that Christophor Heinrich Wegner (1685–1731), a priest of the Lithuanian church in Königsberg, worked as a translator of the edicts into Lithuanian between 1721 and 1731. A comparison of the language and orthography of the published edict with other edicts of the early eighteenth century revealed features common to all texts of Lithuania Minor and specific only to the period of Wegner’s translation work. The linguistic elements of this edict that are typical of the edicts printed during Wegner’s translation period are the adverb ik čiolei ‘until now’. The preposition with [č] <cz> occurs only in the edicts attributed to Wegner. The conjunction ydant ‘so that’ written with <y> is found in other texts, albeit rarely, and the genitive forms menesės ‘of the month’, rugpjutės ‘of August’ are also the most abundant in Wegner’s translation period. According to the currently available data, the chronological distribution of the Germanised Slavism štonas ‘state, condition’ is limited to the years 1721–1723.

The differences in the print of the old books confirm that proof-reading was a common practice when printing Lithuanian books in the 16th century already. The differences can be classified into technical and proofing-related. The former occurred due to typographical actions or materials, the latter were caused by corrective proofing. They allow reconstructing the course of the printing processes and suggest that the presswork would not be ceased after the press proof was taken. While corrector was at work, certain copies of sheets would be printed and the unrevised sheets would later be bound rather than destroyed. They would end up in different copies, resulting in slight differences of print between some of them. Later on, any mistakes that were noticed would be included and printed in a list of errata. There were no lists of errata in the very first Lithuanian books. The oldest 16th century issue with clear evidence of revision was Evangelijos bei Epistolos (1579) by Baltramiejus Vilentas, with corrections made by pasting bits of paper on top of printed words with errors. The first Lithuanian book that had the list of errata was Postilė (1591) by Jonas Bretkūnas, which was printed at the same printing house of Georg Osterberger. Bretkūnas’s Postilė possesses a number of proofing differences in the print that show, with an almost absolute degree of accuracy, whether the printer’s sheet was printed before, or after proofing. A comparison of some of the differences present in the copies (accounting for a fraction of all copies known to exist) allows making a cautious statement that the unrevised sheets had been printed in a smaller number.

This article presents a dedication written in Lithuanian, that until recently was unknown, as well as additional information about its author and the circumstances of its writing. The poem of Johann Christian Dicelius from 1690, published together with Johann Christoph Taubert’s Master’s thesis, is the second known Lithuanian dedication created for the occasion of receiving a scholarly degree. Seven copies of the publication are known, and all of them are held outside of Lithuania. The exact date of Dicelius’s birth is not known, but he was born around 1670 into the family of Ernest Dicelius, a priest in Valtarkiemis (Walterkehmen), known for composing and translating Lithuanian hymns. In 1690 he began studies in Law at the University of Jena. After his studies, from 1695 he worked at the Vėluva (Wehlau) school until 1700 when he left his post as the school’s co-rector to return to Valtarkiemis where he lived with his mother until his death in 1706.

The abundance of Bible citations in old Lithuanian writings makes it difficult to study their relationships. A user-friendly data platform is required to allow the Bible lines to be grouped according to the characteristics interesting to the researcher. The assessment of similarity of citations is the most problematic. An integrated analysis of vocabulary, syntax, and morphology (and in some cases—spelling) allows it, but this kind of philological research is slow and currently impossible to automate. We succeeded in automating the comparison with a cyclic algorithm. The task of the algorithm is to detect identical compounds in two character sequences and to calculate which part of the compared sequences they cover. The effect of the algorithm and the calculated percentages are mainly determined by the length of the lines, the shortest sequence allowed to be compared, and the transliteration accuracy. Different lengths of the lines (a biblical line can be quoted as a fragment that is comparable to the full line) require the consideration of the chronology of the sources and the selection of corresponding comparative calculation parameters. The most optimal shortest comparable character sequence was determined experimentally. The automation of the comparison is hindered by the ambiguous orthography of old writings. It is levelled by the rules of transliteration, the application of which is differentiated according to the most important consistent spelling characteristics of each author. After evaluating the manually and automatically transliterated lines, it was determined that the transliteration method did not have any significant effect on the results. The results can be controversial when comparing the texts written in different dialects (the levelling of