Mova0.6 pre-release⌕
☰
home / docs / languages / uk / 9. Older Ukrainian and the old forms alive today

9. Older Ukrainian and the old forms alive today

Modern Ukrainian is the latest stage of a written tradition that goes back to Kyivan Rus' in the 10th–11th century. A reader of modern Ukrainian meets the older stages in three ways: in older texts read at school and in church (chronicles, the Cossack chronicles, Kotliarevskyi, Shevchenko, the Bible, the anthem, folk songs); in older spellings of texts printed before the 1920s; and, most of all, in forms that are old but have never stopped being used. This last point is the character of the language described in 0. Introduction: Ukrainian keeps old forms in living speech for a very long time, and its speakers use them without any sense of being old-fashioned. The vocative case, the synthetic future in -му, the remnants of the dual and short adjectives such as винен and повинен are ordinary everyday Ukrainian.

This chapter gives the periods in brief (§1), the sound changes that set Ukrainian apart (§2), the Middle Ukrainian written language and its first grammars (§3), the beginning of the modern literary language (§4) and older spellings (§5), and then the old forms alive today with counts (§6). §7 says how modern readers meet older texts, §8 what Mova does with them. Transliteration as in 8. Regional varieties, diaspora and surzhyk.

Each older layer is described, as the varieties are in 8. Regional varieties, diaspora and surzhyk §1.2, as a delta over the literary standard: a table of what changes in orthography, phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon, with an example and a source or count; what a table does not list is as in the standard. The Middle Ukrainian delta is in §3.1, the 19th- and early 20th-century delta in §5, and the old forms alive today, divided into standard forms and an archaic delta, in §6.

1. Periods

perioddates (approximate)written languagestypical texts
Old East Slavic (Old Rus')10th–14th c.Church Slavonic of the East Slavic recension; the vernacular in charters, inscriptions, lawKyivan chronicles (in later northern copies), Rus'ka Pravda, Slovo o polku Ihorevim (late 12th c.), Galician gospels (Galician Gospel 1144)
Middle Ukrainian (Ruthenian, prosta mova)14th–18th c.Church Slavonic of the Ukrainian recension; prosta (rus'ka) mova, the chancery and literary vernacular of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; Polish; LatinPeresopnytsia Gospel (1556–1561), Ostroh Bible (1581), Zyzanii's grammar (1596), Smotrytskyi's grammar (1619), Cossack chronicles (Samovydets, late 17th c.)
New (modern) Ukrainianfrom 1798the new literary language on the vernacular; Russian and Polish as state languagesKotliarevskyi's Eneida (1798), Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Shevchenko's Kobzar (1840), Franko, Lesia Ukrainka
standardised Ukrainianfrom 1928one codified standardthe orthographies of 1928, 1933, 1946, 1960, 1990, 2019 (6. Spelling rules and the 2019 orthography)

Danylenko & Naienko (2022) speak of three languages of Ukrainians that imperial policy targeted in turn: the Church Slavonic of the Ukrainian recension (russified from the 1620s to the 1790s), the prosta (rus'ka) mova (from 1720 to the 1790s) and the new literary language (1800–1914). The decree of 1720, which ordered that no "special dialect" be used in books printed in the Kyiv and Chernihiv presses, was the first Muscovite act aimed at the written language itself; the Valuev circular of 1863 forbade printing books in Ukrainian other than fiction.

The names changed with the periods. Smal-Stockyj, writing in German in 1913, used Ruthenisch for the language and explained that "Little Russian" (Kleinrussisch) came from the 14th-century geographical name Russia minor and gave a false impression, while "Ukrainian" was the name used "in the newest time" (Smal-Stockyj 1913, introduction). Galician grammars of the 19th century called it руский язык (Osadca 1862/1864). The name українська мова became general in the early 20th century.

2. What Ukrainian inherited and changed

The sound changes below separate Ukrainian from its Old East Slavic base and from its neighbours. They are the reason an old text looks different from a modern one even where the words are the same.

changeOld East Slavicmodern Ukrainiancompare Russian
ѣ (jat') became iхлѣбъ, сѣно, лѣсъхліб, сіно, лісхлеб, сено, лес
o, e became i in a newly closed syllableконь, печь, носъкінь (gen. коня), піч (gen. печі), ніс (gen. носа)конь, печь, нос
g became [ɦ]голова [g]голова [ɦ]голова [g]
и and ы merged into [ɪ] (written и); old i stays ібыти, силабути, сила [ˈsɪlɑ]быть, сила
e before soft consonants stayed hardдень [dɛnʲ]день [dʲenʲ]
final -ъ, -ь lost; the voiced consonant stays voiced at the endдубъдуб [dub]дуб [dup]
pleophony (-оро-, -оло-), as in all East Slavicголова, молоко, воротаголова, молоко, воротаголова, молоко, ворота

The alternation i ~ o, e (кінь – коня, ніч – ночі, сіль – солі, осінь – осені) is the most visible trace of the change in the closed syllable; it runs through the declension and is described in 4. Connected speech and 11. Nouns. Krymskyi (1907, §II) records that the archaic dialects of Polissia and the Carpathians still have diphthongs (уо, уы, іе …) where the rest of the language has i: the change stopped there half-way (8. Regional varieties, diaspora and surzhyk §1.3).

Church Slavonic doublets. Church Slavonic, a South Slavic language in origin, has no pleophony; it gave Ukrainian a learned layer of words in -ра-, -ла-, -ре-, -ле- beside the native ones, often with a different meaning: голова 'head' : глава 'chapter; head (of an organisation)'; город 'vegetable garden; (older) town' : град in high style and in Царград 'Constantinople'; ворота 'gate' : врата (church, poetic); молодий 'young' : младенець 'infant' (religious). Other Church Slavonic marks are the prefixes пре-, пред-, воз- in learned words (прекрасний, предмет, предок, возз'єднання). Chapter 19 §2.1 gives this layer as a part of the vocabulary.

The vocative. Old East Slavic had a vocative case in the singular, as Proto-Slavic did. Russian lost it (apart from frozen forms such as Боже, Господи); Ukrainian, like Polish, Czech and most South Slavic languages, kept it, and kept it productive (§6.1).

3. Middle Ukrainian

3.1 The prosta mova

From the 14th to the 18th century the Ukrainian lands were within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and then the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and from the mid-17th century the Cossack Hetmanate. Their written vernacular, called prosta mova or rus'ka mova (Ruthenian), was used for laws, charters, letters, polemics and chronicles; it shared much with Belarusian and took a large layer of Polish words, many of them Latin or German in origin. Church Slavonic of the Ukrainian recension remained the language of liturgy and high learning.

A passage from the Chronicle of the Eyewitness (Litopys Samovydcja), a Cossack chronicle of 1648–1702, in Orest Levytskyi's edition of 1878 (public domain), describes the year 1648:

Того жъ року саранча барзо великая на усей Украинѣ была и барзо шкоди великіе починила, збожя поз̾едала и трави, же не било где сѣна косити. 'In that same year locusts, very great, were all over Ukraine, and did very great damage: they ate the grain and the grass, so that there was nowhere to mow hay.'

The Middle Ukrainian delta over the modern standard, as this passage and the rest of the chronicle show it:

areamodern standardMiddle Ukrainian (Samovydets)examplenote
orthographymodern CyrillicChurch Slavonic letters: ъ at word end, ѣ for i, и/ы without the modern distinctionУкраинѣ read [ukrɑˈjinʲi], сѣна read [ˈsʲinɑ]§5
orthography-ся joinedся apart, also before the verbпочали ся купити 'they began to gather'as in south-western dialects (08 §1.4)
morphology (adjective)contracted велика, великіuncontracted великая, великіеsurvives in song (§6.5)
morphology (participle)adverbial participles -вшиthe sameвзявши, послишавши, скупившиunchanged (§6.6)
syntaxу 1648 році or 1648 рокуgenitive of time placed firstроку 1648
lexicon (Polish layer)дужебарзо (Pol. bardzo)not in the standard
lexicon (Polish layer)що 'that, so that'же (Pol. że)же не било где сѣна коситиnot in the standard
lexicon (Polish layer)також; а, однактежъ (też), зась (zaś), яко тежъ 'as well as'not in the standard
lexicon (vernacular)збіжжя 'grain'збожяthe same word, older shape

3.2 The first grammars: Zyzanii 1596 and Smotrytskyi 1619

The first grammars written in the Ukrainian lands are grammars of Church Slavonic, written for the brotherhood schools that defended Orthodoxy against the Counter-Reformation. Lavrentii Zyzanii's Hrammatika slovenska, printed in Vilnius in 1596 together with a short Church Slavonic–Ruthenian vocabulary, the Leksys, was a school book: Zyzanii addressed it to pupils (спудеї) and modelled it on the Greek grammars of the Lviv brotherhood school (the Adelphotes of 1591) and on Greek and Latin school grammars of his time, translating some passages word for word (Vozniak 1911). Meletii Smotrytskyi's Grammatiki slavenskija pravilnoe sintagma (Jevje, 1619) became the standard Church Slavonic grammar of the Orthodox Slavs for two centuries; it was reprinted in Moscow in 1648 without the author's name, and that edition still carried traces of Zyzanii (Vozniak 1911).

Vozniak (1911) compared their terminology and found Zyzanii's "more popular", Smotrytskyi's more Church Slavonic. The case names show the line from Zyzanii to the present:

caseZyzanii 1596 (Vozniak's list)modern Ukrainian term
nominativeименовныйназивний
genitiveродныйродовий
dativeдателныйдавальний
accusativeвиновныйзнахідний
vocativeзвателныйкличний
instrumentalтворителныйорудний

The modern terms are 19th- and 20th-century Ukrainian coinages (Simovych 1919 uses називний, родовий, давальний, знахідний, кличний, орудний, місцевий, the last in the form місцевий), but the system of seven cases with a vocative is in Zyzanii already.

4. The new literary language

The modern literary language begins with Ivan Kotliarevskyi, a Poltavan, whose travesty of Virgil, the Eneida, was printed in its first three parts in 1798. Simovych (1919) asks "who but the Poltavan Kotliarevskyi first began to write in the popular language?" and notes that all writers before Shevchenko were from the Dnieper lands; he also advises readers to set aside "some Muscovite words of Kotliarevskyi" and the church words of Kvitka. The opening lines, in modern spelling:

Еней був парубок моторний І хлопець хоч куди козак, Удавсь на всеє зле проворний, Завзятіший од всіх бурлак. 'Aeneas was a lively lad, and a fellow every inch a Cossack; he turned out quick at every mischief, bolder than all the vagabonds.'

Everything in it is modern Ukrainian except the uncontracted adjective всеє 'all (n.)' (modern все) and the preposition variant од (modern standard від, 08 §1.3); удавсь with the short reflexive -сь is standard today.

Taras Shevchenko's Kobzar (1840) and the work that followed made this vernacular the language of high literature. A stanza of his Testament (Заповіт, 1845):

Як умру, то поховайте Мене на могилі, Серед степу широкого, На Вкраїні милій. 'When I die, then bury me on a burial mound, amid the wide steppe, in my dear Ukraine.'

The form Вкраїні for Україні is the euphonic alternation of у/в that the standard still uses (4. Connected speech): after a vowel, Україна may begin with в.

5. The 19th- and early 20th-century literary delta

A reader of Ukrainian printed before the 1920s meets a delta over today's standard that is mostly orthographic, with some forms and words. The library's own grammars and the texts of §4 show it.

areamodern standard19th / early 20th c.examplewhere / source
orthographymodern CyrillicChurch Slavonic letters ъ, ѣ, ы, іУкраинѣ, року, сѣнаMiddle Ukrainian and its 19th-c. editions
orthography-ся joinedся apart from the verbрозвинула ся, береть сяGalician print; Simovych 1919
orthographyapostrophenoneпять, девять, звязатиSimovych 1919, Nechui-Levytskyi 1913
orthographyїйійіх for їхNechui-Levytskyi 1913
orthographyії after consonants for i from old e, ѣ (Zhelekhivka, from 1886)сїно, дїло, ЗизанїйGalician print; Vozniak 1911
orthography-ія in loans-иянация, поезияGalician print
orthographysynthetic future one wordtwo wordsписати муSimovych 1919
orthography (1928–1933, diaspora)кафедра, ефір, Афіни, радостікатедра, етер, Атени, радостиPravopys 1928; since 2019 again permitted variants (genitive -ости)
morphology (adjective)contracted formsuncontracted in verseвсеє (Kotliarevskyi)§4, §6.5
morphology (infinitive)-ти-ть freely in verseстать, співатьKotliarevskyi, Shevchenko (§6.7)
lexicon / formвідодод всіх бурлак (Kotliarevskyi)08 §1.3
lexicon / formіншіиньчі, меньш (soft н before consonants written)Simovych 1919
lexiconstandard wordsRussian words in the Dnieper writers, church words in KvitkaSimovych 1919

The Zhelekhivka spelling (from Jevhen Zhelekhivskyi's dictionary of 1886) was the norm of Galicia and Bukovina until the 1920s. For the corpus GRAC, VESUM has a separate module for Zhelekhivka texts and, since 2021, one for the original spelling of Lesia Ukrainka's works (Shvedova et al. 2022; §7). Such modules are deltas in exactly the sense of this manual: rules applied on top of the standard lexicon.

6. Old forms alive today

The counts in this section are of 2026-11-06, over UD Ukrainian IU 2.18 (122,750 syntactic words; mostly written texts; CC BY-NC-SA, counted, never quoted) and UD Ukrainian ParlaMint 2.18 (109,166 words; parliamentary speech 2003–2022; CC BY-SA, quoted with sentence ids), train + dev + test, and over the Leipzig news sample of 2024 (14.2 million words, CC BY).

The old forms divide into two kinds. Some are in the standard and need no delta at all: they are old in origin and ordinary in use. Others form an archaic delta, used in verse, song, church and solemn style. The table sums up §§6.1–6.8.

areaold formstatus todayexamplecount / source
morphology (case)vocativestandard, productiveпане Голово, Тарасе, мамоIU 158, ParlaMint 2,011 (§6.1)
morphology (tense)synthetic future -муstandard, frequentписатиме62% / 10% / 67% of imperfective futures in IU / ParlaMint / news 2024 (§6.2)
morphology (adjective)short forms винен, повинен, ладен, годен, згоден, коженstandard, closed setIU 50, ParlaMint 124 Variant=Short (§6.5)
morphology (participle)adverbial participles -чи, -вшиstandardчитаючи, прочитавшиIU 428, ParlaMint 160 VerbForm=Conv (§6.6)
morphology (participle)impersonal -но, -тоstandard, official proseзроблено13
morphology (number)dual remnants, instrumental -имаstandard in a few nounsочима, плечима, дверимаIU очима 16 (§6.3)
morphology (number)dual -і after два, три, чотириarchaic delta, dialect and literaryдві руці for дві рукиSimovych 1919 (§6.3)
morphology (tense)pluperfect був + pastarchaic delta, rareчитав бувIU 8, ParlaMint 1 (§6.4)
morphology (adjective)uncontracted long formsarchaic delta: song, verseдобрії, зеленая, всеєNechui-Levytskyi 1913 (§6.5)
morphology (verb)1pl -мdelta: verse, song, casual speechзапануєм, ходімanthem (§6.7)
morphology (verb)2sg єси 'art'archaic delta: prayerщо єси на небесах§6.7
morphology (infinitive)-тьcolloquial and verse deltaсказатьIU 0.9%, ParlaMint 0.5% (§6.7)
lexiconChurch Slavonic and old wordsarchaic delta: church, solemn, poeticуста, чоло, десниця, перст, глаголатиVESUM :arch 9,526 lemma lines (§6.8)
lexiconold words in ordinary usestandardаби, бо, либонь, мовляв§6.8

6.1 The vocative

The vocative (кличний відмінок) is the case of address. It is alive and productive: every noun that can be addressed has it, new words and foreign names take it (Джоне, Мері stays indeclinable but Тарасе, Олено, пане Президенте), and its absence in address is felt as Russian-influenced speech. The 2019 orthography gives the endings (Pravopys 2019 §§74, 87; full paradigms in 11. Nouns):

classendingsexamples
1st declension (-а/-я nouns), hard-осестро, Ганно, книжко
1st declension, soft and mixed-е, -єземле, душе, Маріє, Ілле
1st declension, affectionate soft-юбабусю, Галю, доню, матусю
2nd declension (masc.), hard and most mixed-ебрате, Тарасе, пане, козаче (with к > ч), друже (г > ж), пастуше (х > ш)
2nd declension, soft; some hard with suffixes-ю, -украю, Ігорю, діду, синку, батечку
plural (all)= nominativeбрати, колеги, пані

Two rules of the norm concern address formulas. In a name with patronymic both words take the vocative (Оксано Іванівно, Маріє Василівно; Тарасе Івановичу), and in address to a woman with a common noun and surname both take it (пані Гаркуше-type forms; Pravopys 2019 §74, notes 1–2).

Counts. Words with Case=Voc: IU 158 (13 per 10,000 words), ParlaMint 2,011 (184 per 10,000). In ParlaMint the most frequent vocative lemmas are шановний (777), колега (511), депутат (155), народний (150), пан (45) and голова (35), from the formulas шановні колеги, шановні народні депутати, пане Голово:

Дякую, пане Голово. 'Thank you, Mr Chairman.' (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u94.p1.lang1.s1) За вами слово, пане Президенте. 'You have the floor, Mr President.' (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u98.p4.lang1.s1)

Where usage differs from the norm. In name-and-patronymic address, spoken Ukrainian often uses the nominative, a pattern widely attributed to Russian influence, since Russian has no vocative. Among proper names that head an address (UD relation vocative) in ParlaMint, 66 are in the vocative and 103 in the nominative, and the share changes with the session: 2003, 17 vocative : 6 nominative; 2004, 28 : 19; 2014, 4 : 7; the National Security Council meeting of 2014, 10 : 5; 2022, 7 : 66. Both patterns are in the same speeches:

Дякую, Тарасе Івановичу. (vocative, 2022) Дякую, Тарас Іванович. (nominative, 2022) Григорій Миколайовичу, письмове є у вас? (name nominative, patronymic vocative, ParlaMint-UA_2003-10-14-m0.u130.p1.lang1.s2)

The 2022 figures come largely from a few sessions and the habits of whoever chaired them, so they describe those transcripts, not a trend. What they show is that in the most formal spoken setting of the country both forms are used side by side, and that the vocative with common nouns (пане, колеги, друзі) is untouched by the variation. Vocatives of common nouns in address, including affectionate ones (мамо, тату, друже, брате), occur in the news sample too: мамо 59, друже 29, брате 9 times in 2024 (тату is not counted, since it is also the indeclinable тату 'tattoo').

6.2 The synthetic future

Ukrainian forms the future of imperfective verbs in two ways (details in 13. Verbs):

The synthetic form grew from the infinitive plus forms of the old verb яти/имати 'take' (писати иму 'I take to write'), and was still written as two words in Galician print (я писати му, Simovych 1919, §§ on tense). Russian has only the analytic type; Ukrainian kept both, and the synthetic one is not bookish.

corpussynthetic (писатиме)analytic (буде писати)synthetic share
UD IU (written)1046562%
UD ParlaMint (speech)3126910%
Leipzig news 2024 (approx.)20,0349,91367%
Leipzig news crawl 2018 (approx.)21,7709,62769%
Leipzig Wikipedia 2021 (approx.)1,8832,25046%

The UD counts take imperfective finite verbs with Tense=Fut (excluding бути) and auxiliary бути in the future attached to an infinitive. The Leipzig counts are approximate: forms ending in -тиму, -тимеш, -тиме, -тимемо, -тимете, -тимуть (with -ся/-сь) against an adjacent future form of бути + a word in -ти(ся). The two forms differ by text type: edited news prefers the synthetic form two to one, parliamentary speech prefers the analytic one nine to one, and encyclopaedic Wikipedia is in between. Neither form is old-fashioned in any of them.

6.3 Remnants of the dual

Old East Slavic had a dual number. Modern Ukrainian has none as a category, but forms of it survive:

6.4 The pluperfect

The pluperfect (давноминулий час) is був/була/було/були + the past tense: я читав був 'I had read', він з'їв був. Simovych (1919, §§ on tense) still lists it as one of the four tenses of the indicative, and describes the conditional past built on it (як би ти не ходив був на вечорниці 'if you had not gone to the evening party'). Today it is rare and literary, often with a nuance of an action begun and undone ('had been about to'). In UD IU, 8 sentences have an auxiliary бути in the past attached to a past-tense verb; ParlaMint has 1. The related particle було (пішов було, та повернувся 'he set off, but came back') is common in speech.

6.5 Short and long adjectives

Old East Slavic distinguished short (nominal) and long (pronominal) adjectives. Modern Ukrainian adjectives are long and mostly contracted (добрий, добра, добре; old добрая, доброє). Short forms survive in a closed set: винен 'guilty, owing', повинен 'obliged', ладен 'ready', годен 'able, fit', згоден 'agreeing', здатен 'capable', рад 'glad', певен 'sure', повен 'full', and the pronominal кожен 'each', жоден 'none'. UD tags them Variant=Short: IU has 50 such tokens (кожен 29, повинен 5, здатен 3, згоден 2, годен 2, ладен 1 …), ParlaMint 124, of which повинен 21, кожен 14, потрібен 8, жоден 4. They are ordinary speech, not archaisms.

Uncontracted long forms (добрії, зеленая, молодая, всеє) are old forms of song and poetry. Nechui-Levytskyi (1913) cited them from folk songs and called them a remnant of the "dead old language" not to be used in literary prose; they are still sung (08 §6).

6.6 Old participles

The old short active participles gave modern adverbial participles (дієприслівники): present -чи (читаючи 'reading', ідучи 'going'), past -ши, -вши (прочитавши, принісши). These are standard and common: UD tags them VerbForm=Conv, 428 in IU and 160 in ParlaMint. The Chronicle of the Eyewitness already uses them as today (§3.1).

The long active present participles in -чий (читаючий, існуючий) are a different matter. A small number are adjectives of long standing (лежачий 'lying', сидячий 'sitting'), and -чий adjectives such as гарячий, колючий, смердючий are native. The productive participle -ючий used as in Russian (існуючий 'existing', блокуючий 'blocking') is treated as a Russianism by normative works: VESUM lists nearly 3,500 such participles as :bad, with replacements such as a relative clause (що існує) or an adjective (чинний, наявний); they occur more than 730,000 times (410 per million) in GRAC (Starko & Rysin 2025). This is a case where usage, in edited writing as well, and the norm are far apart; 13. Verbs gives the forms.

The impersonal forms in -но, -то (зроблено 'it has been done', сказано, взято) continue old neuter short passive participles; they are standard and especially common in official prose (13. Verbs).

6.7 Old endings in verbs

6.8 Archaic words

Some old words are restricted to church, solemn and poetic style: уста 'lips' (everyday губи), чоло 'brow', десниця 'right hand', перст 'finger', глаголати 'speak', благословенний 'blessed', отче (vocative of отець). Others are old but entirely ordinary: аби 'so that', бо 'because', либонь 'probably', мовляв 'so to say, as they say' (from an old form of мовити 'speak'), вельми 'very' (now bookish), ніж 'than'. VESUM tags 9,526 lemma lines :arch (archaic or, in some cases, dialectal) out of 442,458 (count of 2026-11-06; CC BY-NC-SA, counts only). ParlaMint tags 7 tokens Style=Arch.

7. How modern readers meet older texts

At school and in church. The school canon runs from the Slovo o polku Ihorevim (read in modern translation) through Kotliarevskyi and Shevchenko to the 20th century. The Bible and the liturgy keep Church Slavonic words and old forms (єси, отче, во віки віків 'for ever and ever'). Folk songs keep the long adjectives, the short -м, dual remnants and dialect forms (§6.5, chapter 37).

In modernised editions. Most readers meet 19th- and early 20th-century literature in editions with modern spelling. These editions differ in how far they normalise. Shvedova, Prydvorova & Skibina (2022) compared the two collected editions of Lesia Ukrainka, in twelve volumes (1975–1979) and in fourteen (2021), and found that the 2021 edition renders the author's language more faithfully but normalises her spelling inconsistently. GRAC replaced the 1970s texts with the 2021 ones (1,225 texts, about 1.5 million tokens: letters 0.56 million, poetry 0.33, prose 0.23, journalism 0.15, historical works 0.12, folklore records 0.08) and added to VESUM a separate module of normalisation rules that apply only at lemmatisation, so the text keeps its original look. Separate modules are needed because of homonymy: the token ма in old texts is mostly a verb form ('has', western dialect), in modern ones an address to a mother ('ma'). The authors note that for a closed subcorpus such rules can be hand-tuned, but in a growing corpus the extra rules multiply and the method loses its efficiency.

In the original. Middle Ukrainian texts (the Cossack chronicles, polemics, charters) are read in the original by historians and in editions such as Levytskyi's Samovydets (§3.1). The Institute of the Ukrainian Language publishes the old monuments (among them the Galician Gospel of 1144, the Peresopnytsia Gospel of 1556–1561) and is preparing a Dictionary of the Ukrainian language of the second half of the 17th–18th centuries, following the dictionaries of the 14th–15th and of the 16th–first half of the 17th centuries (Puriaieva, Kotsa & Babenchuk 2022).

8. How Mova handles older Ukrainian

Mova has no model of older Ukrainian. It holds no Old East Slavic or Middle Ukrainian treebank (Universal Dependencies has Old East Slavic treebanks; none is in Mova's collection), no normaliser for older spelling, and no lexicon of archaic forms.

Sources for this chapter

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/09-older-ukrainian/