Берестяные грамоты из раскопок 2021 г. в Великом Новгороде и Старой Руссе

Вопросы языкознания. 2022. № 6. С. 7–20.

Gippius A.

The article contains a preliminary publication of seven birchbark letters of the 12th — first half
of the 15th centuries found during the archaeological season of 2021 in Veliky Novgorod (Nos. 1136–
1141, 1144) and the letter No. 52 from Staraya Russa. Especially interesting in their contents are
No. 1137 (early 15th century) — a fragment of a large letter telling the story of a captured thief and
his bail, No. 1139 (early 12th century) — a vivid example of a “proto-document” drawn up as a letter;
No. 1141 — a fragment of a collective petition written in a famine year. From the phonetic point of view,
the spellings робьжь <рубежь> and ети <яти> (No. 1137) are remarkable. Lexically significant are
the earliest attestations of the agricultural term перелогъ (No. 1136), the verb перемчати (No. 1137),
the use of the verb заповúдати in the meaning ‘to announce publicly about sth’ previously known only
from the Russkaya Pravda, the personal name Пька, which is etymologically a present participle of печи
(No. 1139), the name Шелва (Staraya Russa, No. 52) that finds parallels in the Hypatian Chronicle and
is apparently of Turkic origin. Of high value for historical syntax are: the first vernacular record of the
predicative нú in combination with the infinitive with the meaning of impossibility; the use of the particle
ни with the meaning ‘and there is not’, which finds a parallel in the 10th-century Old Bulgarian Glagolitic
amulet; a rare example of the nominative with the imperative: въспиши ми грамота (No. 1144).
Keywords: birchbark letters, Novgorod, Old Russian, Staraya Russa

Keywords: древнерусский язык, Великий Новгород, birchbark documents, берестяные грамоты, Ancient Novgorod, Старая Русса, Staraya Russa, Old Russian

Publication based on the results of: Semiotic of literary and vernacular text: Slavic world between East and West (2022)