Christian Marchant and Dr. Michael Kelly, Germanic and Slavic Languages
The Republic of Belarus, located in the very heart of Europe, is a relatively unknown country to many westerners. Belarus has an important role in the political future of Europe. Belarus is located in the geographic center of Europe and is a major corridor for energy transport. The country is the only dictatorship remaining in Europe, and with the recent expansion of the European Union, it will now lie directly on its eastern border. Any traveler visiting Belarus would benefit greatly from a knowledge of Belarusian, yet there is a striking absence of any material in English about the Belarusian language. Frustrated by the absence of a thorough English description of Belarusian grammar, I undertook to write a guide to the Belarusian language myself.
One of the first tasks that I undertook was to create a concordance of the Belarusian language. A computer program that I wrote sifted through about 35 MB of texts of Belarusian literature to compile an alphabetized list of over 100,000 words together with their frequency and examples of usage. This resource allowed me to determine word morphology and verify word usage. Another advantage that this concordance offered was that when giving examples in the grammar guide, I was able to easily cite usage by a Belarusian author.
In describing the Belarusian language, I extensively referenced Russian texts on the Belarusian language. These texts assumed that the reader already possessed a basic knowledge of Belarusian, and concentrated more on advanced concepts, such as punctuation and complex syntax. Nevertheless, these books did sketch out many grammatical principles, which I was then able to fill in by using my concordance and by referring directly to Belarusian literature. Using these resources, I was able to complete a draft quality version of the grammar guide but many weaknesses in the text remained. These problems were of two types. The first were grammatical principles, like the imperative for example, which are used far more often in conversation than in written literature. I was unable to satisfactorily determine the rules that governed these principles from the literature alone. The other type of problem stemmed from the fact that in Belarus, there are many regional variations in vocabulary and word forms. It is important that a basic grammar guide give standard vocabulary and word forms.
In order to address these issues, I traveled to Belarus. It was my goal to enlist the help of an expert of the Belarusian language to rectify these problems, and to obtain recordings of conversational Belarusian. To accomplish the latter, I visited various towns and villages to interview speakers of Belarusian. These recordings provided good examples of colloquial speech as well as valuable help in understanding Belarusian pronunciation. I also visited the library of a university in Minsk, where I located materials showing which forms and vocabulary are standard and not simply regional variations.
The most important thing I did, though, was to visit the National Academy of Sciences, where I met Valentina Rusak, a professor of the Belarusian language. She answered the unresolved grammatical questions, helping me resolve the rules governing those principles. She also proofread the entire manuscript of my grammar guide, correcting any spelling and grammar mistakes that she found.
There were many challenges that I faced while completing this project. One of the largest is my lack of experience with either linguistics or philology. As an electrical engineer, I have unique skills that I was able to apply to this project, but I surely would have been able to describe the language more effectively if I had training, or at least guidance in these areas. I have since completed the grammar guide, titled Fundamentals of Modern Belarusian, and have placed it on the Internet. It is available at http://www.vitba.org/fofmb.pdf and is published under the GNU Free Documentation License. This means that the text can be freely modified and redistributed by any party. I intend to continue adding to and improving this work. Many of the topics in the guide need to be covered in more detail, and there are many grammar concepts that should be added. It is my hope that by releasing this document under the General Public License, perhaps others will contribute to improving this work.