Profesora Mariana Kucały Metoda rekonstrukcji gwar i jej zastosowanie w badaniu gwar i nazw własnych na Podlasiu .......... 79

PROFESSOR MARIAN KUCAŁA’S DIALECT RECONSTRUCTION METHOD AND ITS APPLICABILITY IN DIALECT AND PROPER NOUN RESEARCH IN PODLACHIA (PODLASIE)

A memoir piece. It recalls a dialect reconstruction method of long-gone dialects or ones that can be described as vestigial. The method was formulated by Marian Kucała in 2002. The basis for dialect reconstruction is spoken sources – direct evidence of a language’s past: resorting to one’s memory, preserving dialect’s characteristics in rural referent’s terms, linguistic hypercorrectness, mocking of a dialect, preserving dialect’s characteristics in folklore, the usage of dialects outside a country, for example in America, and preserving dialect’s features in proper nouns. Letters, for example ones produced during labour migration, military service, handwritten church songs in prayer books, written wedding songs, school diaries, writing on roadside statues, gravestone inscriptions – those are the written sources contributing to the process of dialect reconstruction. The author of the article uses M. Kucała’s method to reconstruct Podlachia’s dialects and extinct Ukrainian dialects in that area, and to study proper nouns.