Dating the hymns and troparions

Here's a good way of dating some of them:

If the translations are hilariously bad and/or clumsy, like they somehow managed to get the words "the" and "thee" back-to-back in a troparion, that translation was done in the 20th century by the Antiochians. (this coming from an Antiochian)

I'm no liturgy scholar, but I remember Cosmas the Anchorite wrote many and he lived in the 8th century.

Depends, really....some were written a few years ago (for the newer saints) and some were written well over a thousand years ago.

This is incredibly off-topic, but...

I took the title of this thread completely wrong. (Consider the multiple meanings of the word "date.") I just about fell out of my chair laughing.

Thought I would resurrect this thread and make amends for my earlier unhelpful remark by making a suggestion. I haven't researched this at all as it pertains to the East, but in the West, most of the hymnography used to be the work of monastics, and it was customary for monastics not to sign their work. That's why so much chant is by "anonymous." Not that it fell out of the sky, or was left on a church doorstep, but the monk (or nun, in some cases) who wrote it didn't want any credit. Maybe that's the case in Orthodoxy, too, although I really don't know.

Usually the hymnographers hide their name in the sentence made up by combining the first letter (Acrostichis) of each troparion from the matins canon. Cryptic, I know. Needless to say this only works in Greek. For example, for today's troparia the Acrostichis reads:

"Glorious doctors of mortals it is meet to praise, Joseph"

- Edit -

Obviously once you identify the hymnographer and find out when he lived you can figure out the date of the troparia.