Birchbark letters from Veliky Novgorod excavations of the year 2020

The article is a preliminary publication of fourteen birchbark letters found in Veliky Novgorod during the archaeological season of 2020. With the exception of Nо. 1135 (mid-12th century), the published documents date back to the 14th — first half of the 15th century. Despite the fragmented state of most of the texts, their overall content can be plausibly reconstructed. The most important historically are No. 1122/1123 — a draft of a testament, where a number of characters known from the chronicle and charters can be identifi ed, and No. 1132 — a fragment of a petition mentioning the troops sent to Zavolochye. Also noteworthy are two letters written by the same hand, No. 1128 — an offi cial declaration of damages caused by the construction of a dam, and No. 1130 — a note accompanying a batch of sturgeon. In No. 1131, the address formula of a private letter is continued by a glossolalic text of obscure pragmatics. From a phonetic point of view, the following phenomena are signifi cant: вьѥстка <вѣстка> (No. 1132) is a rare case of refl ecting the diphthongic pronunciation of /ě/ in writing; ево (No. 1124) is an early example of the transition from /g/ to /v/ in the Gen. sg. masc.-neut. ending of pronouns and adjectives; the allegro form хошь (No. 1126). A new syntactic pattern is discerned where a group of relatives is described by a simple juxtaposition (на Ѻсташки на єго дѣтехъ ‘Ostashka’s [and] his children’s [debt]’). In the fi eld of vocabulary, the following features are remarkable: the previously unknown name for the measure of volume лубъ-пятерикъ (No. 1122/23), an early example of the expressive diminutive pattern as in шатришко (No. 1126), a bookish adverb поистинѣ used in a business document (No. 1128), the word хребетъ denoting sturgeon balyk (No. 1130), a reconstructed collocation сѣрая куна ‘grey marten’ (No. 1133) — a parallel to the черная куна ‘black marten’ known from Povest’ Vremennykh Let, and the earliest occurrence of the word розметъ ‘breakdown of payments’(No. 1135).