Канцеляризм а равно (и) и его история

The bureaucratic cliché a ravno (i) ‘as well as’ was one of the many con-
junctive units with the root -ravn- (ravno kak (i), ravno (i), ravnym obrazom (i),
ravnomerno (i), etc.) that arose in the Russian language of the 18th century
as a result of calquing German adverbs and adverbial expressions with the root -gleich- (gleichals, gleichfalls, gleichwie, gleicherweise, gleichergestalt, gleichermassen, etc.), capable of being used as cumulative conjunctions. New conjunctive units were signs of book speech — scientifi c, fi ctional, epistolary, including documentary texts. From 1730–1740s, they began to be used in government administrative and legislative documents. Thanks to their cumulative semantics ravno, ravno kak, ravnomerno, ravnym obrazom easily connected with the particle i and formed conjunctive constructions. In business speech, there was a fusion of new conjunctive units (both with the article i or without it) with the cumulative conjunction a inherited from the
syntax of pre-Petrine documents. New conjunctive constructions a ravno (i),
a ravnomerno (i), a ravnym obrazom (i) began to spread in documents at the
end of the 1760s and from the very beginning had a bureaucratic coloration.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the conjunctive combination a ravno (i)
became widespread not only in documentary texts, but also in other types of
written texts, refl ecting the increased infl uence of business speech on other
speech systems of the Russian language. However, from the end of the 19th —
beginning of the 20th century, the genre-stylistic differentiation of the con-
junctive unit a ravno (i) began. Currently, a ravno is used in legislative texts
and has a prominent bureaucratic nuance, while a ravno i, thanks to its dis-
tinct cumulative meaning due to the particle I, is used not only in business,
but also in scientific, journalistic and fiction texts.