Archaisms and computer spell check (on the material of the anthology Poetry of Moscow University: From Lomonosov to... )

The response of the text editor Microsoft Word 2016 (2017 modification) to some lexical and grammatical peculiarities of Russian poetry of the 18th-19th centuries is shown in the article on numerous examples. The examples of archaisms have been taken from the poetry of the authors who worked or studied at the Imperial University of Moscow. On March 14, 2017, the series Poetry of Moscow University: From Lomonosov to.. ., published in the MSU Research Computing Centre, Laboratory for Computational Lexicography (Lomonosov Moscow State University) was awarded with the National Award "BEST BOOKS AND PUBLISHERS - 2016" in the nomination "Poetry" (http://www.whoiswho.ru/yearbook/yearbooks2016/). Examples from Books 1 and 7 of this anthology have been used. This article analyzes the recommendations of the spell checker ("suggestion") on the correction of obsolete vocabulary. Furthermore, an attempt is made to identify and explain the response of Word Spell Check (which is not always appropriate) to deviations from modern Russian grammar in verses, even if they have been marked in academic dictionaries and handbooks. It is shown that the inclusion of some obsolete and low-frequency words into the internal (system) computer dictionaries sometimes not only does nothing to improve the work of the speller, but leads to skipping of errors and typos. The operation of MS Word 2016 text editor (2017 edition) has been tested on quotes from poems by empress Elizabeth Petrovna Romanova (1709-1762), M.V. Lomonosov (1711-1765), G.R. Derzhavin (1743-1816), A.N. Radishchev (17491802), V.A. Zhukovsky (1783-1852) and P.M. Arapov (1796-1861). In the anthology Poetry of Moscow University: From Lomonosov to. . ., many poetical works starting with Book 5 are given in their original form, i.e. in old spelling and without the changes made by the Decree of 1918. The Spell Checker suggests possible correction variants of the words underlined and unidentified by the system (no more than three options in the 2017 edition), or revision of the phrase. The suggestion is not always able to propose the normative spelling of the word, especially if it differs from the underlined one by several letters. In the list of options, words are often split by a space, without taking into account the coherence of the two resulting words. As seen in the examples listed in the article, Word 2016 (just like the previous versions of the automatic spell checker) does not always consider the peculiarities of spelling in poetry, and does not always follow the recommendations of reputable dictionaries and reference books. Some archaic words may coincide with more common but misspelt words in the modern Russian language. In that case, Word sometimes cannot detect an error. When considering Word's spell checker correction options, low-frequency words and proper names included into the system dictionaries are found, which sometimes only hinders the identification of errors and typos. For justice's sake, it should be noted that many of the flaws described by the author of the article and by other Internet users, have recently been eliminated from the MS Word text editor, but the content of its Russian system dictionary and the recommendations of the Spell Checker suggesting program leave a lot of questions.