The Problem of Dating a Periodicals and Ways to Solve it

Abstract

The topic stated in the title of this publication is rarely considered in linguistics, since there is an opinion that "numerical" errors and inconsistencies are indirectly related to it. Exceptions here may be, for example, dates indicated by words (and not numbers) in incorrect case forms, which also took place in the press of different eras. However, even digital dates put down incorrectly, or the complete absence of such dates, can create a lot of problems when performing scientific and other work with a newspaper (for example, when archiving it). The article discusses some such cases related to different epochs – from epoch of Peter the Great to the present day. A case of "encrypted" newspaper dating with an Old Slavic alphanumeric designation is also presented. The lack of dating or erroneous dating is usually due to the "human factor". An exception may be illegal newspapers of the revolutionary years (in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, such newspapers occupy an entire storage section), in which the dates were not put down by publishers for reasons of conspiracy. A separate linguistic interest is the newspaper "Galichanin". Here, in the process of work, nuances related to almost all linguistic disciplines are revealed: phonetics, spelling, orthoepy, morphemics, vocabulary, morphology, semantics, syntax, stylistics. Since some words from this newspaper had to be searched for in dictionaries (both translated and dialect), it is possible to add lexicography to this list. This is explained by the fact that this newspaper is unique in its own way: geographically it was published at the junction of national regions.