Vladimir Vladimirovich Lopatin (for the 90th anniversary of his birth)

The study is devoted to the 90th anniversary of V.V. Lopatin’s birth (1935–2021) – Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor, specialist in word formation, morphemics, morphology, and spelling, and chairman of the Spelling commission of RAS in 2000–2014. The study characterises crucial stages of V.V. Lopatins’ life and scientific paths; his contribution to domestic science is conceptualized, and some myths and stereotypes about Lopatin’s spelling work in the 1990s and 2000s are debunked, including the myths of the new edition of the rules of Russian spelling and punctuation (2000). Special attention is paid on two main stages of V.V. Lopatin’s scientific biography – the participation in the creation of academic descriptive grammars of the Russian language and work at the Spelling commission of RAS, which prepared academic “Russian spelling vocabulary” and a complete academic guide, “The rules of Russian spelling and punctuation.” V.V. Lopatin’s activity as a linguistics populariser is singled out separately. V.V. Lopatin’s scientific legacy is conceptualised in the context of the spelling work that has been performed in the last several years at the V.V. Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of RAS.