Early Cyrillic alphabet

History

The earliest form of manuscript Cyrillic, known as , was based on Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and by letters from the Glagolitic alphabet for phonemes not found in Greek.

The Glagolitic script was created by the Byzantine monk Saint Cyril, possibly with the aid of his brother Saint Methodius, around 863. At the time, the Preslav Literary School was the most important early literary and cultural center of the First Bulgarian Empire and of all Slavs:

The earliest Cyrillic texts are found in northeastern Bulgaria, in the vicinity of Preslav—the Krepcha inscription, dating back to 921, and a ceramic vase from Preslav, dating back to 931. The systematization of Cyrillic may have been undertaken at the Council of Preslav in 893, when the Old Church Slavonic or Glagolitic Cyrillic liturgy was adopted by the First Bulgarian Empire.*Unlike the Churchmen in Ohrid, Preslav scholars were much more dependent upon Greek models and quickly abandoned the Glagolitic scripts in favor of an adaptation of the Greek uncial to the needs of Slavic, which is now known as the Cyrillic alphabet.*American scholar Horace Lunt has alternatively suggested that Cyrillics emerged in the border regions of Greek proselytization to the Slavs before it was codified and adapted by some systematizer among the Slavs. The oldest Cyrillic manuscripts look very similar to 9th and 10th century Greek uncial manuscripts, and the majority of uncial Cyrillic letters were identical to their Greek uncial counterparts.

The early Cyrillic alphabet was very well suited for the writing of Old Church Slavic, generally following a principle of "one letter for one significant sound", with some arbitrary or phonotactically-based exceptions. Letters served as numerals as well as phonetic signs; the values of the numerals were directly borrowed from their Greek-letter analogues. Letters without Greek equivalents mostly had no numeral values, whereas one letter, koppa, had only a numeric value with no phonetic value. Since its creation, the Cyrillic script has adapted to changes in spoken language and developed regional variations to suit the features of national languages. It has been the subject of academic reforms and political decrees. Variations of the Cyrillic script are used to write languages throughout Eastern Europe and Asia.

The form of the Russian alphabet underwent a change when Tsar Peter the Great introduced the civil script (, or гражданка, graždanka), in contrast to the prevailing church typeface, () in 1708. (The two forms are sometimes distinguished as paleo-Cyrillic and neo-Cyrillic.) Some letters and breathing marks which were used only for historical reasons were dropped. Medieval letterforms used in typesetting were harmonized with Latin typesetting practices, exchanging medieval forms for Baroque ones, and skipping the western European Renaissance developments. The reform subsequently influenced Cyrillic orthographies for most other languages. Today, the early orthography and typesetting standards remain in use only in Slavonic. A comprehensive repertoire of early Cyrillic characters has been included in the Unicode standard since version 5.1, published April 4, 2008. These characters and their distinctive letterforms are represented in specialized computer fonts for Slavistics.

|File:Krepchanski_manastir.jpg|View of the cave monastery near the village of Krepcha, Opaka Municipality in Bulgaria. Here is the oldest Cyrillic inscription dated of 921. |File:Birch bark alphabet of Novgorod.jpg|The Cyrillic alphabet on birch bark document № 591 from ancient Novgorod (Russia). Dated to 1025–1050 AD. |File:Bb199.gif|A more complete early Cyrillic abecedary (on the top half of the left side), this one written by the boy Onfim between 1240 and 1260 AD (birch bark document № 199).

Alphabet

In addition to the basic letters, there were a number of scribal variations, combining ligatures, and regionalisms used (for example, the additional letter ꙉ, which was used officially by the Serbians), all of which varied over time.

Versions of this initial alphabet where the letters ҁ and ѿ are omitted are also valid, since ҁ did not have a phonetic value nor an official placement in the alphabet with some putting it between п and р to correspond with the placement of the Greek letter ϙ and other putting it right at the end, and ѿ came later as ligature of ѡ and т. The Greek letters that were used in Cyrillic mainly for their numeric value are sometimes transcribed with the corresponding Greek letters for accuracy: ѳ = θ, ѯ = ξ, ѵ = υ, ҁ = ϙ, ѱ = ψ, and ѡ = ω.

Numerals, diacritics and punctuation

Each letter had a numeric value also, inherited from the corresponding Greek letter. A titlo over a sequence of letters indicated their use as a number; usually this was accompanied by a dot on either side of the letter. In numerals, the ones place was to the left of the tens place, the reverse of the order used in modern Arabic numerals. Thousands are formed using a special symbol, (U+0482), which was attached to the lower left corner of the numeral. Many fonts display this symbol incorrectly as being in line with the letters instead of subscripted below and to the left of them.

Titlos were also used to form abbreviations, especially of nomina sacra; this was done by writing the first and last letter of the abbreviated word along with the word's grammatical endings, then placing a titlo above it. Later manuscripts made increasing use of a different style of abbreviation, in which some of the left-out letters were superscripted above the abbreviation and covered with a pokrytie diacritic. Several diacritics, adopted from Polytonic Greek orthography, were also used, but were seemingly redundant (these may not appear correctly in all web browsers; they are supposed to be directly above the letter, not off to its upper right):

: varia (grave accent), indicating stress on the last syllable (U+0300) : oksia (acute accent), indicating a stressed syllable (U+0301) : trema, diaeresis (U+0308) : kamora (circumflex accent), indicating long falling accent (U+0311); in later Church Slavonic, it disambiguates plurals from homophonous singulars. : titlo, indicating abbreviations, or letters used as numerals (U+0483) : palatalization sign, indicating palatalization (U+0484) : dasia or dasy pneuma, rough breathing mark (U+0485) : psili, zvatel'tse or psilon pneuma, smooth breathing mark (U+0486). Signals a word-initial vowel, at least in later Church Slavonic. : pokrytie, indicating an abbreviation (U+0487). : combined psili and varia is called apostrof. : combined psili and oksia is called iso. : (U+033E) and payerok (U+A67D), indicating an omitted jerŭ (ъ) after a letter.

Punctuation systems in early Cyrillic manuscripts were primitive: there was no space between words and no upper and lower case, and punctuation marks were used inconsistently in all manuscripts.

: ano teleia (U+0387), a middle dot used to separate phrases, words, or parts of words : Full stop, used in the same way : Armenian full stop (U+0589), resembling a colon, used in the same way : Georgian paragraph separator (U+10FB), used to mark off larger divisions : triangular colon (U+2056, added in Unicode 4.1), used to mark off larger divisions : diamond colon (U+2058, added in Unicode 4.1), used to mark off larger divisions : quintuple colon (U+2059, added in Unicode 4.1), used to mark off larger divisions : Greek question mark (U+037E), similar to a semicolon

Some of these marks are also used in Glagolitic script. Used only in modern texts

: comma (U+002C) : full stop (U+002E) : exclamation mark (U+0021)

Gallery

Old Bulgarian examples

File:Codex_Suprasliensis.jpg| Codex Suprasliensis File:Ivan_ALexander_and_his_family_Tetraevangelia.jpg| Gospels of Tsar Ivan Alexander File:Bulgar_Translation_Of_Manasses_Chronicle.png| Bulgar translation of Manasses chronicle File:Tomb_stone_of_Mostich_Boyla.jpg| Mostich tomb stone

Medieval Greek [[Uncial]] manuscripts from which early Cyrillic letter forms take their shapes

File:Codex_Colbertinus_700.jpg| ℓ 1 File:Lectionary_5_(GA)%2C_f.115r.jpg| ℓ 5 File:Codex_Harcleianus.PNG|ℓ 150 File:Lectionary 152 K051435.JPG|ℓ 152 File:Lectionary_179_(Gen_1).JPG|ℓ 179 Old Testament, Genesis File:Lectionary_183_folio_2.JPG|ℓ 183 folio 2 File:Lectionary_269_(Matth._8%2C32-9%2C1.9).JPG|ℓ 269 File:Lectionary 296 f.6v.JPG|ℓ 296 folio 6 verso

Early Cyrillic manuscripts

File:Ostromir_Gospel_4.jpg| Ostromir Gospels File:Scepkin1903Sava142ob.jpg| Sava's book File:Khitrovo_Gospels_05.jpg| Khitrovo Gospels File: Miroslav's_Gospel_001.jpg| Miroslav Gospel File: Archangel_Gospel_03.jpg| Arkhangelsk Gospel File: Pogod 18 list 19 ob mt18-15 18-20 mt4-23 4-24.jpg| File:Andronikovo_Gospel_158rev.jpg|Andronikov Gospels

References

Sources

• Berdnikov, Alexander and Olga Lapko, , EuroTEX '99 Proceedings, September 1999
• Birnbaum, David J., , September 28, 2002
• Cubberley, Paul (1996) "The Slavic Alphabets". In Daniels and Bright, below.
• Daniels, Peter T., and William Bright, eds. (1996). The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press. .
• Everson, Michael and Ralph Cleminson, , September 4, 2003
• Franklin, Simon. 2002. Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300. Cambridge University Press. .
• Iliev, I. Short History of the Cyrillic Alphabet. Plovdiv. 2012/Иван Г. Илиев. Кратка история на кирилската азбука. Пловдив. 2012. Short History of the Cyrillic Alphabet
• Lev, V., "The history of the Ukrainian script (paleography)", in Ukraine: a concise encyclopædia, volume 1. University of Toronto Press, 1963, 1970, 1982.
• Simovyc, V., and J. B. Rudnyckyj, "The history of Ukrainian orthography", in Ukraine: a concise encyclopædia, volume 1 (op cit).
• Zamora, J., Help me learn Church Slavonic
• Azbuka , Church Slavonic calligraphy and typography.
• Obshtezhitie.net, Cyrillic and Glagolitic manuscripts and early printed books.

References

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14. Berdnikov and Lapko 2003, p. 12