Abstrakt
On the 22nd of April 2022 the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine made a post on Facebook: "Here's a small 'r' for you to write ' russia' with an even smaller letter". Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, social media users as well as the Ukrainian media started writing the name of the aggressor country with a lowercase letter: russia (Ukrainian: rosija). This form of expression of disrespect, contempt or even insult is not necessarily understandable for those who do not speak Ukrainian or Russian.
As in languages using the Latin alphabet, the division into lowercase and written letters in Cyrillic was established rather late. For a long time, only the beginnings of sections were distinguished by capital letters, and, in general, norms were floating. For example, in the Kiev edition of The Lives of Saints by Demetrius of Rostov of 1759 upper case letters were not used, but in the edition of 1764, they were used already. In the 19th century, the Kiev and St. Petersburg synodal printing houses began to use capital letters in all their editions, including those intended for liturgical use.
In the course of time, capitalization of the name ceased to have only a function of simplification of reading, but received a variety of semantic content. Therefore, the spelling of the name "rosija" in the contemporary Ukrainian language may have different interpretations. In my presentation I would like to look at it from the position of the founders of Tartu-Moscow semiotic school J. Lotman and B. Uspensky, who consider proper names as manifestations of "mythological consciousness", whose feature is their asemiotic nature.