The Early Cyrillic alphabet was a writing system developed in Bulgaria during the 10th century A.D. for the writing of Old Church Slavonic. With Christianity having been made the official state religion in 864, King Boris I commissioned the creation of the alphabet. Climent of Ochrid developed the alphabet and named it for his teacher, St. Cyril, a missionary who, along with his brother, Methodius, is credited with inventing the Glagolitic alphabet, an earlier Slavic alphabet and an influence on this one. The alphabet also shows influence from the Greek and Latin alphabets. In the following centuries, the Early Cyrillic was replaced by a later form, the Modern Cyrillic alphabet, which is still widely in use throughout Asia and Eastern Europe.

The alphabet

Notes

Numerals, diacritics and punctuation

Each letter also had a numeric value, inherited from the corresponding Greek letter. A titlo over a sequence of letters indicated their use as a number. See Cyrillic numerals, Titlo.

Several diacritics, adopted from Polytonic Greek orthography, were also used (these may not appear correctly in all web browsers; they are supposed to be directly above the letter, not off to its upper right):

•   oksia, indicating a stressed syllable (Unicode U+1FFD), similar to an acute accent
• а`  varia, indicating stress on the last syllable (U+1FEF), similar to a grave accent
• а҄  kamora , indicating palatalization (U+0484), similar to an inverted breve
• а҅  dasy pneuma, rough breathing mark (U+0485)
• а҆  zvatel'tse, or psilon pneuma, soft breathing mark (U+0486)
• а҃  titlo, indicating abbreviations, or letters used as numerals (U+0483)
• ӓ  trema, diaeresis (U+0308)
• а҆´  Combined zvatel'tse and oksia is called iso.
• а҆`  Combined zvatel'tse and varia is called apostrof.

Punctuation marks:

• ,  comma (U+002C)
• .  full stop (U+002E)
• ։  Armenian full stop (U+0589), resembling a colon
• ;  Greek question mark (U+037E), similar to a semicolon
• ·  ano teleia (U+0387), a middle dot used as a word separator
• !  exclamation mark (U+0021)

References

• A Berdnikov and O Lapko, "Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic in TEX and Unicode", EuroTEX '99 Proceedings, September 1999 (PDF)
• DJ Birnbaum, "Unicode for Slavic Medievalists", September 28, 2002 (PDF)
• M Everson and R Cleminson, "Final proposal for encoding the Glagolitic script in the UCS", Expert Contribution to the ISO N2610R, September 4, 2003 (PDF)
• V Lev, "The history of the Ukrainian script (paleography)", in Ukraine: a concise encyclopædia, volume 1. University of Toronto Press, 1963, 1970, 1982. ISBN 0802031056
• V Simovyc and JB Rudnyckyj, "The history of Ukrainian orthography", in Ukraine: a concise encyclopædia, volume 1 (op cit).
• J Zamora, "Help me learn Church Slavonic", online
• Ukrainian Wikipedia, "Кирилиця" (Cyrillic)

See also

• Glagolitic alphabet
• Bosnian Cyrillic
• Modern Cyrillic alphabet
• Reforms of Russian orthography
• Cyrillic numerals
• Titlo
• Polytonic Greek orthography

References

• A Berdnikov and O Lapko, "Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic in TEX and Unicode", EuroTEX '99 Proceedings, September 1999 (PDF)
• DJ Birnbaum, "Unicode for Slavic Medievalists", September 28, 2002 (PDF)
• M Everson and R Cleminson, "Final proposal for encoding the Glagolitic script in the UCS", Expert Contribution to the ISO N2610R, September 4, 2003 (PDF)
• V Lev, "The history of the Ukrainian script (paleography)", in Ukraine: a concise encyclopædia, volume 1. University of Toronto Press, 1963, 1970, 1982. ISBN 0802031056
• V Simovyc and JB Rudnyckyj, "The history of Ukrainian orthography", in Ukraine: a concise encyclopædia, volume 1 (op cit).
• J Zamora, "Help me learn Church Slavonic", online
• Ukrainian Wikipedia, "Кирилиця" (Cyrillic)