National Academy of Sciences of Belarus

09.03.2016

Unique Concordance of 19th century Belarusian language to be presented in Central Scientific Library of NAS of Belarus

On March 10 at 3:00 p.m. there will be a presentation of an electronic edition of the Concordance of the Belarusian Language of the 19th Century in the Yakub Kolas Central Scientific Library of the NAS of Belarus (Мinsk, Surganov str., 15).

The Concordance is a unique lexicographic guide which has been released by the publishing house "Belarusian Science." The author of the project is a researcher at the Slavic and Theoretical Linguistics Section of the Yakub Kolas Institute of Linguistics N.M. Senkevich.

The Concordance of the 19th century Belarusian language is the first fundamental project of this type in national linguistics. This is a set of dictionaries compiled on basis of a text corpus, which is, in its turn, based on all works of fiction of the 19th century. All the texts are given as close as possible to the original form. The structure of the Concordance includes the Concordance itself in which every use of a word in a text is accompanied by a text illustration and information about its frequency and location, 6 frequency dictionaries, word pointer and reverse dictionary. Lists of texts in the Concordance represent a systematized bibliography of literature in the Belarusian language of the period.

In addition to the general Concordance, the guide includes four language concordances of individual authors, namely V. Martsinkevich, A. Yelsky, K. Kaganets and K. Kalinovsky.

The Concordance of the Belarusian Language of the 19th Century will be useful for both specialists in philology who can explore various aspects of the Belarusian language in the stage of formation of its literary form, and for a wide range of readers interested in literary heritage of the Belarusian people. Study of lexical units frequency allows to draw conclusions about the features of a writer's style, to trace thematic similarity in works by various authors, to draw conclusions on ways of development of the Belarusian language in the 19th century.

For more information, please contact Sergei L. Garanin: +375-17-2841531