Language of Ciška Hartny’s Works as Reviewed in Belarusian Philological Research

Abstract

The studies of the language of Ciška Hartny, a writer and a public figure (1887–1937), have a long tradition in Belarusian humanities. However, different circumstances have made these linguistic studies ambiguous. On the one hand, in the 1920s Ciška Hartny was a writer whose language was studied most intensively. Between the 1920s and 2010s several articles were published about the language used in his works. A big corpus was scientifically adopted. Some remarks on Ciška Hartny’s language was included in the academic History of the Belarusian Literary Language (1968) and in two editions of the University handbook on the history of the Belarusian literary language (1963 and 1984). A few years ago an ambitious publication by Alieś Kaŭrus made an attempt to revise modern opinions that stem from 1950s and 1960s. On the other hand, the studies of Ciška Hartny’s linguistic heritage have not been consistent and are quite fragmented. During the mid-1930s and 1950s no studies were conducted on the writer’s language. This is common practice when researches do not consider the findings of predecessors. Until the present day there has been no incorporation into Belarusian linguistics of Jazep Liosik’s fundamental study of the late 1920s. The relevant methodology to study Hartny’s language as a part of the history of the Belarusian literary language is still absent. We observe a tendency to this day to evaluate Ciška Hartny’s language as a (potential) part of the modern literary language rather than from the viewpoint of the Belarusian literary language’s history.