SPELLING OF COMPOUND NOUNS WITH CONNECTING VOWELS IN THE HISTORY OF RUSSIAN WRITING

Abstract

The article highlights codification of continuous and hyphenated writing of compound nouns in diachrony. A usual norm is established on the material of the texts of the National Corpus of the Russian Language, while the codified norm is established on the material of grammars and dictionaries of the 19th century, as well as sets of rules of the 20th – 21st centuries. In the 18 – 19 centuries compound nouns with connecting vowels, as a rule, are written together, with the exception of words with the meaning of cardinal points, which is fixed in grammatical works of the 19th century. In the “National Corpus of the Russian Language” of the 19 century there are hyphenated spellings of formations with the initial священно-, also recorded in the dictionary of 1847. After the reform of 1917 – 1918 both the continuous spelling of the words of the group under consideration and the semi-continuous design of some of them are preserved, although the existing rules do not mention any exceptions. Post-reform grammatical works clarify the spelling rules for compound nouns with a connecting vowel, introducing exceptions to the general rule in the semantic groups “names of political parties and trends”, “complex units of measurement” and “names of intermediate countries of the world”. The modern usage deviates from the rules in two cases: in church publications (hyphenation of complex nouns with the initial священно-); in the words that were proposed in continuous form in the 2000 Project in accordance with the formal feature (the presence of a connecting vowel). The work confirms the idea of the need for a single criterion for the motivation of continuous and hyphenated writing, with preference given to a formal criterion.