Glagolitic Alphabet

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Unlike most of the world's major scripts, which evolved gradually over centuries, Glagolitic appears to have been deliberately designed, essentially from scratch, for a specific purpose: giving the Slavic peoples of Great Moravia scripture and liturgy in their own language. The Byzantine missionary brothers Constantine, later known by his monastic name Cyril, and Methodius are traditionally credited with creating it around 862 to 863 CE, ahead of their mission from Constantinople into Slavic-speaking Central Europe. Scholars broadly agree the alphabet was a genuine invention rather than a natural evolution of an existing script, which makes its distinctive rounded, looping letterforms, unlike anything in Greek, Latin or Cyrillic, worth explaining. Exactly what shaped those letterforms is where agreement ends: some scholars hold that Cyril based the design mainly on a cursive form of the Greek alphabet, while others, including Vondrak, Nahtigal and Fortunatov, have argued for genuine influence from non-Greek Oriental scripts including Hebrew, Samaritan, Coptic, Armenian or Georgian, pointing to specific letter resemblances as evidence. Whatever its precise sources, Glagolitic did what it was built to do: it gave Old Church Slavonic a script of its own and made the Moravian mission's translation work possible.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

It is a common assumption that Cyrillic, the alphabet used today for Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian and many other Slavic languages, is simply a later version of Glagolitic, the way Latin is often loosely described as descending from Greek. The real relationship is narrower and more specific. Cyrillic was created somewhat after Glagolitic, traditionally attributed to Cyril's own disciples working in Bulgaria, and it drew its letterforms mainly from Greek uncial script, the formal rounded capitals Byzantine scribes used for religious manuscripts, not from Glagolitic's own distinctive shapes. What Cyrillic did keep from Glagolitic was narrower but important: a handful of individual letters, needed to represent Slavic sounds that Greek simply had no letters for, were carried over largely intact from the older alphabet into the new one. So Cyrillic is Greek in its main structure and majority of its letterforms, with a small, functional inheritance from Glagolitic layered in for the sounds Greek could not otherwise express. Glagolitic itself did not disappear once Cyrillic became dominant; it survived for centuries as a liturgical script in parts of the Balkans, and a form of the Glagolitic liturgy is still celebrated on ceremonial occasions in a handful of Croatian Catholic communities today.