Crimean Tatar, Russian journalist Ayder Muzdabayev, while commenting the events around the Crimean Tatar media, did write: People who “propose ” to create a “public Crimeantatar TV channel” instead of ATR, do not know that the adjective “Crimeantatar” Crimean Tatars themselves write it together […]”.
In the comments to the author’s post, readers immediately pointed to the spelling dictionary, which fixes the spelling with a hyphen: “Crimean Tatar.”
For all its apparent insignificance, the question of one small line within an adjective is very important.
This is the case when there is a policy within the spelling, and the spelling reveals the attitude to the question, the attitude that has evolved over the decades.
The fact is that the rules of the Russian language prescribe writing adjectives derived from phrases WITHOUT a hyphen.
However, then why, from the phrase “Crimean Tatars” the adjective “Crimean-Tatar” is formed?
Let us recall one more rule, more precisely, the mechanism for checking it: if between parts of a word you can put the union “and” you must write a hyphen.
What does all of this mean? The fact that, by using a hyphen, we separate the two parts, as it were, affirm that “Crimea” separately and “Tatars” as well separately. Crimea and the Tatars, and not the Crimean Tatars.
By the way, linguists from the Vinogradov Russian Language college, with whom I discussed this topic, acknowledged this and said: “Yes, the incorrect spelling is recorded in the dictionary, this adjective should be written without a hyphen!”
It is clear that such spelling norm is fixed in Russia at the current time. It had existed for years and even decades now — this way, the spelling itself had pointed to native speakers of how they should understand this issue.
This hyphen is certainly political.
This does show the head attitude of the state, considering Crimeantatar people and their historic homeland.
Just remember this when writing!
Ksenia Turkova, journalist, candidate of philological sciences
source: [Ukrainian truth]
