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 N. 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 identified, 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 official 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 significant: (No. 1132) is a rare case of reflecting the diphthongic pronunciation of /e/ in writing;... (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.... (No. 1126). A new syntactic pattern is discerned where a group of relatives is described by a simple juxtaposition 'Ostashka's [and] his children's [debt]'). In the field of vocabulary, the following features are remarkable: the previously unknown name for the measure of volume pi gamma omicron b-nob pi mp (No. 1122/23), an early example of the expressive diminutive pattern as in (No. 1126), a bookish adverb sed in a business document (No. 1128), the word denoting sturgeon balyk (No. 1130), a reconstructed collocation 'grey marten' (No. 1133) - a parallel to the 'black marten' known from Povest' Vremennykh Let, and the earliest occurrence of the word 'breakdown of payments'(No. 1135).