Russian Spelling Test (news item)

[Andrew Jameson]

Johnson's Russia List
#5090
13 February 2001
davidjohnson at erols.com

#2
strana.ru
February 12, 2001
President and parliament members are invited to take spelling test

The Pushkin Russian Language Institute and Rossiiskaya Gazeta have invited
President Putin, Duma deputies, governors and the players of the Russian
National Hockey team to take a spelling test. In this way, they will be able
to participate in a nationwide Popular Spelling Test that begins on February
12.

The Rossiiskaya Gazeta journalists were the first to take the test. Ten
persons who wrote two sentences dictated by a teacher from a story by Leo
Tolstoy received an average 3.9 mark (based on a 5 points system). Only the
deputy editor in chief Viktoria Molodtsova received 5 points. The rest of the
journalists made punctuation mistakes or errors in carrying over words to
another line. True, there was only one spelling mistake in all ten papers.

The main thing in this undertaking is not to check out how well or how bad
people know their grammar, but to attract attention to language problem,
declared the acting editor in chief Vladislav Fronin. Even journalists, he
explained, have very poor vocabularies today. The overall level of grammar
has fallen dramatically, and this means that culture was on the decline as
well.

Academician Vitaly Kostomarov, the director of the Russian Language
Institute, pointed out that the country still has spelling rules that were
endorsed back in 1956 even though the language is developing and changing.
The Russian language will be what the younger generation wants it to be,
declared the philologist.

The prospects for reforming the Russian language are now under discussion in
the country. Experts at the Institute have been working on it for more than
10 years already. At the same time, it is assumed that the reform will
concern the spelling of not a great number of words, and it will also
"legalize" new words that have appeared in the language but which have not
yet been reflected in the spelling rules.

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