Lyudmila Putina: Russian language should not be reformed

The City Duma of Nizhny Novgorod has approved the proposition of deputy Vladimir Pachenov about changing the way of writing the title of power body of the regional centre. Since the moment the decision comes into effect, every word in the title will be written with big letter, like in English, contrary to the Russian orthography rules, where only first word in the title is written big. Though, if somebody of Russians thinks to be literate, this is only an illusion. There are no literate people in the nature. There are only professionally literate people: proof-readers. Though, they undertake correcting a text only fully armed with numerous dictionaries.

So, if you take a text written by a literate person, corrected with a proof-reader, and exclude all misprints, you could see that most of mistakes the literate people make while exalting with big letters the titles of different ministries and organizations.

Proof-readers are really tired of correcting advertising texts: if even a proof-reader corrects a text, the advertiser does not want to vise it, because he cannot allow to write small the word “director,” all the more the word-combination “board of directors.”

The same could be said about different commissions, programmes, governors. So people anyway will write all this words big, only from honour to the leadership.

For several years, your linguists have been doing their best to carry out the reform of Russian language. Though, after the first lady of the country Lyudmila Putina, who is professional philologist, and therefore the first philologist of the country, said that there was no necessity in the language reform, the academicians stopped reforming the language. And only Vladimir Pachenov could not correctly estimate the situation.

Though, what is without doubt is that we should pass a law about protection of great and powerful Russian language which could be so easily ridicule by every city duma. If the situation is developing in the same way, in 10 years citizens of different Russian cities will understand each other with difficulty. You know, every deputy has his own linguistic ambitions.

Yelena Kiseleva PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Vera Solovieva

Read the original in Russian: http://www.pravda.ru/culture/2002/07/05/43761.html