THE ORTHOGRAPHY OF THE COMPOUND NOUNS IN THE MACEDONIAN LANGUAGE – IMPLICATIONS IN TEACHING ORTHOGRAPHY

The orthography of every language including the Macedonian is a set of rules that presents the language in written form. Bearing in mind that the language reflects all phenomena of the social life, it is clear that the orthography should constantly be complemented and renewed, explained and précised in order to address the needs of its users. The new edition of the Orthography of the Macedonian language (2015) brings in changes, supplements and provides accurate information in all of the chapters of the last edition of the Orthography (1998). This represents a solid base for improving and equaling the written practice, especially regarding the orthographic rules of the compound nouns. The aim of the paper is to analyze some rules for connected writing (without hyphen) of the compound nouns in the Orthography from 1998 regarding their preciseness, clearness and possibility for double interpretation. These rules are compared with the same rules in the new edition from the Orthography (2015) in order to get an insight into the changes, supplements and the correctness, and then the rules from the new edition are analyzed regarding their preciseness, clearness and possibility for double interpretation. The research has qualitative paradigm (content analysis) and descriptive design. A nonstructural interview has been conducted with 100 teachers from the primary, secondary and the higher education. The methods for data processing and gaining scientific conclusions are analysis, comparison and synthesis. The results from the research show that beside the efforts in the new edition of the Orthography to make the explanations logic and simple in order to be accessible for a larger number of user, still the explanations open dilemmas that may lead to double interpretation, especially in teaching orthography of the Macedonian language. This has an impact on the orthographic competencies of the Macedonian language teacher.