The Research Center for Areal Linguistics (ICAL), a scholarly unit within the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, has launched the Macedonian Language Digital Archive website (http://damj.manu.edu.mk) developed over the past ten years.
Around fifty rare and influential old books on the Macedonian language —grammar books, orthography books, comparative studies, monographs, dialect materials—have been digitized and published online. Among them are Krume Kepeski’s Macedonian Grammar (1946), Blaže Koneski and Krum Tošev’s Macedonian Orthography (1950), Krste Petkov Misirkov’s On Macedonian Matters (1903), and The Abecedarium published in Athens, Greece (1925).
The oldest book in the archive is Georgi Pulevski’s Trilingual Dictionary (1875).
The older editions, dating from the 19th century, also include academic papers on the Macedonian language by international Slavic studies scholars, such as Vatroslav Oblak, Leonard Masing, and Mieczysław Małecki.
“This is the largest Macedonian language digital resources database. It is now available to anyone in the world, and the books can be downloaded in a .pdf format,” ICAL manager Marjan Markovikj said.
At the second day of the International Scholarly Convention Days of Macedonian Studies at MANU, organized by ICAL, the Japanese Slavistics scholar Motoki Nomachi presented the Macedonian grammar book written by Soviet linguist Samuil Borisovich Bernstein, the founder of the Slavic philology department at the Lomonosov University in Moscow.
The book had been considered lost for 70 years, and the Japanese scholar discovered it in the Moscow City Archive a few years ago.
Bernstein’s grammar, according to Markovikj, was the first Macedonian grammar book written in Russian, whereas the first English-language Macedonian grammar was written by Harvard professor Horace Lunt in 1952.
