“Protestation by Yan Lisovsky”as a Reflection of Polotsk Residents’ Language of the Early17th Century
The reliability of conclusions about the origin and development of any language should be based on linguistic facts extracted from historical documents. Meanwhile, the activity of historical and linguistic research in Belarusian linguistics at the beginning of the new century has noticeably decreased.The purpose of this work is a systematic description of the language of one of the documents of the Old Belarusian script to determine the specific features of the speech of the inhabitants of the city of Polotsk in the first half of the 17th century and to identify the role of the language of this particular region in the history of the formation of the Belarusian language.Material and methods. The material for the study was the language of the document, created in 1633 in the city of Polotsk and given by historians the name “Yan Lisovsky's protest against the inhabitants of the city of Polotsk ...”. The study of the text was carried out by the method of systemic comparative historical analysis. Findings and their discussion. Despite the relatively small volume, the document makes it possible to carry out a certain systematization of the linguistic features reflected in it. Among them are:Phonetic features of the language of the inhabitants of Polotsk, which we would classify as Old Belarusian, especially in the area of hardening of hissing (fricative) consonants, in the spelling of the text appear in isolated cases.The grammatical structure of the document language reflects both archaic grammatical forms that go back to the Old Russian language and the elements of the formation of a new, independent, proper Belarusian grammatical structure.Analysis of the lexical composition of the document indicates the minimal use of lexical borrowings, which make up only about 5% of the vocabulary of the text.Conclusion. In the first half of the 17th century, an independent language system was formed on the territory of Polotsk Region, which was noticeably reflected already in the language of Belarusian literature of the 19th century and developed in later eras. It is this territory of present-day Belarus that should probably be recognized as the “ancestral home” of the future Belarusian language, and the very language of that era and that territory - Old Belarusian.