ON THE INTERPRETATION OF CERTAIN BIRCHBARK LETTERS

 The article proposes amendments and additions to the interpretation of four birchbark documents. The mysterious word kob’azhaninъ in letter No. 831 is interpreted as a derivative of the ethnonymic base kъlb’ag- (it thus contributes to the body of evidence on the ethnic category of Kolbyags). In letter No. 528, the segments gievk’a, g’akov’a, which had previously been regarded as the Cyrillic numeral '3' (г҃) preceding the names Ievko and Yakov, were reinterpreted as renderings of an initial [j] in these two names using the letter g. The key evidence for these readings comes from the birchbark letters discovered in recent years (Novgorod No. 1102 and Vologda No. 1, respectively), where the relevant phonetic effects have been discerned. We consider these two readings to be quite reliable. In addition to these readings, we also offer versions for the analysis of documents No. 915-I and 376, which feature drawings. Even the presence of a meaningful text is here a matter of conjecture, so we cannot insist on these versions with certainty. Document No. 915-I (the oldest Russian icon) does not seem to contain a date, and document No. 376 probably features fragments of a church text recorded by the pupil who engraved both the letters and the drawing on the birchbark