Origin of the Cyrillic Alphabet

[Tuckerfan]

The story I heard is that the Cyrillic alphabet was created by Catholic monks who’d travelled to Russia, but hadn’t written in so long that they forgot how the Latin alphabet was written. Considering my source for this, I find this explaination extremely suspect. So what’s the Dope on this?

[Desmostylus]

The History of Cyrillic

The Cyrillic alphabet is currently in use by several eastern European languages, primarily Russian, and also Serbian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Byelorussia, Macedonian. This set of characters is usually attributed to St. Cyril (827-869), who, along with his brother St. Methodius (826-884), was sent from Thessalonica, Greece, by Emperor Michael III to Christianize the Khazars. The Khazars were a Tatar people of the Balkan region (now Slovakia) who practiced Judaism. It is apparent that the missionary effort was not very successful, since the Khazars were probably the source population of much of European Jewry.

As a royal commission, Cyril was directed to create a Slavonic alphabet as a church standard from the mélange of Greek, Hebrew, old Latin, and various rogue characters in common use in the Ninth century. Cyril did indeed create an alphabet, but it was far from the Cyrillic for which he is credited. It was the Glagolitic alphabet, derived in part from Greek, but also containing some entirely new forms.

[Desmostylus]

More: History of the Russian Language

The sixth century AD saw the migration of the Slav people from old Poland. The Slavs expanded westwards to the river Elbe and southwards to the Adriatic sea where they gradually occupied much of the Balkans. By the tenth century, three Slavonic language groups had emerged: Western, Southern and Eastern. Eastern Slavonic gave rise to the modern languages known as Ukranian, Belorussian and Russian. The Slavonic languages retained many features in common especially in grammatical structure, therefore the separate groups were able to use one common written language. This language was known as Old Slavonic or Old Church Slavonic (the language was used in its written form only). In the ninth century, two missionaries - Constantine (who on his deathbed took the monastic name Cyril) and Methodius - were required to write down the scriptures in Old Church Slavonic and to preach Christianity to the people of Moravia. Before they set out for Moravia, Constantine invented a Slavonic, now known as the Cyrillic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet is closely based on the Greek alphabet, with about a dozen additional letters invented to represent Slavic sounds not found in Greek.

Note well: Cyrillic comes from the Greek alphabet.

(Which, of course, is the true alphabet. It’s the one that actually starts with alpha and beta.)

[twickster]

IANAP, but I found this an interesting popular intro to the alphabet an entitity with its own history. He deals with Cyrillic briefly.

[Desmostylus]

*Originally posted by twickster *
**IANAP **

I am not a:

Poet?
Priest?
Pope?
Philosopher?
Pedant?

[twickster]

Pain in the ass?

I meant “professional,” but actually any of the above work.

[John_Mace]

If you want to understand a country’s alphabet, “follow the religion”. This will lead you to the answer at least 90% of the time.

Roman rite Catholicism (or protestant) = Latin alphabet
Eastern rite = Greek (or it’s descendants, like Cyrillic)
Moslim = arabic

The classic scenario is Serbia and Coratia. No one would aruge that the people of those two countries do not speak a single language. Serbs, being Eastern Rite folks use a modified Cyrillic alphabet while their Roman Catholic neighbors use the Latin alphabet.

Turkey is an interesting example of a Moslem country which (very intentionally) switched from the Arabic script to the Latin script in order to “modernize” and “westernize” in the early part of the 20th century.

[John_Mace]

obviously that should’ve been:

Moslem = Arabic

[Cliffy]

*Originally posted by Desmostylus *
**I am not a:

Poet?
Priest?
Pope?
Philosopher?
Pedant? **

Philologist – duh!

–Cliffy

[system]

*Originally posted by John Mace *
If you want to understand a country’s alphabet, “follow the religion”. This will lead you to the answer at least 90% of the time.

…
Moslem = arabic

True enough, but pedantry leads me to note that Xians in the Arabic world use Arabic script ( I note your caveat above).

[chukhung]

*Originally posted by John Mace *
**If you want to understand a country’s alphabet, “follow the religion”. **

I believe that the use of the Cyrillic alphabet was also spread for purely political reasons. From this site about the Mongolian script, http://www.mongoliatoday.com/issue/2/old_script.html

[The traditional Mongolian script] was widely used until 1942, when Stalin decided that Asian nations including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Mongolia must all use Cyrillic instead of their native script.

With the demise of the Soviet Union, I believe there has been something of a revival in the use of older, non-Cyrillic scripts in these nations as well as increased use of the Roman alphabet in some fields (particularly with computers).

[John_Mace]

Coll: Although you noted my caveat, what I was getting at was that the script of a country and its language is usually determined by the dominant historicval religion in that country. I would fully expect Arabic speaking Christians (and Jews for that matter) to use the Arabic script in writng the language they speak.

Chuck: You are correct. While historically, it writing usually entered a new country via its religion, in the modern era we have seen this shift to politics. Moldovans were foced to switch to Cyrillic when that region was incorporated into the Russian/Soviet sphere of influence. Turkey is another example (as I noted above) although the influence was internal politics, not external.

I’m also not sure how much this principle applies to the far east. For example, did Japan import Chinese Characters along with Buddhism, or was it at least partially independent of that process?
And clearly China did not adopt Indian script with Buddhism, presumably because it already had a firmly esatblished writing system.

[Caffeine.addict]

[The traditional Mongolian script] was widely used until 1942, when Stalin decided that Asian nations including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Mongolia must all use Cyrillic instead of their native script.

According to

this , the Kazakh language used an Arabic script before shifting to the Latin alphabet, and then the Cyrillic. I believe that the Kazakhs living in Xinjiang still use the older Arabic script.