Stylometric Analysis of the Church Slavonic Texts of Czech Origin

The paper presents a pilot study of stylometric analysis of Czech Church Slavonic texts. The aim of the study is to measure similarities / differences among texts based on selected quantitative characteristics. Specifically, the average token length (ATL), moving average type-token ratio (MATTR), and text distances determined by normalized frequencies of the most frequent words (MFW) are applied. For the analysis, we used a corpus of twelve Church Slavonic literary writings attributed (with various probability) to Czech authors in the 10th and 11th centuries. In addition, two more textual sources were added (Codex Suprasliensis and the Life of St. Methodius) to compare the results and get a more complex view of relationships among texts. The results show the plausibility of the application of methods on this specific sample of texts.