Formation of the Spelling of Compound Nouns with an Initial Imperative in the History of Russian Writing

The article deals with the codification of the syllabic and hyphenated spelling of compound nouns in diachrony. The usual norm is established on the material of the texts of the National Corpus of the Russian Language, the codified norm is established on the material of grammars and dictionaries of the 19th century, as well as on the material of sets of rules of the 20th and 21st centuries. In the XVIII century compound nouns with the initial imperative are written separately, which is fixed by both editions of the “Dictionary of the Academy of Russian” dating from the turn of the XVIII–XIX centuries. In the “National Corpus of the Russian Language” of the 19th c. hyphenated spellings of the studied formations, fixed in the dictionary of 1847, appear, except for the formation “skopidomъ”, which is noted in the usus and codified in the merged form. After the 1917– 1918 reform, the formation “skopidom” is still written in the fused form, but the words “perekati polye” and “sorvigolova” have different fused, hyphenated and even separate forms. The 1936 Draft proposes to unify the semicolonization of all nouns of this group on a morphological basis (verb in the imperative mood), contrary to the stable orthography of words such as “skopidom”. The 1956 rules, on the contrary, codify their fused spelling, moreover, on a different basis — graphical (the first part in i), while forgetting about the exception of “perekati polya”, which in usus is stably spelled with a hyphen. The 2006 handbook returns the exception “perekati polya” and, following the drafts of 1936 and 2000, formulates the rule on a morphological basis (verb in the imperative mood). The stability of the orthography of words of this group is different and depends, in our opinion, on the degree of derivability of its meaning from the semantics of parts, as well as the presence of homonymic word combinations in the modern Russian language.