Spelling of the Noun Контр-Адмирал in the History of Russian Writing

: The article is devoted to the problem of substantiating the hyphenation of the noun контр-адмирал in diachrony and modern writing. The purpose of the article is to establish the usual and codified spelling norms of this lexeme and to trace their dynamics. The usage is established by sampling on the material placed in the National Corpus of the Russian Language. In addition, the material of grammars and dictionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries is used: The Dictionary of the Russian Academy of the turn of the 18th–19th centuries in two editions, Dictionary of the Church Slavonic and Russian Language (1847), grammars by N.I. Grech (1827), A.Kh. Vostokov (1831), the Academic Grammar of 1849. Nouns beginning with контр- are not codified strongly enough in this period, but the tendency to hyphenate such words develops in the next century and persists to the present day. Obviously, it was originally supported by the tradition of using capital letters in the composition of words such as контр-адмирал. As the uppercase letters were eliminated here, the authors of the 1956 Rule put forward the idea of the semantic separateness of the hyphenated use of контр-, as opposed to the normative confluent use. In the 2020s, the newest academic IPS resource “Spelling Comments on the Russian Dictionary” made an unsuccessful attempt to explain the peculiarities of the spelling of the word контр-адмирал with the meaning ‘low’, which is not confirmed by dictionary data. Obviously, the retention of the hyphenated form of контр-адмирал is due to the orthographic tradition and the desire to isolate morphemes in writing.