The Russian Academy of Sciences agreed with the spelling of the word “Holocaust” with a capital letter
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The head of the spelling commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Corresponding Member of the Academy Alexei Shmelev said that the practice of writing the word “Holocaust” with a capital letter should be taken into account in academic reference publications, including in the answers of the information service of the Institute of the Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Earlier, the Russian Jewish Congress turned to the Russian Academy of Sciences with a request to fix the spelling of this word with a capital letter in dictionaries.
Shmelev recalled that the word entered the Russian language recently, before such designations as Catastrophe and Shoah were not very widely used, and both words were written with a capital letter. However, according to the scientist, the word Catastrophe represents the event “as a kind of natural disaster, and the word Shoah does not quite correspond to the norms of Russian phonetics.”
“It is the word Holocaust that can now be considered the main and stylistically neutral designation,” the head of the commission believes.
He noted that some of the rules related to the functioning of the word are not yet fully established, but points out that “in official documents this word is written almost exclusively with a capital letter.” At the same time, Shmelev added, “regularities in the use of capital letters <...> change over time”, besides, in some languages there are no capital letters at all, but “this does not interfere with normal written communication in these languages”.
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