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When is Orthography Not Just Orthography? The Case of the Novgorod Birchbark Letters

“…These forms basically parallel post-jer shift OR forms. The presence of examples like this illustrates the important point that at no point in time does the BBL corpus reflect a linguistically monolithic population (Vermeer 1997). Furthermore, at no point does the prevalence of the {о, ъ} ~ {e, ь} merger exceed 92%.…”