Where Belarusian puts a dash instead of a verb, which quotation marks it uses, and how direct speech is laid out on the page.
I can punctuate Belarusian prose, including dialogue, using the dash, guillemets and colon correctly.
Look at these examples. Can you spot the grammar pattern?
Мінск - сталіца Беларусі.
Minsk is the capital of Belarus.
Ён інжынер, а яго жонка настаўніца.
He is an engineer and his wife is a teacher.
«Я прыйду, - сказаў ён, - але позна».
"I will come," he said, "but late."
Пайшоў дождж - канцэрт адмянілі.
It started raining, so the concert was cancelled.
Pay attention to the highlighted parts. What do they have in common?
Belarusian has no present-tense copula, so where English writes is, Belarusian writes a dash - if both sides are nouns in the nominative:
No dash when the subject is a pronoun (Ён інжынер), or when не intervenes (Гэта не праблема).
A dash also marks a word left out because it was just used: Я паеду ў Мінск, а ты - у Гомель.
Belarusian uses the angled guillemets « », like Russian and unlike English. Nested quotation takes the low-high pair: «Ён сказаў: „Не пайду“».
Two layouts, and both are used:
When the attribution interrupts the speech, it is fenced by dashes and commas: «Я прыйду, - сказаў ён, - але позна».
Two things that trip up an English-trained writer: subordinate clauses always take a comma in Belarusian, however short (Я ведаю, што ён прыйдзе), and the full stop goes outside the closing guillemet, not inside.
Apply this grammar in B2 course exercises
Practice ExercisesTypical errors: omitting the dash between two nouns, and putting the full stop inside the closing guillemet.
Omitting the dash between two nominative nouns
Мінск - сталіца Беларусі.
Putting a dash after a pronoun subject
Ён інжынер takes none.
Putting the full stop inside the closing guillemet
It goes outside.
Leaving out the comma before a subordinate clause
It is always written, however short the clause.
Мінск - сталіца Беларусі.
Minsk is the capital of Belarus.
Two nominative nouns, so a dash stands in for the missing verb.
Ён інжынер, а яго жонка настаўніца.
He is an engineer and his wife is a teacher.
No dash after a pronoun subject.
«Я прыйду, - сказаў ён, - але позна».
"I will come," he said, "but late."
The attribution is fenced by dashes, and the full stop sits outside the guillemet.
Пайшоў дождж - канцэрт адмянілі.
It started raining, so the concert was cancelled.
A dash between clauses for consequence.
Я паеду ў Мінск, а ты - у Гомель.
I will go to Minsk and you to Homiel.
The dash marks the verb left out.
Practice in course
Apply this grammar in B2 course exercises
The state orthographic norm in force since 1 September 2010, cited as the law itself. It is what makes the written forms of akanne and jakanne, the obligatory ё, ў after a vowel and the apostrophe in place of a hard sign normative rather than conventional. No URL is given deliberately: the rules text is not published at a stable public address - the pages that carry the law show only its enacting articles - so a link here would imply a verification a reader cannot perform.
The academic reference grammar behind the phonology, orthoepy and morphology sections: the 32-letter inventory, дж and дз as digraphs rather than letters, and the normative description of akanne and jakanne. A print work; no URL is given, because the only one available is a library catalogue record that carries none of the text.