Glagolitic alphabet

The Glagolitic alphabet or Glagolitsa is the oldest known Slavonic alphabet. It was created by Saint Cyril around 862-863 in order to translate the Bible and other texts into the Slavonic language (more exactly, Old Church Slavonic).

The name comes from the Old Church Slavonic glagolo, meaning word (which was also the name for the letter "G"). Since glagolati also means to speak, the Glagolitsa are poetically referred to as "the marks that speak".

The Glagolitic alphabet has around 40 letters, depending on variant. 24 of the original (Great Moravian, see below) 38 Glagolitic letters are derived from graphemes of the medieval cursive Greek small alphabet, and they have been given an ornamental design. It is presumed that the letters Sha, Shta and Tsi were derived from Hebrew alphabet (Shin and Tsadi) - the phonemes that these letters represent did not exist in Greek but are quite common for all Slavic languages. The remaining original characters are of unknown oriental origin. Some of them are presumed to stem from the Hebrew and Samaritan scripts, which Cyril got to know during his journey to the Khazars in Cherson.

History

Rastislav, the Prince (King) of Great Moravia, wanted to weaken the dependence of this Slavonic empire on East Frankish priests, so in 862 he had the Byzantine emperor send two Slavonic missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, to Great Moravia. Cyril created a new alphabet for that purpose - the Glagolitic. The alphabet was then used in Great Moravia between 863 (when Cyril and Methodius arrived there) and 885 for government and religious documents and books, and at the Great Moravian Academy (Veľkomoravské učilište) founded by Cyril, where followers of Cyril and Methodius were educated (also by Methodius himself).

The script was prohibited in 886 by Wiching, an East Frankish bishop of Nitra and 200 followers of Method (mostly of the students of the original academy) were jailed and then dispersed or, according to some sources, sold as slaves. Three of them, however, reached Bulgaria and were commissioned by Boris I of Bulgaria to teach and instruct the future clergy of the state into the Slavonic language. After the adoption of Christianity in 865, religious ceremonies in Bulgaria were conducted in Greek by clergy sent from Byzantium. Fearing growing Byzantine influence and weakening of the state, Boris viewed Old Slavonic as a way to preserve the independence of Bulgaria. As a result of Boris's measures, two academies in Ohrid and Preslav were founded.

From there, the students travelled to various other places and spread the use of their alphabet. Some went to Croatia and Dalmatia where the squared variant arose and where the Glagolitic remained in use for a long time. It owed its popularity to the Catholic Church: similarly to how the Croats were allowed to use the native language in liturgy, they were also allowed to use their own alphabet. Later they continued using Glagolitic as opposed to Cyrillic, which was associated with Eastern Orthodoxy. Eventually it was replaced with the Latin alphabet.

Some of the students of the Ohrid academy went to Bohemia where the alphabet was partly used in the 10th and 11th century. Glagolitic was also used in Russia, although rarely.

At the end of the 9th century, one of these students of Methodius who was settled in Preslav (Bulgaria) created the Cyrillic alphabet, and this descendant of the Glagolitic almost entirely replaced the Glagolitic during the Middle Ages.

Nowadays, the Glagolitic is only used for Church Slavonic and, sometimes, vernacular in the service-books of the Catholic Eparchy of Križevci in former Yugoslavia.

Names

Formerly, the tradition that the alphabet was designed by the Greek monks Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius was not universally accepted. A less common belief was that the Glagolitic was created by St. Jerome, hence the alphabet is sometimes named Hieronymian. The Slavs of Great Moravia (present-day Slovakia and Moravia), Hungary, Slovenia and Slavonia were called Sloviens (Slověne) at that time, hence the name Slovenish. Some other, more rare names for the alphabet are Bukvitsa and Illyrian. The name of the alphabet is in Czech hlaholice, in Slovak hlaholika, in Polish glagolica, in Russian and Bulgarian глаго́лица (phonetically: glagolitsa), in Croatian glagoljica, in Ukrainian глаголиця (phonetically: hlaholytsia) etc.

Characteristics

The alphabet has two variants: round and square. The round variant is dominated by circles and smooth curves, and the square variant features a lot of right angles, and sometimes trapezoids. See . The square variant lends itself to abundant use of ligatures comparing to the Latin or the Cyrillic script.

The following table lists each letter in order, giving a picture (round variant), its name, its approximate sound in SAMPA, the Greek letter that it was used to transliterate (if applicable), and the modern Cyrillic letter that it directly gave rise to (if any). The letters jer--jus are sometimes written yer--yus. There are several letters that have no modern counterpart: jo and the nasel vowels jus.

Picture	Name	Sound	Relation to Greek	Relation to modern Cyrillic
	Az	/a/	Alpha	A
	Buki	/b/		Be
	Vedi	/v/	Beta	Ve
	Glagol	/g/	Gamma	Ghe
	Dobro	/d/	Delta	De
	Jest	/E/	Epsilon	E
	Zhivete	/Z/		Zhe
	Dzelo	/dz/		Macedonian Dze
	Zemlja	/z/	Zeta	Ze
	Izhe	/i/	Eta	I
	I	/i/	Iota	Ukrainian I
	Dzherv	/dZ/		Serbian Ðerv
	Kako	/k/	Kappa	Ka
	Ljudi	/l/	Lambda	El
	Mislete	/m/	Mu	Em
	Nash	/n/	Nu	En
	On	/O/	Omicron	O
	Pokoj	/p/	Pi	Pe
	Rtsi	/r/	Rho	Er
	Slovo	/s/	Sigma	Es
	Tverdo	/t/	Tau	Te
	Uk	/u/	Omicron Upsilon	U
	Fert	/f/	Phi	Ef
	Kher	/x/	Chi	Ha
	Oht	/o/	Omega	Only used to transcribe Greek
	Tsi	/ts/		Tse
	Cherv	/tS/		Che
	Sha	/S/		Sha
	Shta	/St/		Shcha
	Jer	/w/, /@/		The hard sign
	Jery	/1/		Jery
	Jerj	/j/		The soft sign
	Jat	/j{/		Removed from Bulgarian in 1945
	jo	/jO/		Obsolete
	Ju	/ju/		Ju
	Jus Malij	/E~/		Obsolete
	Jus Malij Jotirovannij	/jE~/		Obsolete
	Jus Bolshoj	/O~/		Obsolete
	Jus Bolshoj Jotirovannij	/jO~/		Obsolete
	Thita	/f/	Theta	Only used to transcribe Greek
	Izhitsa	/v/, /i/	Upsilon	Removed from Russian in 1917

I'm not sure of the name of the letter between Jat and Ju.

Note that Jery is simply a ligature of Jer and I. The order of Izhe and I varies from source to source, as does the order of the various forms of Jus.

Unicode

It is expected that the Glagolitic alphabet will soon be supported by Unicode. The proposed codepoint range is U+2C00 — U+2C5E. The Unicode Technical Committee has accepted this on Aug 28, 2003. See also:

In Western Culture

In Western Europe, Glagolitic is one of the least well-known Eastern European alphabets. It also has a particularly exotic appearance to Western eyes, as (unlike Cyrillic or Greek) none of the letters bear any resemblance to Roman letters. It may be for this reason that Glagolitic was selected as the script used by an extraterrestrial species in the 3-D IMAX movie, Alien Adventure. Not only did the aliens write in Glagolitic, but their leader was called "Cyrillus"! (However the alien language was unrelated to Slavonic, as in fact they spoke the Walloon language, a rare dialect from the production company's homeland, Belgium).