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129-577: The Glagolitic script ( / ˌ ɡ l æ ɡ ə ˈ l ɪ t ɪ k / GLAG -ə- LIT -ik , ⰳⰾⰰⰳⱁⰾⰻⱌⰰ , glagolitsa ) is the oldest known Slavic alphabet . It is generally agreed that it was created in the 9th century for the purpose of translating liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic by Saint Cyril , a monk from Thessalonica . He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzantine Emperor Michael III in 863 to Great Moravia to spread Christianity there. After

258-731: A is not written, as in the Indic abugidas, The source of the term "abugida", namely the Ge'ez abugida now used for Amharic and Tigrinya , has assimilated into their consonant modifications. It is no longer systematic and must be learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script. Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became logographic . Thus the primary categorisation of alphabets reflects how they treat vowels. For tonal languages , further classification can be based on their treatment of tone. Though names do not yet exist to distinguish

387-476: A 16th-century exclave in Putna . Its authorship by Cyril was forgotten, having been replaced with an attribution to St. Jerome by the early Benedictine adopters of Istria in a bid to secure the approval of the papacy. The bid was ultimately successful, though sporadic restrictions and repressions from individual bishops continued even after its official recognition by Pope Innocent IV . These had little effect on

516-458: A Glagolitic type was confiscated, leading to a shift towards Latinic and Cyrillic literacy when coupled with the Tridentine requirement that priests be educated at seminaries. The result was its gradual death as a written script in most of its continental range, but also the unusually late survival of medieval scribal tradition for the reproduction of Glagolitic texts in isolated areas like

645-718: A brief attempt at reintroduction was made in the West Slavic area in the 14th century through the Emmaus Benedictine Monastery in Prague , where it survived well into the 15th century, the last manuscript with Glagolitic script dating to 1450–1452. Its use for special applications continued in some Cyrillic areas, for example in the Bologna Psalter (1230–1241), the Sinodalna 895 Menaion (1260),

774-416: A consistent one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the phonemes so that a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker would always know the pronunciation of a word given its spelling, and vice versa. However, this ideal is usually never achieved in practice. Languages can come close to it, such as Spanish and Finnish . Others, such as English, deviate from it to

903-474: A consonant, with diacritics for disambiguation. In the Pollard script , an abugida, vowels are indicated by diacritics. The placing of the diacritic relative to the consonant is modified to indicate the tone. More rarely, a script may have separate letters for tones, as is the case for Hmong and Zhuang . For many, regardless of whether letters or diacritics get used, the most common tone is not marked, just as

1032-600: A few monasteries and academic institutions, in addition to a small population of enthusiasts, whose numbers grew and shrank with the prevalence of the script in literature, but grew exponentially in pious and nationalist circles in the years leading up to and following Independence of Croatia , and again more broadly with the Internet . The word glagolitic comes from Neo-Latin glagoliticus and Croatian glagoljica , from Old Church Slavonic ⰳⰾⰰⰳⱁⰾⱏ ( glagolŭ ), meaning "utterance" or "word". The name glagolitsa

1161-513: A high liturgical script until a Glagolitic seminary was opened in Split in the 18th century, aside from a period of time in the parish of Kučiće-Vinišće. Bishoprics by size of 16th century Glagolitic inscriptional corpus (in letters). "Other" includes Senj , Koper , Novigrad , Otočac  [ hr ] , Zagreb , Osor , Aquileia , Đakovo , Nin , Assisi , Cazin , Rab . See list . The Ottoman Empire's repeated incursions into Croatia in

1290-411: A large number of loanwords at different times, retaining their original spelling at varying levels. However, even English has general, albeit complex, rules that predict pronunciation from spelling. Rules like this are usually successful. However, rules to predict spelling from pronunciation have a higher failure rate. Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform to realign

1419-480: A letter for /ti/ . Devanagari is typically an abugida augmented with dedicated letters for initial vowels, though some traditions use अ as a zero consonant as the graphic base for such vowels. The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut. For example, Sorani Kurdish is written in the Arabic script , which, when used for other languages, is an abjad. In Kurdish , writing

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1548-451: A much larger degree. The pronunciation of a language often evolves independently of its writing system. Writing systems have been borrowed for languages the orthography was not initially made to use. The degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies. Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways: National languages sometimes elect to address

1677-460: A phenomenon where letters have been given names distinct from their pronunciations. Systems with acrophony include Greek, Arabic , Hebrew , and Syriac ; systems without include the Latin alphabet . More recently however, four cylinder seals dating to 2400 BC and found at the site of Umm el-Marra , in present-day Syria , are incised with what is potentially the earliest known alphabetic writings in

1806-479: A reference to a kind of property mark or alternatively fortune-telling signs. Some "Ruthenian letters" found in one version of St. Cyril's life are explainable as misspelled "Syrian letters" (in Slavic, the roots are very similar: rus- vs. sur- or syr- ), etc. Glagolitic script is the writing system used in the world of The Witcher books and video game series. It is also featured, in various uses, in several of

1935-409: A set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals, which are glyphs that provide one sound. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms , to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. The script was used a fair amount in the 4th century CE. However, after pagan temples were closed down, it was forgotten in the 5th century until

2064-419: A small number of priests fought to keep its liturgical use alive, encountering difficulties but eventually succeeding to the point that its area expanded in the early 20th century. Latinic translations and transliterations of the matter of the missal in this period led to its decline in the decades before Vatican II , whose promulgation of the vernacular had the effect of confining regular use of Glagolitic to

2193-453: A syllabary, as their name would imply, because each glyph stands for a consonant and is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel. In a true syllabary, each consonant-vowel combination gets represented by a separate glyph. All three types may be augmented with syllabic glyphs. Ugaritic , for example, is essentially an abjad but has syllabic letters for /ʔa, ʔi, ʔu/ These are the only times that vowels are indicated. Coptic has

2322-792: A systematic graphic modification of the consonants. The earliest known alphabet using this sense is the Wadi el-Hol script , believed to be an abjad. Its successor, Phoenician , is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic , Greek , Latin (via the Old Italic alphabet ), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet), and Hebrew (via Aramaic ). Examples of present-day abjads are the Arabic and Hebrew scripts ; true alphabets include Latin , Cyrillic, and Korean hangul; and abugidas, used to write Tigrinya , Amharic , Hindi , and Thai . The Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are also an abugida, rather than

2451-612: A unique order based on phonology : The letters are arranged according to how and where the sounds get produced in the mouth. This organization is present in Southeast Asia, Tibet, Korean hangul , and even Japanese kana , which is not an alphabet. In Phoenician, each letter got associated with a word that begins with that sound. This is called acrophony and is continuously used to varying degrees in Samaritan , Aramaic , Syriac , Hebrew , Greek , and Arabic . Acrophony

2580-462: A wide variety of languages aside from Arabic, including Persian , Malay and Urdu , which are not Semitic . Such adaptations may feature altered or new characters to represent phonemes that do not appear in Arabic phonology . For example, the Arabic language lacks a voiceless bilabial plosive (the [p] sound), therefore many languages add their own letter to represent [p] in the script, though

2709-469: Is Elder Futhark , believed to have evolved out of one of the Old Italic alphabets . Elder Futhark gave rise to other alphabets known collectively as the Runic alphabets . The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from 100 CE to the late Middle Ages, being engraved on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions found on bone and wood occasionally appear. These alphabets have since been replaced with

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2838-519: Is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram c.  1000 BCE . This script is the parent script of all western alphabets. By the 10th century BCE, two other forms distinguish themselves, Canaanite and Aramaic . The Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet . The South Arabian alphabet , a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge'ez abugida

2967-570: Is believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius , while the Cyrillic alphabet was created by Clement of Ohrid , their disciple. They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or influenced by Greek and Hebrew. Many phonetic scripts exist in Asia. The Arabic alphabet , Hebrew alphabet , Syriac alphabet , and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of

3096-546: Is considered a separate letter, but accented vowels such as á and é are not. The ll and ch were also formerly considered single letters and sorted separately after l and c , but in 1994, the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies changed the collating order so that ll came to be sorted between lk and lm in the dictionary and ch came to be sorted between cg and ci ; those digraphs were still formally designated as letters, but in 2010

3225-1306: Is speculated to have developed in Croatia , around the 14th century, and was derived from the word glagoljati , literally "verb ( glagol ) using ( jati )", meaning to say Mass in Old Church Slavonic liturgy. In the languages now spoken in the places where Glagolitic script was once used, the script is known as глаголица (romanized as glagolitsa or glagolica , depending on which language) in Bulgarian , Macedonian and Russian ; glagoljica (глагољица) in Croatian and Serbian ; глаголиця ( hlaholytsia ) in Ukrainian ; глаголіца ( hlaholitsa ) in Belarusian ; hlaholice in Czech ; hlaholika in Slovak ; głagolica in Polish ; and glagolica in Slovene and Sorbian . The creation of

3354-503: Is the writing system used for Arabic ( Arabic alphabet ) and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin script ), the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it, and the third-most by number of users (after the Latin and Chinese scripts ). The script was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably

3483-423: Is unknown to many Italians because spelling is usually trivial, as Italian spelling is highly phonemic. In standard Spanish, one can tell the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa, as phonemes sometimes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is consistently pronounced. French using silent letters , nasal vowels , and elision , may seem to lack much correspondence between

3612-673: The Real Academia Española changed it, so they are no longer considered letters at all. In German, words starting with sch- (which spells the German phoneme / ʃ / ) are inserted between words with initial sca- and sci- (all incidentally loanwords) instead of appearing after the initial sz , as though it were a single letter, which contrasts several languages such as Albanian , in which dh- , ë- , gj- , ll- , rr- , th- , xh-, and zh-, which all represent phonemes and considered separate single letters, would follow

3741-532: The Aramaic alphabet . Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia descend from the Brahmi script , believed to be a descendant of Aramaic. European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many languages of Asia. Arabic is also widely used, sometimes as an abjad, as with Urdu and Persian , and sometimes as a complete alphabet, as with Kurdish and Uyghur . In Korea , Sejong

3870-630: The Bulgarian Empire from Byzantine Constantinople . As a result of Boris' measures, two academies, one in Ohrid and one in Preslav , were founded. From there, the students travelled to other places and spread the use of their alphabet. Students of the two apostles who were expelled from Great Moravia in 886, notably Clement of Ohrid and Saint Naum , brought the Glagolitic alphabet to

3999-593: The Byzantines , Glagolitic gradually ceased to be used there at all. Nevertheless, particular passages or words written with the Glagolitic alphabet appeared in Bulgarian Cyrillic manuscripts till the end of the 14th century. Some students of the Ohrid academy went to Bohemia where the alphabet was used in the 10th and 11th centuries, along with other scripts. It is not clear whether the Glagolitic alphabet

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4128-649: The Etruscan alphabet . One of these became the Latin alphabet, which spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their republic. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire , the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It came to be used for the Romance languages that descended from Latin and most of the other languages of western and central Europe. Today, it is the most widely used script in

4257-701: The First Bulgarian Empire on Balkans and were received and accepted officially by Boris I of Bulgaria . This led to the establishment of the two literary schools: the Preslav Literary School and the Ohrid Literary School . Some went to Croatia ( Dalmatia ), where the squared variant arose and where Glagolitic remained in use for a long time. In 1248, Pope Innocent IV granted the Croatians of southern Dalmatia

4386-609: The First French Empire and Austrian Empire left the script without legal status and its last remaining centers of education were abolished, concurrent with the weakening of the script in the few remaining seminaries that used the cursive form in instruction, resulting in a rapid decline. But when the Slavicists discovered the script and established it as the original script devised by Cyril, Glagolitic gained new niche applications in certain intellectual circles, while

4515-528: The Glagolitic numerals use letters with a numerical value assigned to each based on their native alphabetic order. This differs from Cyrillic numerals , which inherited their numeric value from the corresponding Greek letter (see Greek numerals ). The two brothers from Thessaloniki , who were later canonized as Saints Cyril and Methodius, were sent to Great Moravia in 862 by the Byzantine emperor at

4644-563: The Greek alphabet was the first true alphabet; it was originally derived from the Phoenician alphabet , which was an abjad. Alphabets usually have a standard ordering for their letters. This makes alphabets a useful tool in collation , as words can be listed in a well-defined order—commonly known as alphabetical order . This also means that letters may be used as a method of "numbering" ordered items. Some systems demonstrate acrophony ,

4773-512: The Hanuno'o script , are learned one letter at a time, in no particular order, and are not used for collation where a definite order is required. However, a dozen Ugaritic tablets from the fourteenth century BCE preserve the alphabet in two sequences. One, the ABCDE order later used in Phoenician, has continued with minor changes in Hebrew , Greek , Armenian , Gothic , Cyrillic , and Latin ;

4902-471: The Late Latin word alphabetum , which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος alphábētos ; it was made from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha (α) and beta (β). The names for the Greek letters, in turn, came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet: aleph , the word for ox , and bet , the word for house . The Ancient Egyptian writing system had

5031-706: The March of Verona where the Investiture Controversy afforded it refuge from the opposition of Latin rite prelates, and allowed it to entrench itself in Istria , spreading from there to nearby lands. It survived there and as far south as Dalmatia without interruption into the 20th century for Church Slavonic in addition to its use as a secular script in parts of its range, which at times extended into Bosnia , Slavonia , and Carniola , in addition to 14th-15th century exclaves in Prague and Kraków , and

5160-551: The Phoenician alphabet . The Phoenician system is considered the first true alphabet and is the ultimate ancestor of many modern scripts, including Arabic , Cyrillic , Greek , Hebrew , Latin , and possibly Brahmic . Peter T. Daniels distinguishes true alphabets—which use letters to represent both consonants and vowels—from both abugidas and abjads , which only need letters for consonants. Abjads generally lack vowel indicators altogether, while abugidas represent them with diacritics added to letters. In this narrower sense,

5289-656: The Quran , the holy book of Islam . With the religion's spread , it came to be used as the primary script for many language families, leading to the addition of new letters and other symbols. Such languages still using it are: Persian ( Farsi and Dari ), Urdu , Uyghur , Kurdish , Pashto , Punjabi ( Shahmukhi ), Sindhi , Azerbaijani (Torki in Iran), Malay ( Jawi ), Javanese and Indonesian ( Pegon ), Balti , Balochi , Luri , Kashmiri , Cham (Akhar Srak), Rohingya , Somali , Mandinka , and Mooré , among others. Until

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5418-642: The Sahel , developed with the spread of Islam . To a certain degree the style and usage tends to follow those of the Maghreb (for instance the position of the dots in the letters fāʼ and qāf ). Additional diacritics have come into use to facilitate the writing of sounds not represented in the Arabic language. The term ʻAjamī , which comes from the Arabic root for "foreign", has been applied to Arabic-based orthographies of African languages. Today Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China are

5547-580: The Slavic language . After the adoption of Christianity in Bulgaria in 865, religious ceremonies and Divine Liturgy were conducted in Greek by clergy sent from the Byzantine Empire , using the Byzantine rite . Fearing growing Byzantine influence and weakening of the state, Boris viewed the introduction of the Slavic alphabet and language into church use as a way to preserve the independence of

5676-639: The Syriac alphabet , which are both derived from the Aramaic alphabet , which, in turn, descended from the Phoenician alphabet . The Phoenician script also gave rise to the Greek alphabet (and, therefore, both the Cyrillic alphabet and the Latin alphabet used in America and most European countries.). In the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, northern Arab tribes emigrated and founded a kingdom centred around Petra , Jordan . These people (now named Nabataeans from

5805-448: The phoneme level—that is, it has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words. In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true" alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads , and abugidas . These three differ in how they treat vowels. Abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed. Abugidas are also consonant-based but indicate vowels with diacritics ,

5934-521: The thorn ⟨þ⟩ in Old English and Icelandic , which came from the Futhark runes; and modified existing letters, such as the eth ⟨ð⟩ of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified d . Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian and Italian, which uses the letters j, k, x, y, and w only in foreign words. Another notable script

6063-459: The 13th century) ascribing its invention to St. Jerome (342–429). The legend was partly based on the saint's place of birth on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia . He was viewed as a "compatriot" and anachronistically as belonging to the same ethnic group; this helped the spread of the cult of the saint in Dalmatia and was later used to support the idea of the presence of Slavic communities in

6192-672: The 14th century in the Second Bulgarian Empire and the Serbian Empire , and later mainly for cryptographic purposes. Glagolitic also spread to the Kievan Rus' and the Kingdom of Bohemia , though its use declined there in the 12th century, although some manuscripts in the territory of the former retained Glagolitic inclusions for centuries. It had also spread to Duklja and Zachlumia , from which it reached

6321-517: The 15th and 16th centuries posed the first major existential threat to the script's survival. The Counter-Reformation, alongside other factors, led to the suppression of Glagolitic in Istria in the 16th–17th centuries as well as in the Zagreb archdiocese. The Latinisation of the coastal cities and islands took much longer, where the script continued to be used by the notaries of Krk into the first decade of

6450-405: The 15th century BCE. This was an alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs, including three that indicate the following vowel. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit in 1178 BCE. The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, conventionally called Proto-Canaanite , before c.  1050 BCE . The oldest text in Phoenician script

6579-564: The 16th century BCE, had 87 symbols, including five vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, causing many different alphabets to evolve from it. The Greek alphabet, in Euboean form , was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula c.  800–600 BCE giving rise to many different alphabets used to write the Italic languages , like

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6708-426: The 16th century, it was also used for some Spanish texts, and—prior to the script reform in 1928 —it was the writing system of Turkish . The script is written from right to left in a cursive style, in which most of the letters are written in slightly different forms according to whether they stand alone or are joined to a following or preceding letter. The script does not have capital letters . In most cases,

6837-483: The 19th century, with education by rural chapters on that island ensuring the survival of the script until well after their abolition by the Napoleon administration in the second decade of the 19th century. Novitiates continued to be educated primarily in the Glagolitic script as late as the third decade of the 19th century. But without centres of education, Latin script and Italian rapidly took over, so that very little

6966-580: The 19th century. A once common belief was that the Glagolitic was created or used in the 4th century by St. Jerome , hence the alphabet was sometimes named "Hieronymian". It has also acrophonically been called azbuka from the names of its first two letters, on the same model as "alpha" + "beta" (the same name can also refer to Cyrillic and in some modern languages it simply means "alphabet" in general). The Slavs of Great Moravia (present-day Slovakia and Moravia ), Hungary , Slovenia and Slavonia were called Slověne at that time, which gives rise to

7095-438: The Arabic alphabet use the same base shapes. Most additional letters in languages that use alphabets based on the Arabic alphabet are built by adding (or removing) diacritics to existing Arabic letters. Some stylistic variants in Arabic have distinct meanings in other languages. For example, variant forms of kāf ك ک ڪ ‎ are used in some languages and sometimes have specific usages. In Urdu and some neighbouring languages,

7224-520: The Arabic script is used to write Serbo-Croatian , Sorani , Kashmiri , Mandarin Chinese , or Uyghur , vowels are mandatory. The Arabic script can, therefore, be used as a true alphabet as well as an abjad , although it is often strongly, if erroneously, connected to the latter due to it being originally used only for Arabic. Use of the Arabic script in West African languages, especially in

7353-578: The Arabic script were incorporated among the assortment of scripts used for writing native languages. In the 20th century, the Arabic script was generally replaced by the Latin alphabet in the Balkans , parts of Sub-Saharan Africa , and Southeast Asia , while in the Soviet Union , after a brief period of Latinisation , use of Cyrillic was mandated. Turkey changed to the Latin alphabet in 1928 as part of an internal Westernizing revolution. After

7482-459: The Aramaic alphabet, which continued to evolve; it separated into two forms: one intended for inscriptions (known as "monumental Nabataean") and the other, more cursive and hurriedly written and with joined letters, for writing on papyrus . This cursive form influenced the monumental form more and more and gradually changed into the Arabic alphabet. The Arabic script has been adapted for use in

7611-416: The Church Slavic language. Twenty-four of the 41 original Glagolitic letters (see table below) probably derive from graphemes of the medieval cursive Greek small alphabet but have been given an ornamental design. The source of the other consonantal letters is unknown. If they were added by Cyril, it is likely that they were taken from an alphabet used for Christian scripture. It is frequently proposed that

7740-405: The Eastern Adriatic Coast from ancient times, but the legend was probably firstly introduced for other reasons, like giving a more solid religious justification for the use of this script and Slavic liturgy. The theory nevertheless gained much popularity and spread to other countries before being resolutely disproven. Until the end of the 18th century, a strange but widespread opinion dominated that

7869-449: The English names got derived) preserve the qualities of the English vowels before the Great Vowel Shift. By contrast, the names of F, L, M, N, and S ( /ɛf, ɛl, ɛm, ɛn, ɛs/ ) remain the same in both languages because "short" vowels were largely unaffected by the Shift. In Cyrillic, originally, acrophony was present using Slavic words. The first three words going, azŭ, buky, vědě, with the Cyrillic collation order being, А, Б, В. However, this

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7998-414: The Glagolitic alphabet. The decision by a great assembly of notables summoned by Boris in the year 893 in favor of Cyrillic created an alphabetical difference between the two literary centres of the Bulgarian state in Pliska and Ohrid. In the western part the Glagolitic alphabet remained dominant at first. However, subsequently in the next two centuries, mostly after the fall of the First Bulgarian Empire to

8127-456: The Glagolitic writing system, which was in use in Dalmatia and Istria along with neighboring islands, including the translation of the Holy Scripture, owe their existence to the famous church father St. Jerome. Knowing him as the author of the Latin Vulgate , considering him – by his own words, born on the border between Dalmatia and Pannonia (remembering that the Dalmatian borders extended well into Istria at that time) – presumed to be an Illyrian,

8256-426: The Great created the Hangul alphabet in 1443 CE. Hangul is a unique alphabet: it is a featural alphabet , where the design of many of the letters comes from a sound's place of articulation, like P looking like the widened mouth and L looking like the tongue pulled in. The creation of Hangul was planned by the government of the day, and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in

8385-493: The Greeks Cyril and Methodius but unknown. We do not know who was the first to put in motion this unscientifically-based tradition about Jerome's authorship of the Glagolitic script and translation of the Holy Scripture, but in 1248 this version came to the knowledge of Pope Innocent IV. <...> The belief in Jerome as an inventor of the Glagolitic lasted many centuries, not only in his homeland, i.e. in Dalmatia and Croatia, not only in Rome, due to Slavs living there... but also in

8514-421: The Hludov Gospel (17th/18th). The early development of the Glagolitic minuscule script alongside the increasingly square majuscule is poorly documented, but a mutual relationship evolved between the two varieties; the majuscule being used primarily for inscriptions and higher liturgical uses, and the minuscule being used in both religious and secular documents. Ignoring the problematic early Slavonian inscriptions,

8643-401: The Latin alphabet. The exception was for decorative use, where the runes remained in use until the 20th century. The Old Hungarian script was the writing system of the Hungarians. It was in use during the entire history of Hungary, albeit not as an official writing system. From the 19th century, it once again became more and more popular. The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of

8772-566: The Latin alphabet. Uzbekistan is reforming the alphabet to use diacritics on the letters that are marked by apostrophes and the letters that are digraphs. The standard system of symbols used by linguists to represent sounds in any language, independently of orthography, is called the International Phonetic Alphabet . Zhou, Minglang (2003). Multilingualism in China . doi : 10.1515/9783110924596 . ISBN   978-3-11-017896-8 . Arabic script Co-official script in: Official script at regional level in: The Arabic script

8901-554: The Northwest Semitic "Abgad" order, is already well established. Although, languages using this alphabet have different conventions for their treatment of modified letters (such as the French é , à , and ô ) and certain combinations of letters ( multigraphs ). In French, these are not considered to be additional letters for collation. However, in Icelandic , the accented letters such as á , í , and ö are considered distinct letters representing different vowel sounds from sounds represented by their unaccented counterparts. In Spanish, ñ

9030-402: The Prague NM IX.F.38 Psalter (18th) and in the initials of many manuscripts of the Prophets with Commentary dating to the late 15th and early 16th centuries from Muscovy and Russia . Most later use in the Cyrillic world was for cryptographic purposes, such as in the Krushedol Miscellany (15th), the RNB F.п.I.48 Prologue (1456), the Piskarev 59 Isaac (1472), the Shchukin 511 Miscellany (1511) and

9159-512: The Preslav Literary School, where the Bulgarian capital, along with the school, was transferred to in 893) – is often credited, at least by supporters of glagolitic precedence , for the "creation" or wider adoption of the Cyrillic script , which almost entirely replaced Glagolitic during the Middle Ages . The Cyrillic alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet used at that time, with some additional letters for sounds peculiar to Slavic languages (like ⟨ш⟩, ⟨ц⟩, ⟨ч⟩, ⟨ъ⟩, ⟨ь⟩, ⟨ѣ⟩), likely derived from

9288-1036: The RPK 312 Gospel (13th), the Karakallou Epistolary (13th), the NBKM 933 Triodion (13th), the Skopje 1511 Octoechos (13th), the BRAN 4.9.39 Miscellany (13th), the Hilandar Chrysorrhoas (13th/14th), the Mazurin 1698 Pandects (13th/14th), the Sofia Psalter (1337), the SANU 55 Epistolary (1366–1367), the RNB F.п.I.2 Psalter (14th), the Čajniče Gospel (late 14th), the Radosav Miscellany (1444–1461),

9417-462: The Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited number of signs instead of using many different signs for words, in contrast to cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B . The Phoenician script was probably the first phonemic script, and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for traders to learn. Another advantage of the Phoenician alphabet

9546-658: The West. In the 14th century, Croatian monks brought the legend to the Czechs, and even the Emperor Charles IV believed them. The epoch of traditional attribution of the script to Jerome ended probably in 1812. In modern times, only certain marginal authors share this view, usually "re-discovering" one of the already-known mediaeval sources. The phonetic values of many of the letters are thought to have been displaced under Cyrillic influence or to have become confused through

9675-484: The characters is popularly attributed to Saints Cyril and Methodius , who may have created them to facilitate the introduction of Christianity. It is believed that the original letters were fitted to Slavic dialects in geographical Macedonia specifically (the Byzantine theme of Thessalonica ). The words of that language could not be easily written by using either the Greek or Latin alphabets. The number of letters in

9804-787: The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of the Turkic languages of the ex-USSR attempted to follow Turkey's lead and convert to a Turkish-style Latin alphabet. However, renewed use of the Arabic alphabet has occurred to a limited extent in Tajikistan , whose language's close resemblance to Persian allows direct use of publications from Afghanistan and Iran. As of Unicode 15.1, the following ranges encode Arabic characters: Used to represent / ɡ / in Morocco and in many dialects of Algerian . Most languages that use alphabets based on

9933-426: The deaths of Cyril and Methodius, their disciples were expelled and they moved to the First Bulgarian Empire instead. The Early Cyrillic alphabet , which developed gradually in the Preslav Literary School by Greek alphabet scribes who incorporated some Glagolitic letters, gradually replaced Glagolitic in that region. Glagolitic remained in use alongside Latin in the Kingdom of Croatia and alongside Cyrillic until

10062-801: The discovery of the Rosetta Stone . There was also cuneiform , primarily used to write several ancient languages, including Sumerian . The last known use of cuneiform was in 75 CE, after which the script fell out of use. In the Middle Bronze Age , an apparently alphabetic system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script appeared in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai Peninsula c.  1840 BCE , apparently left by Canaanite workers. Orly Goldwasser has connected

10191-598: The earlier forms. The script in its classical form was used until the 1st century CE. The Etruscan language itself was not used during the Roman Empire , but the script was used for religious texts. Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet have ligatures , a combination of two letters make one, such as æ in Danish and Icelandic and ⟨ Ȣ ⟩ in Algonquian ; borrowings from other alphabets, such as

10320-514: The early spread to different dialects, so the original values are not always clear. For instance, the letter yu Ⱓ is thought to have perhaps originally had the sound /u/ but was displaced by the adoption of the ligature Ⱆ under the influence of later Cyrillic oѵ , mirroring the Greek ου . Other letters were late creations after a Cyrillic model. It should also be noted that Ⱑ corresponds to two different Cyrillic letters (Ѣ and Я), present even in older manuscripts, and not to different later variants of

10449-402: The entire final -an . While bopomofo is not a mainstream writing system, it is still often used in ways similar to a romanization system, for aiding pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers and cellphones. The term "alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense. In a broader sense, an alphabet is a segmental script at

10578-429: The existence of any pre-Glagolitic Slavic writing system has been found, except for a few brief and vague references in old chronicles and "lives of the saints". All artifacts presented as evidence of pre-Glagolitic Slavic inscriptions have later been identified as texts in known scripts and in known non-Slavic languages, or as fakes. The well-known Chernorizets Hrabar 's strokes and incisions are usually considered to be

10707-481: The first alphabet had developed about that time. The script was based on letter appearances and names, believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. This script had no characters representing vowels. Originally, it probably was a syllabary—a script where syllables are represented with characters—with symbols that were not needed being removed. The best-attested Bronze Age alphabet is Ugaritic , invented in Ugarit before

10836-432: The illiterate turquoise miner graffiti theory to the origin of the alphabet. In 1999, American Egyptologists John and Deborah Darnell discovered an earlier version of this first alphabet at the Wadi el-Hol valley. The script dated to c.  1800 BCE and shows evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to c.  2000 BCE , strongly suggesting that

10965-540: The island of Krk and the Zadar Archipelago . Although the Propaganda Fide would eventually resume printing Glagolitic books, very few titles were published, so the majority of Glagolitic literary works continued to be written and copied by hand well into the 18th century. Of the major European scripts, only the Arabic script is comparable in this regard. In the early 19th century, the policies of

11094-525: The islands of Zadar, but there were also findings in inner Lika and Krbava , reaching to Kupa river, and even as far as Međimurje and Slovenia . Hrvoje's Missal from 1404 was illuminated in Split , and it is considered one of the most beautiful Croatian Glagolitic books. The 1483 Missale Romanum Glagolitice was the first printed Croatian Glagolitic book. It was believed that Glagolitsa in Croatia

11223-447: The letters ⟨d, e, g, l, n, r, t, x, z⟩ respectively, as well as Hungarian and Welsh. Further, German words with an umlaut get collated ignoring the umlaut as—contrary to Turkish , which adopted the graphemes ö and ü , and where a word like tüfek would come after tuz , in the dictionary. An exception is the German telephone directory, where umlauts are sorted like ä = ae since names such as Jäger also appear with

11352-555: The letters sha Ⱎ , tsi Ⱌ , and cherv Ⱍ were taken from the letters shin ש and tsadi צ of the Hebrew alphabet , and that Ⰶ zhivete derives from Coptic janja Ϫ. However, Cubberley suggests that if a single prototype were presumed, the most likely source would be Armenian . Other proposals include the Samaritan alphabet , which Cyril learned during his journey to the Khazars in Cherson . For writing numbers,

11481-470: The letters transcribe consonants , or consonants and a few vowels, so most Arabic alphabets are abjads , with the versions used for some languages, such as Kurdish dialect of Sorani , Uyghur , Mandarin , and Bosniak , being alphabets . It is the basis for the tradition of Arabic calligraphy . The Arabic alphabet is derived either from the Nabataean alphabet or (less widely believed) directly from

11610-441: The liturgical language Old Church Slavonic and became, together with the Greek uncial script, the basis of the Cyrillic script . Cyrillic is one of the most widely used modern alphabetic scripts and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and also for other languages within the former Soviet Union . Cyrillic alphabets include Serbian , Macedonian , Bulgarian , Russian , Belarusian , and Ukrainian . The Glagolitic alphabet

11739-407: The main non-Arabic speaking states using the Arabic alphabet to write one or more official national languages, including Azerbaijani , Baluchi , Brahui , Persian , Pashto , Central Kurdish , Urdu , Sindhi , Kashmiri , Punjabi and Uyghur . An Arabic alphabet is currently used for the following languages: With the establishment of Muslim rule in the subcontinent , one or more forms of

11868-535: The most common vowel is not marked in Indic abugidas. In Zhuyin , not only is one of the tones unmarked; but there is a diacritic to indicate a lack of tone, like the virama of Indic. Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters; this is for collation —namely, for listing words and other items in alphabetical order . The ordering of the Latin alphabet ( A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z ), which derives from

11997-568: The mostly similar Church Slavonic ones follow an approach more familiar to a generic English speaking reader. Several letters have no modern counterpart. The column for the angular variant, sometimes referred to as Croatian Glagolitic , is not complete as some of the letters were not used following the Croatian recension of Old Church Slavonic . In older texts, uk ( Ⱆ ) and three out of four yus es ( Ⱗ, Ⱘ, Ⱙ ) also can be written as digraphs, in two separate parts. The order of izhe ( Ⰹ, Ⰺ ) and i ( Ⰻ ) varies from source to source, as does

12126-536: The name "Slovenish" for the alphabet. Some other, rarer, names for this alphabet are Bukvitsa (from common Slavic word "bukva" meaning "letter", and a suffix "-itsa") and "Illyrian" (presumably similar to using the same anachronistic name for the Illyrian (Slavic) language). In the Middle Ages, Glagolitsa was also known as "St. Jerome's script" due to a popular mediaeval legend (created by Croatian scribes in

12255-521: The name of one of the tribes, Nabatu) spoke Nabataean Arabic , a dialect of the Arabic language. In the 2nd or 1st centuries BCE, the first known records of the Nabataean alphabet were written in the Aramaic language (which was the language of communication and trade), but included some Arabic language features: the Nabataeans did not write the language which they spoke. They wrote in a form of

12384-399: The order of the various forms of yus ( Ⱔ, Ⱗ, Ⱘ, Ⱙ ). Correspondence between Glagolitic izhe ( Ⰹ, Ⰺ ) and i ( Ⰻ ) with Cyrillic И and І is unknown. The Proto-Slavic language did not have the phoneme /f/, and the letters fert ( Ⱇ ) and fita ( Ⱚ ) were used for transcribing words of Greek origin, and so was izhitsa ( Ⱛ ) for the Greek upsilon. The Glagolitic alphabet

12513-451: The original Glagolitic alphabet is not known, but it may have been close to its presumed Greek model. The 41 letters known today include letters for non-Greek sounds, which may have been added by Saint Cyril, as well as ligatures added in the 12th century under the influence of Cyrillic , as Glagolitic lost its dominance. In later centuries, the number of letters dropped dramatically, to fewer than 30 in modern Croatian and Czech recensions of

12642-505: The other, HMĦLQ, was used in southern Arabia and is preserved today in Geʻez . Both orders have therefore been stable for at least 3000 years. Runic used an unrelated Futhark sequence, which got simplified later on. Arabic usually uses its sequence, although Arabic retains the traditional abjadi order , which is used for numbers. The Brahmic family of alphabets used in India uses

12771-660: The point and click adventure games made by Cateia Games, a Croatian game studio. In the 2023 PS5 game Forspoken , Athian script, the written language of the Athian continent and cultures, seems to be based upon Glagolitic script. It is also featured on 1 euro cent, 2 euro cent and 5 euro cent coins minted in Croatia. Alphabet The first letters were invented in Ancient Egypt to serve as an aid in writing Egyptian hieroglyphs ; these are referred to as Egyptian uniliteral signs by lexicographers . This system

12900-402: The problem of dialects by associating the alphabet with the national standard. Some national languages like Finnish , Armenian , Turkish , Russian, Serbo-Croatian ( Serbian , Croatian , and Bosnian ), and Bulgarian have a very regular spelling system with nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes. Similarly, the Italian verb corresponding to 'spell (out),' compitare ,

13029-557: The request of Prince Rastislav , who wanted to weaken the dependence of his country on East Frankish priests. The Glagolitic alphabet, however it originated, was used between 863 and 885 for government and religious documents and books and at the Great Moravian Academy ( Veľkomoravské učilište ) founded by the missionaries, where their followers were educated. The Kiev Missal , found in the 19th century in Jerusalem,

13158-484: The same Cyrillic letter in different times or places. The following table lists each letter in its modern order, showing its Unicode representation, images of the letter in both the round and angular/squared variant forms, the corresponding modern Cyrillic letter, the approximate sound transcribed with the IPA , the name, and suggestions for its origin. The Old Church Slavonic names follow the scientific transliteration , while

13287-568: The same way as Chinese characters . This change allows for mixed-script writing, where one syllable always takes up one type space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block. Bopomofo , also referred to as zhuyin , is a semi-syllabary used primarily in Taiwan to transcribe the sounds of Standard Chinese . Following the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin in 1956,

13416-460: The script and jailed 200 followers of Methodius, mostly students of the original academy. They were then dispersed or, according to some sources, sold as slaves by the Franks. However, many of them, including Saints Naum , Clement , Angelar , Sava and Gorazd , reached the First Bulgarian Empire and were commissioned by Boris I of Bulgaria to teach and instruct the future clergy of the state in

13545-514: The self-styled Slavic intellectuals in Dalmatia very early began to ascribe to him the invention of glagolitsa , possibly with the intention of more successfully defending both Slavic writing and the Slavic holy service against prosecutions and prohibitions from Rome's hierarchy, thus using the opinion of the famous Latin Father of the Church to protect their church rituals which were inherited not from

13674-533: The specific letter used varies from language to language. These modifications tend to fall into groups: Indian and Turkic languages written in the Arabic script tend to use the Persian modified letters , whereas the languages of Indonesia tend to imitate those of Jawi . The modified version of the Arabic script originally devised for use with Persian is known as the Perso-Arabic script by scholars. When

13803-500: The spelling Jaeger and are not distinguished in the spoken language. The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with ⟨æ, ø, å⟩ , whereas the Swedish conventionally put ⟨å, ä, ö⟩ at the end. However, æ phonetically corresponds with ⟨ä⟩ , as does ⟨ø⟩ and ⟨ö⟩ . It is unknown whether the earliest alphabets had a defined sequence. Some alphabets today, such as

13932-507: The spelling and pronunciation. However, its rules on pronunciation, though complex, are consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy. At the other extreme are languages such as English, where pronunciations mostly have to be memorized as they do not correspond to the spelling consistently. For English, this is because the Great Vowel Shift occurred after the orthography got established and because English has acquired

14061-640: The term zed for Z in all forms of English, other than American English. Over time names sometimes shifted or were added, as in double U for W , or "double V" in French, the English name for Y, and the American zee for Z. Comparing them in English and French gives a clear reflection of the Great Vowel Shift : A, B, C, and D are pronounced /eɪ, biː, siː, diː/ in today's English, but in contemporary French they are /a, be, se, de/ . The French names (from which

14190-604: The unique privilege of using their own language and this script in the Roman Rite liturgy. Formally granted to bishop Philip of Senj , permission to use the Glagolitic liturgy (the Roman Rite conducted in the Slavic language instead of Latin , not the Byzantine rite ), actually extended to all Croatian lands, mostly along the Adriatic coast. The Holy See had several Glagolitic missals published in Rome. Authorization for

14319-520: The use of bopomofo on the mainland is limited. Bopomofo developed from a form of Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s and has elements of both an alphabet and a syllabary. Like an alphabet, the phonemes of syllable initials are represented by individual symbols, but like a syllabary, the phonemes of the syllable finals are not; each possible final (excluding the medial glide ) has its own character, an example being luan written as ㄌㄨㄢ ( l-u-an ). The last symbol ㄢ takes place as

14448-626: The use of the Glagolitic script at its peak before the Croatian-Ottoman wars corresponded roughly to the area that spoke the Chakavian dialect at the time, in addition to some adjacent Kajkavian regions within the Zagreb bishopric . As a result, vernacular impact on the liturgical language and script largely stems from Chakavian sub-dialects, although South Chakavian speakers mostly used Cyrillic, with Glagolitic only in certain parishes as

14577-560: The use of this language was extended to some other Slavic regions between 1886 and 1935. In missals, the Glagolitic script was eventually replaced with the Latin alphabet, but the use of the Slavic language in the Mass continued, until replaced by modern vernacular languages. At the end of the 9th century, one of these students of Methodius – Saint Naum , one of the founders of the Pliska Literary School (commonly known as

14706-513: The various types. Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in Somali and many other languages of Africa and the Americas. Most commonly, tones are indicated by diacritics, which is how vowels are treated in abugidas, which is the case for Vietnamese (a true alphabet) and Thai (an abugida). In Thai, the tone is determined primarily by

14835-600: The vitality of the script, which evolved from its original Rounded Glagolitic form into an Angular Glagolitic form, in addition to a cursive form developed for notary purposes. But the Ottoman conquests left the script without most of its continental population, and as a result of the Counter-Reformation its use was restricted in Istria and the Diocese of Zagreb , and the only active printing press with

14964-520: The vowels is mandatory, and whole letters are used, so the script is a true alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with forced vowel diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the ʼPhags-pa script of the Mongol Empire was based closely on the Tibetan abugida , but vowel marks are written after the preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. Although short

15093-411: The world. The Etruscan alphabet remained nearly unchanged for several hundred years. Only evolving once the Etruscan language changed itself. The letters used for non-existent phonemes were dropped. Afterwards, however, the alphabet went through many different changes. The final classical form of Etruscan contained 20 letters. Four of them are vowels— ⟨a, e, i, u⟩ —six fewer letters than

15222-486: The world. The discovery suggests that the alphabet emerged 500 years earlier than previously thought, and undermines leading ideas about how it was invented. According to Christopher Rollston , a scholar of the ancient Near East, the morphology of the letters on the cylinder seals parallels quite nicely that of the existing corpus of early alphabetic writing. This theory however has yet to be universally accepted. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from

15351-572: The writing with the contemporary spoken language. These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system. For example, Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to a Latin-based Turkish alphabet , and Kazakh changed from an Arabic script to a Cyrillic script due to the Soviet Union's influence. In 2021, it made a transition to the Latin alphabet, similar to Turkish. The Cyrillic script used to be official in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan before they switched to

15480-411: Was abandoned in Latin . It referred to the letters by adding a vowel—usually ⟨e⟩ , sometimes ⟨a⟩ or ⟨u⟩ —before or after the consonant. Two exceptions were Y and Z , which were borrowed from the Greek alphabet rather than Etruscan. They were known as Y Graeca "Greek Y" and zeta (from Greek)—this discrepancy was inherited by many European languages, as in

15609-684: Was added to the Unicode Standard in March 2005 with the release of version 4.1. The Unicode block for Glagolitic is U+2C00–U+2C5F. The Glagolitic combining letters for Glagolitic Supplement block (U+1E000–U+1E02F) was added to the Unicode Standard in June, 2016 with the release of version 9.0: A hypothetical pre-Glagolitic writing system is typically referred to as cherty i rezy (strokes and incisions) – but no material evidence of

15738-505: Was dated to the 10th century. In 885, Pope Stephen V issued a papal bull to restrict spreading and reading Christian services in languages other than Latin or Greek. Around the same time, Svatopluk I , following the interests of the Frankish Empire and its clergy, persecuted the students of Cyril and Methodius, imprisoned and expelled them from Great Moravia . In 886, an East Frankish bishop of Nitra named Wiching banned

15867-476: Was descended. Abugidas are writing systems with characters comprising consonant–vowel sequences. Alphabets without obligatory vowels are called abjads , with examples being Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac . The omission of vowels was not always a satisfactory solution due to the need of preserving sacred texts. "Weak" consonants are used to indicate vowels. These letters have a dual function since they can also be used as pure consonants. The Proto-Sinaitic script and

15996-412: Was later abandoned in favor of a system similar to Latin. When an alphabet is adopted or developed to represent a given language, an orthography generally comes into being, providing rules for spelling words, following the principle on which alphabets get based. These rules will map letters of the alphabet to the phonemes of the spoken language. In a perfectly phonemic orthography , there would be

16125-671: Was present only in those areas. But, in 1992, the discovery of Glagolitic inscriptions in churches along the Orljava river in Slavonia totally changed the picture (churches in Brodski Drenovac , Lovčić , and some others), showing that use of the Glagolitic alphabet was spread from Slavonia also. Sporadic instances aside, Glagolitic survived beyond the 12th century as a primary script in Croatian lands alone, although from there

16254-555: Was that it could write different languages since it recorded words phonemically. The Phoenician script was spread across the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians. The Greek alphabet was the first in which vowels had independent letterforms separate from those of consonants. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Phoenician to represent vowels. The Linear B syllabary, used by Mycenaean Greeks from

16383-622: Was used in the Duchy of Kopnik before the Wendish Crusade , but it was certainly used in Kievan Rus' . Another use of Glagolitic is presumed in now southern Poland ( Duchy of Vistula / White Croats state) and the Transcarpathia region. In Croatia, from the 12th century, Glagolitic inscriptions appeared mostly in littoral areas: Istria , Primorje, Kvarner , and Kvarner islands, notably Krk , Cres , and Lošinj ; in Dalmatia, on

16512-404: Was used until the 5th century CE, and fundamentally differed by adding pronunciation hints to existing hieroglyphs that had previously carried no pronunciation information. Later on, these phonemic symbols also became used to transcribe foreign words. The first fully phonemic script was the Proto-Sinaitic script , also descending from Egyptian hieroglyphs, which was later modified to create

16641-482: Was written in the script after the third quarter of the 19th century except for ceremonial purposes, and soon very few could read the cursive script apart from a few scholars. The exact nature of relationship between the Glagolitic alphabet and the Early Cyrillic alphabet , their order of development, and influence on each other has been a matter of great study, controversy, and dispute in Slavic studies since

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