Early Cyrillic alphabet

The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is an alphabetic writing system that was developed in Medieval Bulgaria in the Preslav Literary School during the late 9th century. It is used to write the Church Slavonic language, and was historically used for its ancestor, Old Church Slavonic. It was also used for other languages, but between the 18th and 20th centuries was mostly replaced by the modern Cyrillic script, which is used for some Slavic languages (such as Russian), and for East European and Asian languages that have experienced a great amount of Russian cultural influence.
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 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. 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:
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 the Glagolitic script 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 or Glagolitic Cyrillic 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 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. Particularly, this principle is violated by certain vowel letters, which represent [j] 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 (Russian: гражданский шрифт, romanized: graždanskiy šrift, or гражданка, graždanka), in contrast to the prevailing church typeface, (Russian: церковнославя́нский шрифт, romanized: cerkovnoslavjanskiy šrift) 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.
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.
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, ѵ = υ, ҁ = ϙ, ѱ = ψ, and ѡ = ω.
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):
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.
Some of these marks are also used in Glagolitic script.
Used only in modern texts
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