Origins of The Glagolitic Characters
The creation of the characters is popularly attributed to the Bulgarian brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius, who may have created them in order to facilitate the introduction of Christianity. It is believed that the original letters have been fitted to the original Macedonian Slavic.
The number of letters in the original Glagolitic alphabet is not known, but may have been close to its presumed Greek model. The 41 letters we know today include letters for non-Greek sounds which may have been added by Saint Cyril, as well as ligatures added in the 12th century under the influence of Cyrillic, as Glagolitic lost its dominance. In later centuries the number of letters drops dramatically, to fewer than 30 in modern Croatian and Czech recensions of the Church Slavic language. Twenty-four of the 41 original Glagolitic letters (see table below) probably derive from graphemes of the medieval cursive Greek small alphabet, but have been given an ornamental design.
The source of the other consonantal letters is unknown. If they were added by Cyril, it is likely that they were taken from an alphabet used for Christian scripture. It is frequently proposed that the letters sha Ⱎ, tsi Ⱌ, and cherv Ⱍ were taken from the letters shin ש and tsadi צ of the Hebrew alphabet, and that Ⰶ zhivete derives from Coptic janja Ϫ. However, Cubberley (1996) suggests that if a single prototype were presumed, that the most likely source would be Armenian. Other proposals include the Samaritan alphabet, which Cyril learned during his journey to the Khazars in Cherson.
South Slavic languages and dialects |
---|
Western South Slavic |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Eastern South Slavic |
|
|
|
Transitional dialects |
|
|
Alphabets |
|
|
1 Includes Banat Bulgarian alphabet. |
Glagolitic letters were also used as numbers, similarly to Cyrillic numerals. Unlike Cyrillic numerals, which inherited their numeric value from the corresponding Greek letter (see Greek numerals), Glagolitic letters were assigned values based on their native alphabetic order.
Read more about this topic: Glagolitic Alphabet
Famous quotes containing the words origins of, origins and/or characters:
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weedsand one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: Look what I killed. Arent I the best?”
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)