Graghics of Old Believers' Domestic Manuscripts in the Aspect of Confessional Traditionalism

The article substantiates the introduction of the problem of graphics into linguistic research. The research material was two diaries of Tomsk Old Believers written by a man (in 1915-1923) and a woman (in 1956-1975) in the late semi-uncial. These texts have graphic and content archaic elements. They use a specific chronology, the September year, the overnight boundary (the generally accepted 6 p.m.). These and some other features are considered as symbols of confessional traditionalism. The material confirms the high significance of the late semi-uncial, which follows book samples of the sacred texts of the late Old Russian writing, for Old Believers. Notes in this script, with all its graphic variation, are much neater than the rare cursive inserts, extremely sloppy and hardly readable, in the analyzed texts. This indicates the priority of the semi-uncial script for this confessional community. The texts reflect such traditional features of the late semi-uncial as the alphabetic numeral system, frequent concatenation, various abbreviations, diacritics, simplified punctuation, broken geometry principle of writing, proportionality of graphemes, their angularity, the absence of hyphenation and some letters (k and re), changes in writing letters. The comparison of graphics from the diaries written in different time periods showed its simplification in the woman's diary. The woman is inconsistent in the use of the final hard sign; she uses superscripts rarely and inconsistently, etc. All these features show us the influence of the cursive on the late semiuncial because some graphemes in her texts are clearly comparable to the civil cursive. The influence of the civil script and the erosion of the tradition of the semi-uncial one is the evidence of the poorly differentiated use of graphic doublets, the significantly greater functional load of the civil versions of the letters, errors in the titling of words, as well as the absence of the Yat letter in the woman's alphabet. The use of the semi-uncial in domestic texts is the marker of the confessional significance of the handwriting and texts of the genre. It allows clarifying the development of the chronicle genre, which flourished in the pre-Reformation period and which Old Believers consider an exemplary one. This can be proved by the prevalence of such diaries in the Old Believers' environment, the beginnings of records typical for chronicles, the cliched nature of the records, as well as the graphic design of the text.

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