Inventing Cyrillic

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/inventing-cyrillic

by drdee • 2 years ago

42 96 2 years ago

culebron219• 2 years ago

So, author boils everything down to anti-Western politics a 1000 years ago and insists Cyrillic just got lucky that it spread so wide. And then puts Putin next to it, so that this celebration looked definitely shameful. That's just as ridiculous as pumping it with anti-Western sentiment from the other side.

To put it in a perspective, imagine what tone would a piece on the day of Arabic writing have.

gostsamo5• 2 years ago

If it helps you put things in prospective, Ivanova is a slavic family name. Most likely bulgarian. And the conclusions are not in the context of east vs west but in terms of power structures and how they are enabled and shaped by technology.

Adding some more historical context, check the bulgarian kingdom end of IX, beginning of X century. It is mentioned in the article, but not expanded to what degree the state invested in adopting, adapting, and spreading the new alphabet.

culebron219• 2 years ago

I think there are 2 completely different topics mixed up in this article:

1. East-West opposition back 1000 years ago was 100% religious matter, the schism between East and West Christian churches.

2. The stance of Putin and some politicians against the West nowadays.

Spreading the alphabet back then meant spreading it in clerical writing. IIRC, Catholic church back then required doing services in Latin, while Constantinople allowed it in local languages -- hence the need for translation and that's why Cyrillic developed from Greek, the primary language and writing system of the East church.

I don't see what Putin has to do with this at all.

pvdoom5• 2 years ago

So, author boils everything down to anti-Western politics a 1000 years ago and insists Cyrillic just got lucky that it spread so wide.

It's a mix of accurate and inaccurate. It is based on a 1000 years old anti-western politics, but also anti-Eastern politics. And it didn't just get lucky, but there was a massive, massive effort on part of the First Bulgarian Empire to spread it via missionaries and the like, which is what set the foundations for its later use up North, where later the Russian Empire became a thing and so on ...

culebron219• 2 years ago

I want to point out that spreading the script back then meant spreading it in churches. I don't know for sure, but it might have come with first translations of Bible into local languages.

We nowadays instead perceive the question like whether or not a whole country will 99% literacy should switch writing system.

FearNotDaniel• 2 years ago

Thank God for Wikipedia [0] because this article says absolutely nothing about the actual invention of the script, except to credit it to the wrong people - the script was indeed named after St Cyrill but he and his brother Methodius invented a completely different script, from which a few characters were later taken and combined with Greek letters to make what eventually became modern Cyrillic. The real history is much more interesting than TFA!

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script

keiferski15• 2 years ago

As a Polish-American guy, it’s a bit painful to use the Latin alphabet with Slavic languages. It works, but at the cost of your name being unintelligible to anyone west of Vienna.

Cyrillic is much more suited for Slavic languages, but of course there is so much historical baggage there that it’ll never happen. Cyrillic is a civilization-level thing tied to a lot of cultural elements, not merely a different set of symbols.

What will be interesting to see is if Bulgaria, Serbia, and Ukraine continue to use Cyrillic or gradually switch to Latin.

farmdve5• 2 years ago

Well, Bulgaria has a lot of borrowed words now, but I don't see even a hint of switching to the Latin alphabet. Not even a hint.

keiferski15• 2 years ago

I mean in the longer term. Bulgaria has a lot of population issues and seems somewhat torn between the West and the Russian spheres, so I don’t think it’s inconceivable that in 50 years (after generations grow up online familiar with computer-based Latin alphabets) they formally switch to using it.

Serbia would probably switch first, though. When I was there a half decade ago, Latin and Cyrillic were used interchangeably. But it’s my understanding that Latin is much more popular amongst the young.

vsnf2• 2 years ago

What will be interesting to see is if Bulgaria, Serbia, and Ukraine continue to use Cyrillic or gradually switch to Latin.

Turkmenistan of all places is currently undergoing a gradual switch to Latin, which has happened in fits and starts with various mandates to do so, and then to stop doing so. But the culture seems pretty undeniably to be trending to romanization.

sampa• 2 years ago

but they have a Turkic family language there, not a Slavic one

331c8c71• 2 years ago

Kazakhstan as well if I understand correctly. These languages are Turkic though so cyrillic script is not such a natural fit.

Koshkin4• 2 years ago

Cyrillic was not a bad choice for Tajik. In any case, I think it is better (than Arabic script) suited for Indo-European languages like Persian. (On the other hand, it would have been fun to see Spanish also use Arabic script. :)

holoduke2• 2 years ago

Ukraine switching to Latin? I have never heard that before. It would be very annoying. Latin alfabet is not suited for eastern slavic languages. My Latin Russian is already so rusty. There are 10 different ways to write certain letters in latin. In Cyrillic just one.

keiferski15• 2 years ago

Linguistically it would be pretty annoying, I agree. Although perhaps not dramatically different from the romanization of Slovak or Polish.

The point is more that there are many obvious political reasons why a future Ukraine might go down this path.

usrnm• 2 years ago

In Cyrillic just one

That's not true. Depends on the language, of course, but at least in Russian there are definitely more than one way to express many sounds using different letters. For example, there is no difference in pronunciation between "ёлка" and "йолка", although only one of them is accepted as correct

agapon• 2 years ago

There have been several Latin based scripts proposed for Ukrainian over many decades. So, if you haven't heard, you just haven't been interested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Latin_alphabet

horsh12• 2 years ago

Why Latin? At the moment of EU dissolution, there will be an easy choice of switching to Arabic vs staying with Cyrillic.

GoblinSlayer• 2 years ago

Write it in Greek?

postepowanieadm2• 2 years ago

It works, but at the cost of your name being unintelligible to anyone west of Vienna.

Same thing would still be true with cyrylic I believe.

keiferski15• 2 years ago

One interesting consequence of the Latin-Cyrillic split in America is that Cyrillic names got transliterated into English-understandable ones, whereas Polish Latin names often didn’t. With the result that the originally-Cyrillic names are actually easier to understand in daily life.

Compare for example, Kuznetsov (fairly easy to say in English) vs. Kwiatkowski (ported directly from Polish.)

Koshkin4• 2 years ago

But compare:

The Polish "chrząszcz" vs. the Cyrillic "xрущ" vs. its usual transliteration into English as "khrusch".

BerislavLopac• 2 years ago

It's a shame that Glagolitic hasn't caught up and remained relevant like Cyrillic did. On the upside, at least now we have our own historically accurate fantasy script. ;)|

larodi2• 2 years ago

This switch in other Slavic countries, you must understand, is thanks (caused by) the adoption of Catholicism. So nothing to do with what people decided, really, it was a political/church decision. I doubt Bulgarians would ever toss the Cyrillic away, as it gives so much identity to the country and the people there.

TheMatten• 2 years ago

I don't think it's really about Latin vs Cyrillic. Cyrillic is indeed very natural even for Slavic languages that only use Latin (modulo language-specific tweaks), but same results can be achieved with diacritics in Latin - take a look at Czech, Slovak and Serbo-Croatian alphabets. On the other hand, Polish alphabet really feels painful to an outsider, but that seems to be more about how it uses Latin, not about Latin itself.

Koshkin4• 2 years ago

diacritics

Tiếng Việt hay Việt ngữ là một ngôn ngữ thuộc...

broken-kebab• 2 years ago

bit painful to use the Latin alphabet with Slavic languages. It works, but at the cost of your name being unintelligible to anyone west of Vienna.

I'm not sure what you mean. Using Cyrillic would make it more unintelligible.

mmaniac• 2 years ago

It's interesting to observe how foreign writing systems fit the needs of the languages they are were designed to record.

Korean Hangeul is the gold standard here. Letter shapes represent their articulation and harmony and modify in regular ways to represent related pronunciations. You find similar observations in the writing systems for Arabic, Hindi, and Chinese. In the case of Cyrillic, it's that vowels come in soft and hard pairs.

Perhaps it's bias, but the Latin alphabet seems unopinionated by comparison. It has a good spread of characters for consonants and vowels and is amenable to diacritics or even novel characters. The only thing it's seriously lacking is a good way to transcribe tones. Chinese characters are great for writing a language with a near-1:1 morpheme:syllable correspondence, but its adaptation to write Japanese was famously clumsy.

kgeist4• 2 years ago

The article uses the word "invention" several times, and makes it look like the alphabet was created to make Slavs independent from the West, the Byzantine empire, to create division etc.

It fails to mention the fact that, if you compare the earliest forms of Cyrillic to the contemporary Byzantine Greek alphabet, it's 100% identical to the Greek alphabet. The only difference is that Cyrillic added a few letters for Slavic sounds originally not found in Greek: sh, ch, nasal sounds, etc. Cyrillic was originally nothing more than the Greek alphabet with extra characters. Cyrillic and Greek diverged from each other much later, for purely technical reasons (e.g. letter H in cursive was often written as И and later became the norm).

So I'm not sure what the point of the article is.

andrewshadura• 2 years ago

In fact, the original alphabet was Glagolitic, and it was very very different from both Latin and Greek. What became the foundation of the modern Cyrillic came much later.

ithkuil2• 2 years ago

Yes the evolution is attested via intermediate "old Cyrillic" forms that still retain a shadow of glagolitic aesthetics but is likely spawned directly from Greek alphabet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script:

    Unlike the Churchmen in Ohrid, Preslav scholars were much more dependent upon Greek models and quickly abandoned the Glagolitic scripts in favor of an adaptation of the Greek uncial to the needs of Slavic, which is now known as the Cyrillic alphabet.[10]

That said, Glagolitic itself derives from the Greek script but it was clearly an attempt to explicitly create something that looks different and not just "branching off" whatever was the current Greek script version of the time. So that would count more as "invention" (similarly to how Georgian and Armenian scripts were invented by a single person, allegedly the same person for both). Whether ties with Greek script is about inspiration or origin is hard to define and perhaps just a matter of degree.

For example, consider alphabet ordering. Even if you totally invent a new script for aesthetic purposes, you may want to keep the letter ordering from your home alphabet just for simplicity. Other invented scripts like Georgian and Armenian, also retain the Greek alphabet ordering. Does that indicate origin/inspiration? Can the ordering be something that was added on later when the need of a stable ordering of words for building lexicons and teaching people was recognized?

plouffy2• 2 years ago

The article is less interesting in how Cyrillic was “invented” but why.

pvdoom5• 2 years ago

It's a bit more complicated. The OG cyclic was the the Glagolitic - which is very different from the greek alphabet. The proper Cyrillic, while based on the greek alphabet, was developed then specifically and consciously as a political project against Byzantium, as of course the byzantines would much prefer to use greek for church and business ...

gampleman• 2 years ago

This article seems to miss the drastic religious importance and confuses it for politics. Of course religion affects politics, but I don’t think that was really the aim nor the main reason Sts Cyril and Methodios are held in such high honour.

First and foremost they are honoured as “equal to the apostles, enlighteners of the Slavs” as they were first and foremost missionaries. That the article calls them “diplomats” before even mentioning their mission work is already rather telling. Of course being sent somewhere by an emperor on the request of a duke will inevitably entail some diplomatic work, but that was hardly the point.

But I think it’s hard to overstate also the benefit the Slavic people saw in having Christianity in a language they understood as well as the benefit of having their religion and all the necessary literary tradition that comes with it being broadly compatible with the spoken vernacular.

pvdoom5• 2 years ago

During the time we are talking about politics and religion are one and the same ...

DeathArrow• 2 years ago

The article claims Cyrillic alphabet was made to opress people and help Putin invade Ukraine. That it was made to help lords, rulers and politicians and ordinary people didn't have any advantage from using it. Also, Cyryl and Methodius were diplomats not saints. Also the alphabet was used by people from the East in their political fights against the West.

Quite laughable for anyone who knows a bit about the Cyrillic alphabet and the history of Eastern Europe.

nbzso• 2 years ago

Bulgaria has one of the world’s fastest-shrinking populations, primarily attributed to a high death rate and a low birth rate. Major health-related issues, such as high rates of smoking and alcohol consumption, contribute to Bulgaria’s elevated mortality rate. Furthermore, Bulgaria faces challenges in retaining its younger population due to a lack of economic opportunities and declining living standards in certain areas, indirectly contributing to its demographic decline.

After joining EU and NATO. No army. No agriculture. No serious manufacturing capability. Corruption. Crime. Failing infrastructure. And now fractured energy sector. The cheap IT labor and political mafia money laundering keeps the illusion a float.

Lost identity and culture. 500 years under Ottoman Empire. 45 under Soviets (statistically economy and population growth in the period). And 34 under Britain and USA (total failure and no sovereignty).

Cyrillic alphabet is the most phonetically accurate, they have a letter for every sound you make with your mouth. One sad story for the country founded in 681 b.c.

The First Bulgarian Empire (Church Slavonic: блъгарьско цѣсарьствиѥ, romanized: blŭgarĭsko tsěsarǐstvije; Bulgarian: Първо българско царство) was a medieval 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.

nikolay• 2 years ago

Meanwhile, Bulgaria is a survivor. I'm sure it will outlive the EU, NATO, and many Western European States. It will also outlive Great Islamistan (presently known as the United Kingdom).

Surviving and thriving are two separate states, often incompatible, and Bulgaria is a champion of the first.

larodi2• 2 years ago

Nice work by this Mirella girl, though she fails on several important point.

* The original alphabet, called glagolic, namely this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script#/media/File:... - is not in use anymore, and have hardly been in use even at the time of its creation.

* There is this argument whether Saints Cyril and Methodius were of Greek/Bulgarian/Macedonian origin, but the fact is that what is in use now as the Cyrillic was formalized in Pliska - the then-capital of Bulgaria during this same Boris ruler. The Pliska Literary school - this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preslav_Literary_School - developed what is nowadays known as old-Bulgarian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preslav_Literary_School#/media...

now we read from wikipedia this thing:

"Unlike the Churchmen in Ohrid, Preslav scholars were much more dependent upon Greek models and quickly abandoned the Glagolitic scripts in favor of an adaptation of the Greek uncial to the needs of Slavic, which is now known as the Cyrillic alphabet."

So you see, this thing, which is the Cyrillic alphabet was developed in area that is indisputably the Bulgarian kingdom. Which is this blob https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Southeas... comprising significant part of present day Northen Macedonia, and much of the geographical Macedonian area, half of it falls in present day Greece. Later this also includes Ochrid - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/63/Ri....

* Finally this argument of rulers in Bulgaria speaking Turkish is very funny, given the fact that Bulgarians list tribes such as trace, proton-bulgarians and slavs as ancestors, and not the turks. The names of rules before Boris are Asparuh, Krum, Kahn Omurtag, Khan Tervel...etc. none sound Turkish to me, for all I care there may be something persian in the ancestry, which explains why so many Bulgarians look Iran so often.

And if you have reached reading here, take a look at this coptic alphabet from ... 2cent AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script and try to convince me scholars in Pliska didn't use it as foundation for cyrrilic. Many believe the actual cyrillic, used today, was influnced by the greek alphabet, but given the fact that this all was done by church people it gives some impression it was this Coptic Orthodox script, rather than Greek alphabet at the time which influenced the change. Which was done by Clement of Ohrid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_of_Ohrid and his fellow scholars.

Finally, I really dispose such arguments of whether Nikola Tesla, for example, was Slavic himself, or Serbian or Croatian or whether, which you can find in history books. The fact that Tesla took American citizenship and his work flourished in the U.S.A. (because it was not possible to do so in Serbia/Croatia!) gives to the fact that the environment where genius works may be more important than his origins.

hoseja3• 2 years ago

Not Turkish, Turkic. Which they totally were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgar_language

Koshkin4• 2 years ago

Not totally, only partially. At the time the Bulgarians were already a mix of the Slavic, Byzantine, and other peoples - including, of course, the Bulgars who, too, settled there, in the process of their migration from the East. The Bulgarian language and the Bulgar language have little (if anything) to do with each other.

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

Unless you suspect Mirela Ivanova to be a child, it's pretty disrespectful to refer to the author as "this Mirella girl". But I'm guessing that the disrespect was intentional.

0xBABAD00C2• 2 years ago

There are Byzantine Armenian dimensions to this story that I suspect not many people know. Cyrill and Methodius were taught by Leo the Philosopher and Photios, in the University established by Bardas, all Greek-Armenians who clearly knew the transformative effect of having your own writing system (it saved Armenians from assimilation just a few centuries prior to these events). It took Hellenic culture of Byzantine period and Armenian experience to give birth to the first Slavic writing of Moravia and Bulgaria, and later most of Eastern Europe.

Incidentally, the first writing system (Glagolithic) didn't stick nearly as well as the subsequent iteration (Cyrillic) because the latter was so much closer to Greek, and every educated person already knew how to read/write Greek so it was a much easier sell. Regardless, this invention and its promotion was very much a planned and well-understood Byzantine project.

Thus Bardas founded the Magnaura School with seats for philosophy, grammar, astronomy and mathematics, supported scholars like Leo the Mathematician and promoted the missionary activities of Cyril and Methodius to Greater Moravia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_the_Mathematician https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_VII_of_Constantinople https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photios_I_of_Constantinople

(these further cite primary sources)

hoseja3• 2 years ago

Did you mean the second paragraph as Cyrillic being closer to Greek? That makes sense but I was confused at first and thought you meant Glagolitic being closer, which makes very little sense.

0xBABAD00C2• 2 years ago

Yes, Cyrillic was closer to Greek, that's why it stuck better. Just edited to make it clear.

hoseja3• 2 years ago

That "Sviatoslav" the article talks about is actually Svatopluk [0], who was not a "Slavonic speaker" as Old Church Slavonic is a sort of pidgin based on a local Macedonian dialect.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svatopluk_I_of_Moravia

ibobev• 2 years ago

Actually, the Cyrillic alphabet was invented in the First Bulgarian Empire by the disciples of St. Cyril and Methodius who created the Glagolic alphabet before that. The Cyrillic alphabet is the greatest civilizational achievement of Bulgaria for its entire history.

Inventing Cyrillic

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