Еще раз o языковой непрерывности

Abstract

The theory of language continuity which dates back to the 19th century (A. Pictet, R. Schuchardt, J. Schmidt) saw active development in the 20th century which became an epoch of compiling dialectological atlases verifying the theory. The analysis of interpretative syntactic maps of Belarus we have made on the basis of dialectal data shows that the territory of Belarus regarded from the point of view of syntactic properties as well as in other aspects is characterized by continuity. A. X. Sobolevsky was the first to notice it. At the beginning of the 20th century he wrote that in the light of J. Schmidt’s wave theory Belarus might become of great interest to linguists. Our research reaffirms it with numerous additional data The interpretative syntactic maps of Belarus reveal three levels of continuity - Belarusian-Russian, Eastern-Western Slavic, and Baltic-Slavic. It is an indication that continuity, in our opinion, is not merely a relationship between two languages on different diachronic planes but a much more complicated phenomenon. We suppose it necessary to single out continuity proper which can be defined as the field of a language unit the center of which is characterized by unconscious bilinguism of the bearers of rural dialects.