The Causes of interlingual homonymy of the Belarusian and English languages

Natallia Narkevich, the Republic of Belarus, ID LLCE2018-318;    Abstract: If you look at the map of Europe you will rightfully assume that the distance between Belarus and the UK makes linguistic borrowings almost impossible and on the one hand you will be right. But on the other hand, if we look back into history we can find some similarities between the way the Romans invaded England and brought their cultural traditions and their language to the land of the Angles and the Saxons and the Latin language which had been holding the leading position in Europe for many centuries and penetrated into Belarusian. And like the Romans who occupied England, but left the territory of Scotland and Wales free of their expansion, Latin had also stopped on the border of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and hadn’t intrude into the Russian language though it had left a remarkable legacy on the territory of modern Belarus.

This fact naturally leads to the following question: does this give the grounds to assume that the Belarusian language is closer by its linguistic characteristics to English than Russian? The problem is that from time to time we can hear some hints or allusions – especially from politicians – that there is no Belarusian as an independent language and it is only a distorted version of Russian. So the aim of my simple and modest research – in a broad sense -  is to show that the Belarusian language is a true European language that possesses some features which Russian lacks.

In linguistic way the aim of the research is to find out the causes of similar words and grammatical structures of the two very distant languages. The practical value of the research is to prove the connection between the Belarusian and the English languages setting up the pairs of cognates and to show that borrowings from other languages came to Belarusian not only through Russian but directly and independently. So, we hope that the research will lead to the revival of the interest in the Belarusian language.

Key words: borrowings, cognates, linguistic characteristics, the Belarussian language