Capital or Lowercase Letters? The History of Orthography Practices in the 17th and 18th Centuries

The article is devoted to the practice of capitalization in church and secular publications of the 17th and 18th centuries. Smotritsky’s Grammar prescribed to capitalize proper names, geographical names and nomina sacra. However, in reality books of the church press did not comply with this recommendation. It was solely in prefaces and afterwords that the norms described by Smotritsky were partially followed, and it was only the names and titles of secular rulers that were consistently marked with capital letters. In the first editions, which were printed in the civil alphabet created by Peter the Great, capital letters were used randomly, but the names and titles of secular governors were capitalized. By the middle of the 18th century, the general principles of using capital letters in the new orthography had been approved. These principles were fixed in grammars and began to be perceived as universal, belonging to both the Russian and Church Slavonic languages. The last quarter of the 19th century was marked by a lengthy discussion about the need to use capital letters in Church Slavonic books. This idea was rejected, but the very fact of such a discussion shows that during this period the idea of normative spelling was determined by the norms of Russian rather than Church Slavonic orthography.