ИСТИНА

I argue that some corpus methods established in the field of linguistic expertise and authorship attribution can be applied in historical text corpora consisting of philologically relatively homogeneous text collections that nevertheless may contain more than one dialect form. As a case study, I discuss two memorably incidents reflected in the first Russian Embassy Books of Ivan III (the texts from 1474 to 1505), dated back with 1502 and 1505. The first episode is reflected in the negotiations with the Envoy of the Kefe Sultan. I argue that the Crimean embassy book contains genuine incoming letters written in the city of Kefe (Feodosia) in an Old Ukrainian dialect ca. 1500-1501. These texts were not edited by the Muscovites. The second episode tells the story of the Emperor Maximiliane I messenger who suddenly appeared in the boarder fortress Jaanilinn (Ivangorod) and requested an interpreter. I argue that this interpreter was of Novgorod origin. He can be identified with the well-known Russian author Dmitry Gerasimov. In the initial section, I also discuss the perspective of identifying Serbian-speaking people in the corpus of Valachian XV century letters, mostly written in Middle Bulgarian.