The larger part of the present volume is about Slavic historical linguistics while the second part is about more general issues and methodological aspects. The initial chapters contain a revision of the author’s Slavic Accentuation and a discussion of the Slovene evidence for the Late Proto-Slavic accentual system and of the Kiev Leaflets. These are complemented by an extensive review of Garde’s theory and an introductory article about the work of earlier authors for those who are unfamiliar with the subject. Then follows a discussion of changes in the vowel system, Bulgarian developments, final syllables in Slavic, early changes in the consonant system, and of Halle and Kiparsky’s review of Garde’s book. This results in a relative chronology of 70 stages from Proto-Indo-European to Slavic. The following chapters deal with the progressive palatalization, the accentuation of West and South Slavic languages, various aspects of the Old Slovene manuscripts, the chronology of nominal paradigms, and other issues under discussion in recent publications. The second part of the present volume contains a number of case studies exemplifying specific theoretical problems, most of them of a semantic nature. The synchronic studies deal with Russian and Japanese syntax and semantics, the diachronic studies with tonogenesis in different languages and with semantic reconstruction in Altaic and Chinese.

In Voices on Birchbark Jos Schaeken explores the major role that writing on birchbark – an ephemeral, even ‘throw-away’ form of correspondence and administration – played in the vibrant medieval merchant city of Novgorod and other cities in the Russian Northwest. Birchbark literacy was crucial to the organization of Novgorodian society; it was integrated into a huge variety of activities and had a broad social basis; it was used extensively by the laity, by women as well as men, by villagers as well as landlords. Voices on Birchbark is the first book-length study of this unique corpus in English. By examining a representative selection of birchbark texts, Jos Schaeken presents fascinating vignettes of daily medieval life and a holistic picture of the pragmatics of communication in pre-modern societies.