Early Cyrillic alphabet

Early Cyrillic alphabet
The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is a writing system that was developed in Medieval Bulgaria in the Preslav Literary School during the late 9th century. The modern Cyrillic script is used for some Slavic languages (such as Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Russian, Ukrainian), and for East European and Asian languages that have experienced a great amount of Russian cultural influence.
History
The earliest form of manuscript Cyrillic, known as ustav, was based on Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and by letters from the Glagolitic alphabet for consonants not found in Greek.
The Glagolitic alphabet was created by the monk Saint Cyril, possibly with the aid of his brother Saint Methodius, around 863. Most scholars agree that Cyrillic, on the other hand, was created by Cyril's students at the Preslav Literary School in the 890s as a more suitable script for church books, based on uncial Greek but retaining some Glagolitic letters for sounds not present in Greek. 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: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.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. Moreover, unlike the other literary centre in the First Bulgarian Empire, the Ohrid Literary School, which continued to use Glagolitic well into the 12th century, the School at Preslav was using Cyrillic in the early 900s. The systematization of Cyrillic may have been undertaken at the Council of Preslav in 893, when the Old Church Slavonic liturgy was adopted by the First Bulgarian Empire.
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 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. Particularly, this principle is violated by certain vowel letters, which represent plus the vowel if they are not preceded by a consonant. It is also violated by a significant failure to distinguish between /ji/ and /jĭ/ orthographically. There was no distinction of capital and lowercase letters, though manuscript letters were rendered larger for emphasis, or in various decorative initial and nameplate forms. 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 ), 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 Church 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.
Alphabet
In addition to the basic letters, there were a number of scribal variations, combining ligatures, and regionalisms used, all of which varied over time.
Sometimes the Greek letters that were used in Cyrillic mainly for their numeric value are transcribed with the corresponding Greek letters for accuracy: ѳ = θ, ѯ = ξ, ѱ = ψ, ѵ = υ, 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):
trema, diaeresis (U+0308)
varia (grave accent), indicating stress on the last syllable (U+0300)
oksia (acute accent), indicating a stressed syllable (Unicode U+0301)
titlo, indicating abbreviations, or letters used as numerals (U+0483)
kamora (circumflex accent), indicating palatalization (U+0484); in later Church Slavonic, it disambiguates plurals from homophonous singulars.
dasia or dasy pneuma, rough breathing mark (U+0485)
psili, zvatel'tse, or psilon pneuma, soft breathing mark (U+0486). Signals a word-initial vowel, at least in later Church Slavonic.
Combined zvatel'tse and varia is called apostrof.
Combined zvatel'tse and oksia is called iso.
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
Medieval Greek Uncial manuscripts from which early Cyrillic letter forms take their shapes
Early Cyrillic manuscripts
See also
Relationship of Cyrillic and Glagolitic scripts
Bosnian Cyrillic
Romanian Cyrillic alphabet
Reforms of Russian orthography
Nationalism in the Middle Ages#Eastern Orthodox Church, Byzantium, Slavs and Greeks
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.
External links
Old Cyrillic [Стара Славянска Език] text entry application
Slavonic Computing Initiative
churchslavonic – Typesetting documents in Church Slavonic language using Unicode
fonts-churchslavonic – Fonts for typesetting in Church Slavonic language
Church Slavonic Typography in Unicode (Unicode Technical Note no. 41), 2015-11-04, accessed 2016-02-23.
Cyrillic alphabets
Preslav Literary School
History of writing
1st-millennium establishments in Europe
Western calligraphy
Golden Age of medieval Bulgarian culture
Medieval scripts
Eastern Orthodox Christian culture