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

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:In this paper, I argue that the jer-letter merger in the corpus of the Novgorod birchbark letters is entirely explicable in terms of the underlying phonology of the Old Novgorod dialect. In particular, I propose that the outcome of the jer shift in the Old Novgorod dialect was affected by a Finnic substratum.