Operation Letter of the Law

Intelligence agencies ask senators to improve their spelling

A gap has been discovered in Russia's national security system - a round, small, but very serious one. It turns out that it causes such serious concern among the leadership of the FSB that a special appeal to the Federation Council was required. Yesterday, State Secretary of the service, Deputy Director of the FSB Yuri Gorbunov, speaking at a meeting on the issue of legislative activity, asked senators to pay special attention to one single letter of the law. Namely, the letter “o” in the law “On operational investigative activities.” “We now have a law on operational-investigative activities, but in all other regulations it is already written “operational-investigative”, with an “a,” he reminded the senators, complaining that such discrepancies in documentation occur all the time.

The struggle of the special services with the letter “o” has been going on for many years now. In 2000, the State Duma even proposed a bill “On introducing amendments and additions to certain legislative acts of the Russian Federation,” one of the points of which was: “to change the letter “o” to the letter “a” in the title of the law “On operational investigative activities.” The initiators of the amendments referred to the fact that the word “search” was recognized as “contrary to spelling norms,” and the word “search” is present in such regulatory publications as the “Spelling Dictionary of the Russian Language” (29th edition and subsequent); Bukchina B.Z. “Together? Separately? Hyphenated? Spelling dictionary of the Russian language." M., 1998; Rosenthal D.E., Telenkova M.A. "Dictionary of difficulties of the Russian language." M., 1998.

Philologists explain the metamorphoses of the word “search” as “work to streamline Russian spelling.” This is exactly the conclusion that was made back in 1998 by members of the commission on Russian spelling at the Department of Literature and Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yuri Karaulov. As stated in their conclusion, “according to the rule of writing the prefix raz-/roz-/ras-/ros- it is written with the letter “o” only under stress, while in the unstressed position the letter “a” is written in it.” This rule is observed even within the forms of the same word: distributed , but distributed .”

Also, linguistic scientists argue that the test word for “wanted” is not the word “wanted” at all, as it seems at first glance, but the word “wanted.” “The verb to find - to find in the meaning of “to investigate” has been known to the Russian language since the 17th century,” the authors write. - Since the end of the 18th century. the word "search" fell out of active use and was not used in any official institutions. It became active again only in the 30s of the 20th century. Then, obviously, linguists should have corrected the spelling of this word.”

But Russian legislators, apparently like linguists of the 1930s, are very conservative and cautious about spelling and are in no hurry to eliminate spelling and legal conflicts. Speaker of the Federation Council Sergei Mironov admitted that legislators have quite a lot of questions about spelling words and it is not always possible to quickly get the necessary answer to a query from philologists. “Specialists gather and argue,” Mr. Mironov explained.

Irina BELASHEVA