When Beauty Was a Ribbon: Can Large Language Models Read Church Slavonic Lexicography Without Inventing Semantic Continuity?

In the Regional Great Russian Dictionary of 1852, красота ('beauty') denotes a bride's ribbon, placed by the priest into the Gospel book during the wedding rite. In the Suprasl Codex of the 10th–11th centuries, its root renders Greek κόσμος 'ornament, order, universe'. The familiar aesthetic sense—'attractiveness'—is a late and derived development. Historical lexicography preserves this stratigraphy; large language models, trained overwhelmingly on post-print text, may not. This pilot study tests whether LLMs can read pre-print-era dictionary definitions without projecting modern semantics backwards.

The material comprises entries for красота in eleven Church Slavonic and historical Russian dictionaries documenting the language of the pre-print era—from the earliest Slavonic manuscripts of the 10th–11th centuries onwards—in editions from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. The pre-print past becomes machine-readable only through this later lexicographic mediation, which is precisely where models may substitute their own training distribution for the historical record. A completed manual componential and Greek–Slavonic analysis of these sources serves as the gold standard: humanistic scholarship as the evaluation benchmark for AI. Definitions are presented to frontier models under three conditions—unattributed, source-attributed, and with an explicit question about the relation to modern meaning—separating inference from the text, recognition of the source, and knowledge of later semantics. Errors are classified as epistemic upgrades, anachronisms, fabricated components, fabricated Greek glosses, and invented continuity narratives.

Two single-model series (42 responses) show fabrication migrating to the continuity condition: the model refused to reproduce unseen dictionary content in direct probes, read the authentic regional label correctly, yet invented two contradictory expansions for its corrupted variant, produced an anachronistic attribution, and inserted a nonexistent word into a Septuagint quote. The paper proposes an anti-fabrication protocol for LLM-assisted work with historical lexicography—a contribution to defending pre-print scholarship against dangerously plausible AI output.