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Glag, 225
The Glagolitic alphabet , also known as Glagolitsa, is the oldest known Slavic alphabet, from the 9th century.
The name was not coined until many centuries after its creation, and comes from the Old Church Slavonic glagolъ "utterance" (also the origin of the Slavic name for the letter G). The verb glagoliti means "to speak". It has been conjectured that the name glagolitsa developed in Croatia around the 14th century and was derived from the word glagolity, applied to adherents of the liturgy in Slavonic.[1]
In Old Church Slavonic the name is , Кѷрїлловица.
The words that denote Glagolitic alphabet in the main Slavic languages are as follows: Bulgarian, Russian, Macedonian глаголица (glagolitsa / glagolica), Belarusian глаголіца (hłaholica), Croatian glagoljica, Serbian глагољица / glagoljica, Czech hlaholice, Polish głagolica, Slovene glagolica, Slovak hlaholika, and Ukrainian глаголиця (hlaholycia).
The creation of the characters is popularly attributed to Saints Cyril and Methodius, who may have created them in order to facilitate the introduction of Christianity.[2][3][4][5][6] It is believed that the original letters were fitted to the original Macedonian dialect of Bulgarian.[3][7]
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 known 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.[8] In later centuries the number of letters dropped 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.
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.
The two monks later canonized as Saints Cyril and Methodius, the brothers from Thessaloniki, were sent to Great Moravia (modern Czech Republic and Slovakia) in 862 by the Byzantine emperor at the request of Prince Rastislav, who wanted to weaken the dependence of his country on East Frankish priests. The Glagolitic alphabet, however it originated, was used between 863 and 885 for government and religious documents and books, and at the Great Moravian Academy (Veľkomoravské učilište) founded by the missionaries, where their followers were educated. The Kiev Missal, found in the 19th century in Jerusalem, was dated to the 10th century.
In 886, an East Frankish bishop of Nitra named Wiching banned the script and jailed 200 followers of Methodius, mostly students of the original academy. They were then dispersed or, according to some sources, sold as slaves by the Franks. Many of them (including Naum, Clement, Angelarious, Sava and Gorazd), however, reached Bulgaria and were commissioned by Boris I of Bulgaria to teach and instruct the future clergy of the state into the Slavic languages. After the adoption of Christianity in Bulgaria in 865, religious ceremonies and Divine Liturgy were conducted in Greek by clergy sent from the Byzantine Empire, using the Byzantine rite. Fearing growing Byzantine influence and weakening of the state, Boris viewed the introduction of the Slavic alphabet and language in church use as a way to preserve the independence of Slavic Bulgaria from Byzantine Constantinople. As a result of Boris' measures, two academies, one in Ohrid and one in Preslav, were founded.
From there, the students traveled to other places and spread the use of their alphabet. Some went to Croatia (into Dalmatia), where the squared variant arose and where the Glagolitic remained in use for a long time. In 1248, Pope Innocent IV gave the Croats of southern Dalmatia the unique privilege of using their own language and this script in the Roman Rite liturgy. Formally given to bishop Philip of Senj, the permission to use the Glagolitic liturgy (the Roman Rite conducted in Slavic language instead of Latin, not the Byzantine rite), actually extended to all Croatian lands, mostly along the Adriatic coast. The Holy See had several Glagolitic missals published in Rome. Authorisation for use of this language was extended to some other Slavic regions between 1886 and 1935.[9] In missals, the Glagolitic script was eventually replaced with the Latin alphabet, but the use of the Slavic language in the Mass continued, until replaced by the modern vernacular languages.
Some of the students of the Ohrid academy went to Bohemia where the alphabet was used in the 10th and 11th century, along with other scripts. Glagolitic was also used in Kievan Rus.
In Croatia, from the 12th century, Glagolitic inscriptions appeared mostly in littoral areas: Istria, Primorje, Kvarner and Kvarner islands, notably Krk, Cres and Lošinj; in Dalmatia, on the islands of Zadar, but there were also findings in inner Lika and Krbava, reaching to Kupa river, and even as far as Međimurje and Slovenia. The Hrvoje's Missal (Croatian: Hrvojev misal) from 1404 was written in Split, and it is considered one of the most beautiful Croatian Glagolitic books. The 1483 Missale Romanum Glagolitice was the first printed Croatian Glagolitic book.
It was believed that Glagolitsa in Croatia was present only in those areas. But, in 1992, the discovery of Glagolitic inscriptions in churches along the Orljava river in Slavonia, totally changed the picture (churches in Brodski Drenovac, Lovčić and some others), showing that use of Glagolitic alphabet was spread from Slavonia also.[10]
At the end of the 9th century, one of these students of Methodius – Naum, who had settled in Preslav (Bulgaria) created the Cyrillic script, which almost entirely replaced the Glagolitic during the Middle Ages. The Cyrillic alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet, with (at least 10) letters peculiar to Slavic languages being derived from the Glagolitic. The decision in favor of Cyrillic created an alphabetical difference between the two literary centres of the Bulgarian state in Pliska and Ohrid. In the western part the Glagolitic alphabet remained dominant at first. However, subsequently in the next two centuries, Glagolitic gradually ceased to be used there at all.[11] Nevertheless, particular passages or words written with the Glagolitic alphabet appeared in Bulgarian Cyrillic manuscripts till the end of the 14th century.[12]
Only in Croatia the Glagolitic alphabet was used until the 19th century. Nowadays, Glagolitic is used only for Church Slavic (Croatian and Czech recensions).
The tradition that the alphabet was designed by Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius has not been universally accepted. A less common belief, contradicting allochtonic Slovene origin, was that the Glagolitic was created or used in the 4th century by St. Jerome (Latin: Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus), hence the alphabet is sometimes named Hieronymian.
It is also acrophonically called azbuki from the names of its first two letters in Bulgaria, on the same model as 'alpha' + 'beta'. The Slavs of Great Moravia (present-day Slovakia and Moravia), Hungary, Slovenia and Slavonia were called Slověne at that time, which gives rise to the name Slovenish for the alphabet. Some other, rarer, names for this alphabet are Bukvitsa (from common Slavic word 'bukva' meaning 'letter', and a suffix '-itsa') and Illyrian.
In the Middle Ages, Glagolitsa was also known as "St. Jerome's script" due to popular mediaeval legend (created by Croatian scribes in the 13th century) ascribing its invention to St. Jerome (342–429). That claim, however, has been resolutely disproved.
The epoch of traditional attribution of the script to Jerome ended probably in 1812.[14] In modern times, only certain marginal authors share this view, usually "re-discovering" one of the already-known mediaeval sources.[15]
A hypothetical pre-Glagolitic writing system is typically referred to as cherty i rezy (strokes and incisions)[16] – but no material evidence of the existence of any pre-Glagolitic Slavic writing system has been found, except for a few brief and vague references in old chronicles and "lives of the saints". All artifacts presented as evidence of pre-Glagolitic Slavic inscriptions have later been identified as texts in known scripts and in known non-Slavic languages, or as fakes.[17] The well-known Chernorizets Hrabar's strokes and incisions are usually considered to be a reference to a kind of property mark or alternatively fortune-telling signs. Some 'Russian letters' found in one version of St. Cyril's life are explainable as misspelled 'Syrian letters' (in Slavic, the roots are very similar: rus- vs. sur- or syr-), etc.
The values of many of the letters are thought to have been displaced under Cyrillic influence, or to have become confused through the early spread to different dialects, so that the original values are not always clear. For instance, the letter yu Ⱓ is thought to have perhaps originally had the sound /u/, but was displaced by the adoption of an ow ligature Ⱆ under the influence of later Cyrillic. Other letters were late creations after a Cyrillic model.
The following table lists each letter in its modern order, showing an image of the letter (round variant), the corresponding modern Cyrillic letter, the approximate sound transcribed with the , the name, and suggestions for its origin. Several letters have no modern counterpart.
Egyptian hieroglyphs 32 c. BCE
Note that yery (ⰟⰉ) is a digraph of either yer (Ⱏ) or yerь (Ⱐ) followed by either izhe (Ⰹ, Ⰺ) or i (Ⰻ).[18]
In older texts, uk (Ⱆ) and three out of four yuses (Ⱗ, Ⱘ, Ⱙ) also can be written as digraphs, in two separate parts.
The order of izhe (Ⰹ, Ⰺ) and i (Ⰻ) varies from source to source, as does the order of the various forms of yus (Ⱔ, Ⱗ, Ⱘ, Ⱙ). Correspondence between Glagolitic izhe (Ⰹ, Ⰺ) and i (Ⰻ) with Cyrillic И and І is unknown—textbooks and dictionaries often mention one of two possible versions and keep silence about the existence of the opposite one.
The Glagolitic alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in March 2005 with the release of version 4.1.
Greek alphabet, Latin alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Hangul, Syriac alphabet
Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Romania, European Union
Byzantine–Bulgarian wars
Cyrillic script, Slavic languages, Great Moravia, First Bulgarian Empire, Bulgaria
Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Republic of Macedonia, Moravia
Kingdom of Bulgaria, Bulgaria, Black Sea, Byzantine Empire, Roman Empire
Unicode, Greek alphabet, Arabic script, Syriac alphabet, Devanagari