Syntactic feature or scribal convention?

Apr 18, 2012 by

Syntactic feature or scribal convention?

In an earlier post, discussing the birch bark document 607/562 (see image on the left), I mentioned a peculiarity of word order in this brief crime report: the appositive phrase (=extra description) NOVGORODSKE SMЬRDE appears not...

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Birch Bark Letters and the Second Slavic Palatalization, part 3

Sep 14, 2011 by

At the end of the previous posting, we’ve reached a conundrum: the Old Novgorod dialect must have diverged from the rest of the Slavic family early enough to avoid the application of the Second Slavic Palatalization, yet not...

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Birch Bark Letters and the Second Slavic Palatalization, part 2

Sep 13, 2011 by

At the end of the previous posting, I said that the Old Novgorod KѢLЪ, the Modern Russian CELYJ and the English whole are all cognates, but how are they related to each other? This is where the Second Slavic Palatalization comes in....

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Birch Bark Letters and the Second Slavic Palatalization, part 1

Sep 13, 2011 by

While the second part of this posting’s title may sound scary to some of you, bear with me and you will discover one of the most fascinating puzzles of Slavic historical linguistics. But let’s concern ourselves with the...

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Birch Bark Letters, part 3

Sep 12, 2011 by

In the previous posting, I brought up an example of a short crime report known as the combined birch bark document #607/562. It’s diagram, transliterated text and translation are repeated below for ease of reference....

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