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Last updated 2005-07-08.

Introduction

This document aims to be a practical introduction to typeset Old Church Slavonic in either Latin transliteration or in Cyrillic. Typesetting the Glagolitic script is not yet described. For dependencies, see my larger article LaTeX for Classical Philologists and Historical Linguists.

OCS in Latin Transliteration

Using the utf8x input method, most of the common symbols used in Cyrillic transliteration, such as c, s, and z with caron, and i and u with breve, can be input directly.

It is common for scholars to use the Latin alphabet but retain the Cyrillic symbols for the front yer and back yer (as in Schmalstieg’s Introduction to Old Church Slavic and Lunt’s Old Church Slavonic Grammar). There are two ways to acheive this in LaTeX. The easiest is to use the tipa package which provides the commands textsoftsign and texthardsign.

For those who do not want to install the tipa package, one may also declare Russian in the document preamble and set a custom command for each of the yers. The following minimal document serves to typeset a passage from page 110 of Grigore Nandriș’ Old Church Slavonic Grammar using this method (I have transliterated the given Cyrillic words).


\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage[russian,english]{babel}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage{ucs}
\title{Old Church Slavonic in LaTeX: a transliteration example}
\author{Christopher Culver}

\newcommand\fyer{\foreignlanguage{russian}{ь}} % front yer
\newcommand\byer{\foreignlanguage{russian}{ъ}} % back yer

\begin{document}

\maketitle

The prefix \textit{ně-} gives the word an indefinite meaning, the prefix \textit{{ni-} gives it a negative meaning: \textit{{něk\byer{}{to} `some one', \textit{{něč\fyer{}{to} `something', \textit{{nik\byer{}{to} `none', \textit{{nič\fyer{}{to} `nothing'.
{\raggedleft Grigore Nandriș, \textit{Old Church Slavonic Grammar}}

\end{document}

OCS in Cyrillic

Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic in TeX (PDF) by Alexander Berdnikov and Olga Lapko is an introduction to the problems of rendering OCS with that typesetting tool, written to introduce the new T2D font encoding. The authors give a thorough interesting explanation of the diversity of OCS texts and why even with Unicode it is difficult to work with the language in computing. The difficulty of which those authors speak is mostly caused by Church Slavonic texts with elaborate ornamentation such as breathing marks. Luckily, the comparative philologist does not normally need to duplicate that adornment. Also, some of their complaints have been resolved with new releases of Unicode.

Though this article and some other exploration I found a working method, though not one that is entirely satisfactory. One must first specify the T2D fontencoding in the document preamble and define a command to switch to it. After that one can type a great deal of Cyrillic right into the document.

However, various letters present complications. An especial annoyance is Unicode CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER UK. It cannot be typed as it is, and instead one must use the command \cyruk. Furthermore, the common representation of that letter as a horizontal digraph of omicron and upsilon is not included in this font encoding, and instead we get the variant in which the upsilon is positioned above the omicron.

Another problematic letter is the dotless ‹i›, which must be called with the command \i (and adding \ if a space follows). One might want to consider normalizing orthography and using only the и for this vowel. However, the dotless ‹i› does come in useful to get a pleasing appearance for the digraph yery. Instead of using the Unicode character ы, which result in a letter looking much like in modern Russian, one can instead type the back yer followed by a dotless ‹i›: ъ\i. This is still less than satisfactory in appearance.

While the T2D encoding contains the common Cyrillic а, an appearance more suitable for OCS texts can be had with the commands \cyraz (for lowercase) or \CYRAZ (for uppercase). Similarly, alongside the common Cyrillic з there is \cyrzemla and \CYRZEMLA, and for щ there is \cyrshta and \CYRSHTA.

The iotified Cyrillic letter а inexplicably lacks a position in Unicode, and so cannot be entered directly. One must use the commands \cyriaz and \CYRIAZ.

The following minimal document serves to typeset the phrase солѹнѣне вьси чисто словѣньскъi бесѣдѹѭтъ.


\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article}

\usepackage[british]{babel}
\usepackage[T2D,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage{ucs}
\title{Old Church Slavonic in LaTeX: a Cyrillic example}
\author{Christopher Culver}
\newcommand\ocs[1]{\bgroup\fontencoding{T2D}\selectfont#1\egroup}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
Following is an example of Old Church Slavonic text within an
English-language document.
\begin{quotation}
Constantine was a native of Salonika, and the Emperor pointed out
that all the people of Salonika spoke Slavic well
(\ocs{сол\cyrukнѣне вьси чисто словѣньскъ\i бесѣд\cyrukѭтъ}).
{\raggedleft Horace G. Lunt, \textit{Old Church Slavonic
Grammar}\par}
\end{quotation}
\end{document}

As you can see, LaTeX’s default font is less than ideal. The yat is especially ugly.