Cyrillic script and Related Topics

Old Church Slavonic

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The first Slavic literary language.

Example of the Cyrillic alphabet: excerpt from the manuscript "Bdinski Zbornik" written in Old Slavonic, 1360

A page from the Gospel of Miroslav, Serbian medieval manuscript, a 12th-century Byzantine-Slavonic book, National Library of Serbia.

The Introduction of the Slavonic Liturgy in Great Moravia (1912), by Alphonse Mucha, The Slav Epic

"Simeon I of Bulgaria, the Morning Star of Slavonic Literature". (1923), by Alphonse Mucha, The Slav Epic

Both schools originally used the Glagolitic alphabet, though the Cyrillic script developed early on at the Preslav Literary School, where it superseded Glagolitic as official in Bulgaria in 893.

A page from the Zograf Codex with text of the Gospel of Luke

Glagolitic script

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Oldest known Slavic alphabet.

The Baška tablet, found in the 19th century on Krk, conventionally dated to about 1100.

The first page of the Gospel of Mark from the 10th–11th century Codex Zographensis, found in the Zograf Monastery in 1843.

The first page of the Gospel of John from the Codex Zographensis.

In a book printed in 1591, Angelo Rocca attributed the Glagolitic script to Saint Jerome.

Glagolitic script in the Zagreb Cathedral

The last Glagolitic entry in the baptismal register of the Omišalj parish on the island of Krk by the parishioner Nicholas in 1817.

The Lord's Prayer shown in (from left) round, angular, and cursive versions of Glagolitic script.

Both the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets were used until 13th-14th century in Bulgaria.

Russian language

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East Slavic language mainly spoken across Russia.

Competence of Russian in countries of the former Soviet Union (except Russia), 2004

Percentage of people in Ukraine with Russian as their native language (according to a 2001 census) (by region)

A page from Azbuka (Alphabet book), the first East Slavic printed textbook. Printed by Ivan Fyodorov in 1574 in Lviv. This page features the Cyrillic script.

This page from an "ABC" book printed in Moscow in 1694 shows the letter П.

The Ostromir Gospels of 1056 is the second oldest East Slavic book known, one of many medieval illuminated manuscripts preserved in the Russian National Library.

Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without—the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds.

Greek alphabet

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The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE.

Early Greek alphabet on pottery in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens

Distribution of "green", "red" and "blue" alphabet types, after Kirchhoff.

A 16th-century edition of the New Testament (Gospel of John), printed in a renaissance typeface by Claude Garamond

Theocritus Idyll 1, lines 12–14, in script with abbreviations and ligatures from a caption in an illustrated edition of Theocritus. Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer: Carmina bucolica, Leiden 1779.

The earliest Etruscan abecedarium, from Marsiliana d'Albegna, still almost identical with contemporaneous archaic Greek alphabets

A page from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century Bible manuscript in Gothic

18th-century title page of a book printed in Karamanli Turkish

The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts.

De chalcographiae inventione (1541, Mainz) with the 23 letters. J, U and W are missing.

Latin script

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Alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet used by the Etruscans.

The distribution of the Latin script. The dark green areas show the countries where the Latin script is the sole main script. Light green shows countries where Latin co-exists with other scripts. Latin-script alphabets are sometimes extensively used in areas coloured grey due to the use of unofficial second languages, such as French in Algeria and English in Egypt, and to Latin transliteration of the official script, such as pinyin in China.

The speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity.

First Bulgarian Empire

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Medieval Bulgar-Slavic and later Bulgarian state that existed in Southeastern Europe between the 7th and 11th centuries AD. It was founded in 680–681 after part of the Bulgars, led by Asparuh, moved south to the northeastern Balkans.

Slavic tribes and states in Early Middle Ages

The Bulgar colonies after the fall of Old Great Bulgaria in the 7th century.

Zones of control by Slavic tribes and Bulgars in the late 7th century

Territorial expansion during the reign of Krum

Bulgarian Empire during the reign of Simeon I

Emperor Simeon I: The Morning Star of Slavonic Literature, painting by Alfons Mucha

Bulgaria under the rule of Emperor Samuel

Above: The Byzantines defeat Samuel at Kleidion; below: the death of Samuel, Manasses Chronicle

Khan Omurtag was the first Bulgarian ruler known to have claimed divine origin, Madrid Skylitzes

The symbol ıYı is associated with the Dulo clan and the First Empire

A replica of a Bulgarian sabre found near the town of Varbitsa

A battle scene of the Byzantine–Bulgarian war of 894–896, Madrid Skylitzes

Slavic mythology: Sadko (1876) by Ilya Repin

The Pliska rosette dated from the pagan period has seven fingers representing the Classical planets

Bulgarian soldiers kill Christians during the persecutions, Menologion of Basil II

Baptism of Boris I and his court, painting by Nikolai Pavlovich

A medieval icon of Saint Clement of Ohrid, a high-ranking official of the Bulgarian Church, scholar, writer and enlightener of the Bulgarians and the Slavs

Expansion of Bogomilism in medieval Europe

The ruins of Pliska, the first capital of Bulgaria

Ceramic icon of Saint Theodore, Preslav ceramics, c. 900.

A page with the Alphabet Prayer by Constantine of Preslav

The Christianization of Bulgaria, the establishment of Old Bulgarian as a language of the state and the church under Boris I, and the creation of the Cyrillic script in the country, were the main means to the final formation of the Bulgarian nation in the 9th century; this included Macedonia, where the Bulgarian khan, Kuber, established a state existing in parallel with Khan Asparuh's Bulgarian Empire.

Slavic languages

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The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants.

Ethnographic Map of Slavic and Baltic Languages

Baška tablet, 11th century, Krk, Croatia.

14th-century Novgorodian children were literate enough to send each other letters written on birch bark.

10th–11th century Codex Zographensis, canonical monument of Old Church Slavonic

Map and tree of Slavic languages, according to Kassian and A. Dybo

Map of all areas where the Russian language is the language spoken by the majority of the population.

The most obvious differences between the East, South, and West Slavic branches are in the orthography of the standard languages: West Slavic languages (and Western South Slavic languages – Croatian and Slovene) are written in the Latin script, and have had more Western European influence due to their proximity and speakers being historically Roman Catholic, whereas the East Slavic and Eastern South Slavic languages are written in Cyrillic and, with Eastern Orthodox or Uniate faith, have had more Greek influence.

Alphabet

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Standardized set of basic written symbols or graphemes that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages.

A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia

A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script, one of the earliest (if not the very first) phonemic scripts

Codex Zographensis in the Glagolitic alphabet from Medieval Bulgaria

A Venn diagram showing the Greek (left), Cyrillic (bottom) and Latin (right) alphabets, which share many of the same letters, although they have different pronunciations

Old Georgian alphabet inscription on monastery gate

Terracotta jar (probably inkwell) with abecedarium of the Etruscan alphabet, 630–620 BC

The first fully phonemic script, the Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic.