Finally, after several years of intensive discussions and work a group of Belarusian linguists published the new updated version of the classical orthography rules. The PDF and DOC files of this document are freely available on our website in the downloads section.
August 31st, 2005
In the beginning of August, the German media giant "Deutsche Welle" announced its plans to start broadcasting to Belarus (tentative starting date, October 2005). The big surprise is the choice of broadcasting language: it's Russian, not Belarusian. This is, probably, the first time ever, when a Western media chooses to broadcast to Belarus in Russian. This decision of the Germans sparkled protests in Minsk and in diaspora all over the world. Youngsters in Minsk staged street protests demanding from "Deutsche Welle" not to encourage further Russification of Belarus. Thousands of people sent letters to the German embassy, also demanding to review the choice of broadcastig language. The vice-president of the European Parliament mister Onyszkiewicz sharply criticised "Deutsche Welle" for choosing Russian, not Belarusan. We are planning to make a separate web-page with the up-to-date information on the issue of European broadcasts to Belarus and related language issues.
July 28th, 2005
"Ethnographical and Historical Territories and Boundaries of Whiteruthenia" is a rare ethnographic map from the a famous Belarusian linguist Dr. Jan Stankievich that was published in New York in 1953. You can find the JPEG-map image and the accompanying text in the download section.
July 2nd, 2005
First of all, I'm happy to announce that a new, long-awaited edition of the new orthography rules of the classical system was released in Minsk last month, and soon we are going to prepare and upload the electronic version of this document. In other news, Vera Rich sent a disquieting open letter about one Belarusian programme of UNESCO Moscow office.
In 2004, a bilinguial anthology of original poems "Poems on Liberty: Reflections for Belarus" was published by Radio Liberty. Here I posted the preface to the book, the translator's notes about difficulties and challenges in translating poetry from Belarusian into English.
October 27th, 2004
Some updates in the utilities section. There is a new little script to display Unicode codes of characters in any language. Also several weeks ago I've set up a special voting page for Belarusian speakers to vote on the preferred spelling forms of the foreign loan words in the new standard of the classical orthography.
April 17th, 2004
Professor Andrej Katlarczuk from Stockholm (Sweden) wrote a short commentary "Vitryssland is not Russia in winter" in Belarusan. I've written a short English summary.
March 6th, 2004
February 18th, 2004
Great news. First of all, our colleagues made a bunch of Belarusian dictionaries available online at slounik.org. And secondly there is finally a nice introduction to Belarusian grammar in English! Chris Marchant wrote a great 100-page guide to modern Belarusian, which is now freely available for download on our site.
January 24th, 2004
There is a new article in the Belarusian section about the new 3rd edition of the Soviet Belarusian-Russian dictionary that came out in 2004 and for political reasons does not include even such basic and well-known Belarusian words as "spadar" (mister). The article includes a brief English summary on top of the page.
January 14th, 2003
December 31st, 2003
On January 1st we celebrate the 143th birthday of the great Belarusian linguist Jauchim Karski, and today I have uploaded one very nice article about him "Academician Karski" that was written by Arnold McMillin and published in "The Journal of Byelorussian Studies" in 1967. Also I have made some changes to Marc Chagall's Biography.
In the Belarusian language section there is a new article with the top ten list of the best-selling Belarusian books in 2003. The article includes an English summary at the bottom. Happy New Year!
After a relatively long hiatus there is a new article in English "Grammatical Changes in Modern Literary Belarusian Language" (1968). This is a public lecture that was delivered by professor de Bray in London in 1968, which serves as a good introduction to anyone who wants to know what are the key differences between the classical and the Soviet orthography.
November 24th, 2003
Due to a growing number of guestbook messages (460 messages as of today) and considering that there appeared some rather informative and interesting comments, I have made a special guestbook search. There still might be some small bugs, please, contact me if you spotted any bugs or have any other suggestions.
Also it's worth noting that exactly one month ago on October 24th akavita.by and splylog.com counters have crossed the 40,000 mark. In spite of relatively infrequent updates (unfortunately!) people still visit pravapis.org regularly. This is wonderful. Thanks to everyone!
The authorities closed down Belarusian Humanities Lyceum, but children are fighting for their rights, for their right to receive Belarusian-language education in Minsk.
August 6th, 2003
The city council of the oldest Belarusian city Polack (or Polacak) have decided to make a monument of the unique Cyrillic Belarusian letter Ў (non-syllable U). The article about this new monument includes an English summary at the bottom.
August 6th, 2003
The city council of the oldest Belarusian city Polack (or Polacak) have decided to make a monument of the unique Cyrillic Belarusian letter Ў (non-syllable U). The article about this new monument includes an English summary at the bottom.
August 3rd, 2003
There is a new article in Belarusian about an old form of future tense in Belarusian language that was banned by the communist language reformes in 1933. The article includes an English summary.
July 18th, 2003
There is a new article in Belarusian, an opinion poll among famous Belarusian writers, linguists and journalists about the co-existance of two orthographical systems in the Belarusian language. Also there is a new article in English with the tables of the phonetic alphabets for English (British and American), German, Russian and Belarusian.
June 23rd, 2003
Yesterday evening I have received shocking and tragic news from Minsk. Vasil Bykau, one of the greatest modern writers of Belarus, has passed away. Please read this article – Vasil Bykau.
June 11th, 2003
June 3rd, 2003
May 18th, 2003
Several new additions to the lacinka download (corrected the capslock problem and added the versions for Windows 2000 and Windows XP). Also our guestbook now on supports Unicode, which means you can type your entries in any alphabet you want: Cyrillics, Lacinka, Arabica or any other.
May 3rd, 2003
Another new article in the Belarusian section "Belarusian Language in 20th century" is about computer and technical terminology in Belarusian and the problems of the Belarusian language development throughout 20th century. Also there is a new article in English Auld Guid White Ruce about parallels in Scottish and Belarusian history.
A new article in the Belarusian section The Minsk City Guide (1930), a rare edition with only a few copies preserved on paper (this is a shortened version with comments). The guide is written in Belarusian, in classical pre-reform orthography.
I also would like to congratulate all the visitors with the upcoming event: the 85th annivessary of the independence of Belarusian National Republic, that was proclaimed on March 25th, 1918, independent from the communist Russia or anyone else. Best wishes to you!
Quite a few updates. First of all, an article in English about different forms of the adjective: Byelorussian, Belarusian, Belarusan... Then, a new article in Belarusian, a short slang dictionary of Belarusian hippies and punks of the late 70's and early 80's. And, finally, modified KBD and DLL files with the new keyboard layout that includes the new letter "Cyrillic Ghe with upturn" (as it's called in the Unicode charts) in the download section. Also, note that there is a very active discussion in the guestbook about the adjective and the new letter.
January 10th, 2003
Greetings in the new year! We have compiled a top list of the most popular articles from the last year. Check them out just to be sure that you have not missed some interesting article.
Also, you can now search our site using three different options: our internal search (not so friendly, but really searches through all files), with the help of google (probably almost as good as internal, and much friendlier design), and finally, you can search for related books on Amazon. The recommended way to search is via Google, which is the default option in our search box.
December 25th, 2002
Breaking news: our Academy of Science is planning a new language reform. So far, there are only sketchy details regarding the nature of this reform. We will post more details, once we know more about this initiative of the government.
December 23rd, 2002
Finally, on X-Mas eve I added the guestbook. So now you can actually sign the guestbook or check out what others have written already. And, of course, I wish you all a very merry X-Mas!
December 20th, 2002
Compiled a new article containing the letter frequencies for Belarusian and Russian. There is also Excel sheet with complete data and Windows utility to calculate frequencies on your local files, now available from downloads section.
December 8th, 2002
Uploaded a new article in Belarusian, the pot-pourri collection of Worvik's posts from various Belarusian forums about our language situation (the spheres of usage and the co-existence of two orthographical traditions).
December 2nd, 2002
We have scanned and uploaded yet another rare book on our site. This time it's the unique Turkish-Belarusian phrasebook of 1836, published in New York in 1995, and now available in Acrobat PDF file from our downloads section.
Anoter nice thing: we got a real mascot for our site. And it's the Regenmaus.
October 22nd, 2002
Bad news: the new hoster turned out to be not so reliable (we have about 20 hours of downtime since October 1st). And good news: I've uploaded a new article about Jewish songs in Belarusian, written by Janka Stankievic in 1933 for the "Annals of the Belarusian Scientific Society in Vilnia." There is a detailed English summary of the article and the scanned image of the notes.
October 3rd, 2002
Good news: there is a new version of our links page (still in beta) which allows to vote for the sites and submit new links via a special form. Even better news: we uploaded a rare edition of Belarusian ABC "Lemantar" that was published in New York in 1964. You can see it in the download section.
September 14th, 2002
In August I've experienced more difficulties with my web hoster and finally made the decision to move out and search for some other hosting company. Due to moving the site was inaccessible for more than 10 days in mid-August, but, thanks God, with the new web hoster everything seems to work perfectly. We haven't had any downtime so far. This is the good news. The summer is over, and I will try to update pravapis more often, which is perhaps also should be considered good news. And, yes, I did upload a new article in Belarusian about "trasianka", the famous Belarusian-Russian patois. The article includes summary in English at the bottom of the page.
July 28th, 2002
Translated the article about Belarusian Kitabs into English, also scanned and uploaded the images with the Belarusian-Arabic writing samples for this articles, as well as some other pictures for articles in Belarusian.
July 14th, 2002
Vilnius Pedagogical University is offering a major in Belarusian Philology. You are welcome to apply, the details about this programme and application process can be found in this announcement (see English summary at the bottom of the page).
July 9th, 2002
We got a couple more friendly language sites in the links section - slovnyk.org and mova.org. And also I have posted a list of possible topics for the articles submitted to pravapis.org. Internet activity in Belarus seemngly slows down in the summertime, but we will try to update as often as we can.
June 28th, 2002
The new article "Saying Nyet To Russian" has been published in the English section the day before.
Also yesterday our site set a new popularity record – 320 unique visitors and almost 600 page views in one day. By the way, the total number of page views since the birth of our site has now reached 20,000. Great!
The new book review about Lee Hogan's "Belarus" sci-fi novel "The thief that stole a whole country" has been added to the articles section (in English).
May 15th, 2002
Added one more book by Czeslaw Milosz and also two books by David Marples to the books review section and, besides, made some changes to the home page and the about page.
Also today, according to the stats of the akavita.by
webcounter we had a 5000th unique visitor. We are becoming the most popular site on the Web about Belarusian language.
May 2nd, 2002
There is a new minibutton which you can use to link to pravapis.org. Also, check out a new article in Belarusian about the decline of Old Belarusian in 17th century.
April 21th, 2002
We developed a new online translator for converting
"translit" into Cyrillic alphabet. It is still in beta, so you are welcome to play around with it
and send your suggestions. We had a lot of fun with this linguistic toy.
April 11th, 2002
Asuperb article about the scholar who brought the first printed Bible to the Eastern Slavs, dr. Francis Skaryna (Skorina). "At home in the West, in his native country he was perhaps ahead of his time." He was the person ever to publish a book on the whole territory of former Soviet Union.
April 4th, 2002
A new article about various spellings of our country name (Belarus) according to Google. Also an article in Belarusian section about netspeak, the language of the chats and on-line communication.
April 2nd, 2002
January 26th, 2002
A new article about Minsk slang in
the Belarusian language section (the unknown toponimy of the capital). Four new books in the Belarusian books section from the Belarusian bookstore oz.by.
January 10th, 2002
Several new articles in the Belarusian language
section (Al Kitabs – Belarusian-language manuscripts in Arabic writing, Vocative form and its correct
usage), new article about political aspect of speaking Belarusian in the 90's.
New materials were added: a sample phrasebook,
two converters from Cyrillic to Latin script, and several new articles. Everything was uploaded to the Web server.
October 3rd, 2001
The new Nasza Niva dictionary was converted
from separate RTF files into a single CHM (compiled HTML) help file.
Easy search and 400% compression. You can download it from
downloads section.
October 1st, 2001
The long "vacations" are over. The collection of the materials
has begun (links, articles, dictionaries, language utilities) and the first sample designs of the website have been created. That's the day when our language site started operating.
We have compiled a 