STANDARDS OF BUSINESS WRITING AND RUSSIAN GRAMMAR OF THE 18th CENTURY

Abstract

The article is devoted to studying the history of Russian orthography in the early period of its codification. Spelling recommendations of the Russian grammar systems of M.Lomonosov and A.Barsov are consistently compared with norms prevailing in the manuscripts of business content. It is noted that the business cursive writing had still focused on the live speech, had kept a wide variation, while the printed text and grammar reflect the tendency towards uniform spelling of morphemes based on the morphological principle. The authors of the Russian grammar, basing on tradition, tend to consolidate a number of Church Slavonic spellings.