Cyrillic alphabet: Encyclopedia - Cyrillic alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic alphabet (or azbuka, from the old name of the first letters) is an alphabet used to write six natural Slavic languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian) and many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe.

* archaic letters
† used in non-Slavic languages

Middle Bronze Age 19-15th c. BC

• Proto-Canaanite 14th c. BC
  • Ugaritic 13th c. BC
  • Phoenician 11th c. BC
    • Samaritan 6th c. BC
    • Aramaic 9th c. BC
      • Brāhmī 4th c. BC
      • Hebrew 3rd c. BC
      • Syriac 2nd c. BC
      • Avestan 3th c.
      • Arabic 4th c.
    • Greek 8th c. BC
      • Old Italic 8th c. BC
        • Latin 7th c. BC
        • Runes 2nd c.
      • Gothic 4th c.
      • Armenian 405
      • Glagolitic 862
      • Cyrillic 10th c.
    • Iberian
      • Celtiberian
  • South Arabian 9th c. BC
    • Ge'ez 3rd-4th c.

Cyrillic alphabet - Origins

The plan of the alphabet is derived from the early Cyrillic alphabet, itself a derivative of the Glagolitic alphabet, a ninth century uncial cursive usually credited to two brothers from Thessaloniki, Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius. The glyphs in the Cyrillic alphabet are, however, mainly Byzantine Greek letters. Some of them, especially those representing sounds that did not exist in medieval Greek, retain their Glagolitic forms.

Whereas it is widely accepted that the Glagolitic alphabet was invented by Saints Cyril and Methodius, the origins of the early Cyrillic alphabet are still a source of much controversy. Though it is usually attributed to Saint Clement of Ohrid, a Bulgarian scholar and disciple of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, the alphabet is more likely to have developed at the Preslav Literary School in north-eastern Bulgaria, where the oldest Cyrillic inscriptions have been found, dating back to the 940s. The theory is supported by the fact that the Cyrillic alphabet almost completely replaced the Glagolitic in northeastern Bulgaria as early as the end of the tenth century, whereas the Ohrid Literary School—where Saint Clement worked—continued to use the Glagolitic until the twelfth century.

Among the reasons for the replacement of the Glagolithic with the Cyrillic alphabet is the greater simplicity and ease of use of the latter and its closeness with the Greek alphabet, which had been well known in the First Bulgarian Empire.

There are also other theories regarding the origins of the Cyrillic alphabet, namely that the alphabet was created by Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius themselves, or that it preceded the Glagolitic alphabet, representing a "transitional" stage between Greek and Glagolitic cursive, but these have been widely disproved. Although Cyril is almost certainly not the author of the Cyrillic alphabet, his contributions to the Glagolitic and hence to the Cyrillic alphabet are still recognised, as the latter is named after him.

The alphabet was disseminated along with the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language, and the alphabet used for modern Church Slavonic language in Eastern Orthodox rites still resembles early Cyrillic. However, over the following ten centuries, the Cyrillic alphabet adapted to changes in spoken language, developed regional variations to suit the features of national languages, and was subjected to academic reforms and political decrees. Today, dozens of languages in Eastern Europe and Asia are written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Cyrillic alphabet - Letter-forms and typography

The development of Cyrillic typography passed directly from the medieval stage to the late Baroque, without a Renaissance phase as in Western Europe. Late Medieval Cyrillic letters (still found on many icon inscriptions even today) show a marked tendency to be very tall and narrow; strokes are often shared between adjacent letters.

Peter the Great, tsar of Russia, mandated the use of westernized letter forms in the early eighteenth century; over time, these were largely adopted in the other languages that use the alphabet. Thus, unlike modern Greek fonts that retained their own set of design principles (such as the placement of serifs, the shapes of stroke ends, and stroke-thickness rules), modern Cyrillic fonts are much the same as modern Latin fonts of the same font family. The development of some Cyrillic computer typefaces from Latin ones has also contributed to the visual Latinization of Cyrillic type.

Cyrillic uppercase and lowercase letter-forms are not as differentiated as in Latin typography. Upright Cyrillic lowercase letters are essentially small capitals (with the exception of a few forms such as "а" and "е" which adopted western lowercase shapes), although a good-quality Cyrillic typeface will still include separate small caps glyphs.

In the absence of Roman and Italic traditions, Cyrillic type fonts are properly classified as upright (Russian: pryamoi shrift) and cursive (kursivnyi). Cursive or hand-written shapes of many letters, especially the lowercase letters, are entirely different from the upright shapes. As in Latin typography, a sans-serif face may have a mechanically-sloped oblique font (naklonnyi).

In Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian, some cursive letters are different from those used in other languages. These cursive letter shapes are often used in upright fonts as well, especially for road signs, inscriptions, posters and the like, less so in newspapers or books. External link: Serbian Cyrillic Letters BE, GHE, DE, PE, TE.

The following table shows the differences between the upright and cursive Cyrillic letters as used in Russian. Cursive glyphs that are bound to confuse beginners (either because of an entirely different look, or because of being a false friend with an entirely different Latin character) are highlighted.

Reference: Bringhurst, Robert (2002). The Elements of Typographic Style (version 2.5), pp. 262–264. Vancouver, Hartley & Marks. ISBN 0-88179-133-4.

Cyrillic alphabet - Romanization

There are various systems for Romanization of Cyrillic text, including transliteration to convey Cyrillic spelling in Latin characters, and transcription to convey pronunciation.

Standard Cyrillic-to-Latin transliteration systems include:

• Scientific transliteration, used in linguistics, is based on the Latin Croatian alphabet.
• The Working Group on Romanization Systems of the United Nations recommends different systems for specific languages. These are the most commonly used around the world.
• ISO 9:1995, from the International Organization for Standardization.
• America Library Association & Library of Congress (ALA-LC) Romanization tables for Slavic alphabets, used in North American libraries.
• BGN/PCGN 1947 transliteration system (United States Board on Geographic Names & Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use).
• GOST 16876-71 (1983), from the Main Administration of Geodesy and Cartography of the former Soviet Union. Russian abbreviation of GOsudarstvenny STandart, "the State Standard". GOST has limited support for non-Russian alphabets.

Serbian is written in both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. There is also a Latin alphabet for Belarusian, and some non-Slavic languages, such as Azerbaijani, Uzbek or Moldavian have confronted permanent Romanization after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In Serbian there is a one-to-one correspondence between Vuk Karadžić's Serbian Cyrillic and Ljudevit Gaj's Croatian Gajica (derived from the Czech alphabet. See Serbo-Croatian language#Writing systems.) The Belarusian Latin alphabet is traditionally based on Polish and is called Łacinka, but, because of the political realities in the former USSR, Belarusian is usually Romanized by analogy to Russian.

See also:

• Romanization
• Romanization of Bulgarian
• Romanization of Russian
• Romanization of Ukrainian

External links:

• Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts, a collection of writing systems and transliteration tables, by Thomas T. Pederson. Includes PDF reference charts for many languages' transliteration systems.

Cyrillic alphabet - As used in various languages

Sounds are indicated using IPA. These are only approximate indicators. While these languages by and large have phonemic orthographies, there are occasional exceptions—for example, Russian его (meaning him/his), which is pronounced /jevɔ/ instead of /jeɡɔ/.

Note that spellings of names may vary, especially Y/J/I, but also GH/G/H and ZH/J.

Cyrillic alphabet - Slavic languages

Main article: early Cyrillic alphabet

Old Church Slavonic is the first literary and liturgical Slavic language developed from the native language of the 9th century missionaries, Saints Cyril and Methodius. It is not the same as the modern Church Slavonic language, which is still used in some Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic church services.

As the Cyrillic alphabet spread throughout the Slavic world, it was adopted for writing local languages, such as Old Ruthenian. Its adaptation to the characteristics of local languages led to the development of its many modern variants, below.

Yeri (ЪІ) was originally a ligature of Yer and I. Ya (Я) was written in an archaic form called A iotified. Capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts.

The early Cyrillic alphabet is difficult to represent on computers. Many of the letterforms differed from modern Cyrillic and varied a great deal in manuscripts, and changed over time. Few fonts include adequate glyphs to reproduce the alphabet. Some characters are missing from the current Unicode standard altogether, including Cyrillic dotless I, iotified Yat, abbreviated Yer ("Yerok"), and many ligatures.

See also: Glagolitic alphabet.

Main article: Russian alphabet

Notes:

1. In the pre-reform Russian orthography, in Old Russian and in Old Church Slavonic the letter is called yer. Historically, the "hard sign" takes the place of a now-absent vowel, still preserved in Bulgarian. See the notes for Bulgarian.
2. When an iotated vowel (vowel whose sound begins with /j/) follows a consonant, the consonant will become palatalised (the /j/ sound will mix with the consonant), and the vowel's /j/ sound will not be heard independently. The Hard Sign will indicate that this does not happen, and the /j/ sound will appear only in front of the vowel. The Soft Sign will indicate the consonant should be palatised, but the vowel's /j/ sound will not mix with the palatalization of the consonant. The Soft Sign will also indicate that a consonant before another consonant or at the end of a word is palatised. Examples: та (ta); тя (tʲa); тья (tʲja); тъя (tja); т (t); ть (tʲ).

Historical letters: before 1918, there were four extra letters in use: Іі (replaced by Ии), Ѳѳ (Фита "Fita", replaced by Фф), Ѣѣ (Ять "Yat", replaced by Ее), and Ѵѵ (ижица "Izhitsa", replaced by Ии); these were eliminated by reforms of Russian orthography.

Main article: Ukrainian alphabet.

Ukrainian differs from Russian in the following ways:

• He (Г, г) is a voiced fricative consonant, pronounced /ɦ/.
• Ge (Ґ, ґ) appears after He, pronounced /g/, i.e., like a Russian Г. It looks like He with an "upturn" pointing up from the right side of the top bar. (This letter was not officially used in the Soviet Union after 1933, so it is missing from older Cyrillic fonts.)
• E (Е, е) is pronounced /e/ .
• Ye (Є, є) appears after E, pronounced /je/. It looks like a mirrored Russian letter Э.
• Y (И, и) is pronounced /ɪ/ (similar to Russian Yery).
• I (І, і) appears after Y, pronounced /i/. It looks like the Latin letter I.
• Yi (Ї, ї) appears after I, pronounced /ji/. It looks like I with a diaeresis above it (the same two dots that appear over the Russian letter Yo).
• Yot (Й, й) is the equivalent of Russian Short I.
• Shcha (Щ, щ) is pronounced ʃʧ.
• An apostrophe (’) serves the purpose of the Russian Hard Sign.
• Yo does not appear.

Belarusian is also written in a Belarusian Latin alphabet (Łacinka). Historically, Belarusian Tatars have written the language in the Arabic alphabet (Arabica), and Belarusian Jews in the Hebrew alphabet.

NB: Before 1933, Ґ (/g/) was also present. Some linguists call for restoring the letter.

Belarusian differs from Russian in the following ways:

• I looks like the Latin letter I (І, і). (But non-syllable short I looks the same as in Russian.)
• Between U and Ef is the letter U short (Ў, ў), which looks like U (У) with a breve and pronounced /w/, or like the u part in diphthongs in now, low.
• Shcha (Щщ) does not appear. A combination of sh and ch (ШЧ/шч) is typically used instead.
• The Hard Sign is not used. Its purpose (removing of palatalisation) is served by an apostrophe.
• The letter combinations Дж дж and Дз дз appear after Д д in the Belarusian alphabet in some publications. These digraphs each represent one sound: Дж /ʤ/, Дз /ʣ/.
• Г represents a voiced fricative consonant.

• Introduction to Belarusian Alphabet
• Introduction to Belarusian Latin Script
• Belarusian language using Arabic script
• Letter Frequency in Belarusian and Russian
• Converter from Latin "Translit" into Cyrillics

See Bulgarian language#Alphabet. Bulgarian differs from Russian in the following ways:

• Ye (Е) is pronounced /ɛ/ and is called "E".
• Yo (Ё) does not appear.
• The Russian letter Э does not appear.
• Shcha (Щ) is pronounced /ʃt/ and is called "Shta".
• The Hard Sign (Ъ) is used for a vowel, /ə/ (Schwa).
• Yery (Ы) does not appear.

Serbian can also be written with the Latin alphabet. See Serbo-Croatian language.

Serbian differs from Russian in the following ways:

• Ye is pronounced /ɛ/. Yo does not appear. The Russian letter Э does not appear.
• Between D and E is the letter Djə (Ђ, ђ), which is pronounced /dʲ/, and looks like Tjə, except that the loop of the H curls farther and dips downwards.
• Short I does not appear. Between I and K is the letter Jə (Ј, ј), pronounced /j/, which looks like the Latin letter J.
• Between L and M is the letter Ljə (Љ, љ), pronounced /lʲ/, which looks like L and the Soft Sign smashed together.
• Between N and O is the letter Njə (Њ, њ), pronounced /nʲ/, which looks like N and the Soft Sign smashed together.
• Between T and U is the letter Tjə (Ћ, ћ), which is pronounced /tʲ/ and looks like a lowercase Latin letter h with a bar. On the uppercase letter, the bar appears at the top; on the lowercase letter, the bar crosses the top half of the vertical line.
• Between Ch and Sh is the letter Dzhə (Џ, џ), pronounced /dʒ/, which looks like Ts but with the downturn moved from the right side of the bottom bar to the middle of the bottom bar.
• Sh is the last letter; the rest do not appear.

Macedonian differs from Serbian in the following ways:

• Between Ze and I is the letter Dze (Ѕ, ѕ), pronounced /dz/, which looks like the Latin letter S.
• Djerv is replaced by Gje (Ѓ, ѓ), pronounced /gʲ/, which looks like Ghe with an acute accent (´).
• Tjerv is replaced by Kja (Ќ, ќ), pronounced /kʲ/, which looks like Ka with an acute accent (´).

Cyrillic alphabet - Non-Slavic languages

These alphabets are generally modelled after Russian, but often bear striking differences, particularly when adapted for Caucasian languages. The first few of them were generated by Orthodox missionaries for the Finnic and Turkic peoples of Idel-Ural (Mari, Udmurt, Mordva, Chuvash, Kerashen Tatars) in 1870s. Later such alphabets were created for some of the Siberian and Caucasus peoples who had recently converted to Christianity. In the 1930s, some of those alphabets were switched to the Uniform Turkic Alphabet. All of the peoples of the former Soviet Union who had been using an Arabic or other Asian script (Mongolian script, etc.) also adopted Cyrillic alphabets, and during the Great Purge in late 1930s, all of the Roman-based alphabets of the peoples of then Soviet Union were switched over to Cyrillic as well. The Abkhazian alphabet was switched to Georgian script, but after the death of Stalin Abkhaz also adopted Cyrillic. The last language to adopt Cyrillic was the Gagauz language, which had used Greek script before.

In Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, the use of Cyrillic to represent local languages has often been a politically controversial issue after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as it evokes the era of Soviet rule (see Russification). Some of Russia's languages have also tried to drop Cyrillic, but the move was halted under Russian law (see Tatar alphabet). A number of languages have switched from Cyrillic to other orthographies—either Roman-based or returning to a former script.

Unlike the Roman alphabet, which is usually adapted to different languages by using additions to existing letters such as accents, umlauts, tildes and cedillas, the Cyrillic alphabet is usually adapted by the creation of entirely new letter shapes. In some alphabets invented in the 19th century, such as Mari, Udmurt and Chuvash, umlauts and breves also were used.

Abkhaz is a Caucasian language, spoken in the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia, Georgia. See Abkhaz alphabet.

The Cyrillic alphabet was used for the Azerbaijani language from 1939 to 1991. See Azerbaijani alphabet for discussion.

The Cyrillic alphabet is used for the Chuvash language since the late 19th century, with some changes in 1938.

Kazakh is also written with the Latin alphabet (in Turkey, but not in Kazakhstan yet), and modified Arabic alphabet (in China, Iran and Afghanistan).

• Ә ә = /æ/
• Ғ ғ = /ʁ/ (uvular fricative)
• Қ қ = /q/ (uvular plosive)
• Ң ң = /ŋ/
• Ө ө = /œ/
• У у = /uw/, /yw/,/w/
• Ұ ұ = /u/
• Ү ү = /y/
• Һ һ = /h/
• İ і = /i/

The Cyrillic letters Вв, Ёё, Цц, Чч, Щщ, Ъъ, Ьь and Ээ are not used in native Kazakh words, but only for Russian loans.

Kyrgyz has also been written in Latin and in Arabic.

• Ң ң = /ŋ/
• Ү ү = /y/
• Ө ө = /œ/

The Cyrillic alphabet was used for the Uzbek language from 1940 to 1992.

Table comparing Cyrillic with Roman alphabets, with IPA equivalents

The Moldovan language used the Cyrillic alphabet between 1946 and 1989. Nowadays, this alphabet is still official in the breakaway republic of Transnistria.

The Mongolic languages include Khalkha (in Mongolia), Buryat (around Lake Baikal) and Kalmyk (northwest of the Caspian Sea). Khalkha Mongolian is also written with the Mongol vertical alphabet, which is being slowly reintroduced in Mongolia.

• В в = /w/
• Е е = /jɛ/, /jœ/
• Ё ё = /jo/
• Ж ж = /ʤ/
• З з = /dz/
• Н н = /n-/, /-ŋ/
• Ө ө = /œ/
• Ү ү = /y/
• Ы ы = /ī/ (after a hard consonant)
• Ь ь = /ĭ/ (extra short)
• Ю ю = /ju/, /jy/

The Cyrillic letters Кк, Фф and Щщ are not used in native Mongolian words, but only for Russian loans.

The Buryat (буряад) Cyrillic alphabet is similar to the Khalkha above, but Ьь indicates palatalization as in Russian. Buryat does not use Вв, Кк, Фф, Цц, Чч, Щщ or Ъъ in its native words.

• Е е = /jɛ/, /jœ/
• Ё ё = /jo/
• Ж ж = /ʤ/
• Н н = /n-/, /-ŋ/
• Ө ө = /œ/
• Ү ү = /y/
• Һ һ = /h/
• Ы ы = /ei/, /ī/
• Ю ю = /ju/, /jy/

The Kalmyk (хальмг) Cyrillic alphabet is similar to the Khalkha, but the letters Ээ, Юю and Яя appear only word-initially. In Kalmyk, long vowels are written double in the first syllable (нөөрин), but single in syllables after the first. Short vowels are omitted altogether in syllables after the first syllable (хальмг = xaʎmag).

• Ә ә = /æ/
• В в = /w/
• Һ һ = /γ/
• Е е = /ɛ/, /jɛ-/
• Җ җ = /ʤ/
• Ң ң = /ŋ/
• Ө ө = /œ/
• Ү ү = /y/

Cyrillic alphabet - Cyrillic in Unicode

Main article: Cyrillic characters in Unicode.

In Unicode, the Cyrillic block extends from U+0400 to U+052F. The characters in the range U+0400 to U+045F are basically the characters from ISO 8859-5 moved upward by 864 positions. The characters in the range U+0460 to U+0489 are historic letters, not used now. The characters in the range U+048A to U+052F are additional letters for various languages that are written with Cyrillic script.

Unicode does not include accented Cyrillic letters, but they can be combined by adding U+0301 ("combining acute accent") after the accented vowel (e.g., ы́ э́ ю́ я́). Some languages (e.g., modern Church Slavonic) still are not fully supported.

See also

• Bosnian Cyrillic
• Cyrillization
• Iotation
• palochka
• Languages using Cyrillic
• Volapuk encoding
• Slavic numerals
• Russian Manual Alphabet (the fingerspelled Cyrillic alphabet)
• KOI8-R (8 bit native russian character encoding)
• KOI8-U (8 bit ukrainian character encoding)
• ISO/IEC 8859-5 (8 bit cyrillic character encoding established by International Organization for Standardization)
• CP866 (8 bit cyrillic character encoding established by Microsoft for use in MS-DOS)
• Windows-1251 (8 bit cyrillic character encoding established by Microsoft for use in Microsoft Windows)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Cyrillic alphabet", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki