The Cyrillic script, Slavonic script or simply Slavic script is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia, and used by many other minority languages.
The Glagolitic script 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 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 the 14th century in the Second Bulgarian Empire and the Serbian Empire, and later mainly for cryptographic purposes.
Cyril and Methodius were brothers, Byzantine Christian theologians and missionaries. For their work evangelizing the Slavs, they are known as the "Apostles to the Slavs".
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic is the first Slavic literary language and the oldest extant written Slavonic language attested in literary sources. It belongs to the South Slavic subgroup of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family and remains the liturgical language of many Christian Orthodox churches. Until the reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow between 1652 and 1666, Church Slavonic was the mandatory language of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Ya, Ia or Ja is a letter of the Cyrillic script, the civil script variant of Old Cyrillic Little Yus, and possibly Iotated A. Among modern Slavic languages, it is used in the East Slavic languages and Bulgarian. It is also used in the Cyrillic alphabets used by Mongolian and many Uralic, Caucasian and Turkic languages of the former Soviet Union.
Church Slavonic is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in Belarus, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia. The language appears also in the services of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, and occasionally in the services of the Orthodox Church in America.
The Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet is used to write the Bulgarian language. The Cyrillic alphabet was originally developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 9th – 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School.
En is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
O is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
The Preslav Literary School, also known as the "Pliska Literary School" or "Pliska-Preslav Literary school" was the first literary school in the medieval First Bulgarian Empire. It was established by Boris I in 886 in Bulgaria's capital, Pliska. In 893, Simeon I moved the seat of the school from the First Bulgarian capital Pliska to the new capital, Veliki Preslav. Preslav was captured and burnt by the Byzantine Emperor John I Tzimisces in 972 in the aftermath of Sviatoslav's invasion of Bulgaria.
Chernorizets Hrabar was a Bulgarian monk, scholar and writer who is credited as the author of On the Letters. He worked at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire at the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century.
Dze is a letter of the Cyrillic script, used in the Macedonian alphabet to represent the voiced alveolar affricate, similar to the pronunciation of ⟨ds⟩ in "needs" or "kids" in English. It is derived from the letter dzelo or zelo of the Early Cyrillic alphabet, and it was used historically in all Slavic languages that use Cyrillic.
Ukrainian Ye or Round Ye is a character of the Cyrillic script. It is a separate letter in the Ukrainian alphabet, the Pannonian Rusyn alphabet, and both the Carpathian Rusyn alphabets; in all of these, it comes directly after Е. In modern Church Slavonic, it is considered a variant form of Ye (Е е). Until the mid-19th century, Є/є was also used in Romanian and Serbian. Other modern Slavonic languages may use Є/є shapes instead of Е/е for decorative purposes. Then, the letter is usually referred to by the older name Yest. If the two need to be distinguished, the descriptive name Broad E is sometimes used. It can also be found in the writing of the Khanty language.
Izhitsa is a letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet and several later alphabets, usually the last in the row. It originates from the Greek letter upsilon and was used in words and names derived from or via the Greek language, such as кѵрилъ or флаѵии. It represented the sounds or as normal letters и and в, respectively. The Glagolitic alphabet has a corresponding letter with the name izhitsa as well. Also, izhitsa in its standard form or, most often, in a tailed variant was part of a digraph оѵ/оу representing the sound. The digraph is known as Cyrillic "uk", and today's Cyrillic letter u originates from its simplified form.
Cyrillic numerals are a numeral system derived from the Cyrillic script, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the late 10th century. It was used in the First Bulgarian Empire and by South and East Slavic peoples. The system was used in Russia as late as the early 18th century, when Peter the Great replaced it with Hindu-Arabic numerals as part of his civil script reform initiative. Cyrillic numbers played a role in Peter the Great's currency reform plans, too, with silver wire kopecks issued after 1696 and mechanically minted coins issued between 1700 and 1722 inscribed with the date using Cyrillic numerals. By 1725, Russian Imperial coins had transitioned to Arabic numerals. The Cyrillic numerals may still be found in books written in the Church Slavonic language.
The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet is a variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language originated in medieval Serbia. Reformed in 19th century by the Serbian philologist and linguist Vuk Karadžić. It is one of the two alphabets used to write modern standard Serbian, the other being Gaj's Latin alphabet.
As the 9th-century missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius undertook their mission to evangelize to the Slavs of Great Moravia, two writing systems were developed: Glagolitic and Cyrillic. Both scripts were based on the Greek alphabet and share commonalities, but 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.
Iotated A also known as Iya is a letter of the Cyrillic script, built as a ligature of the letters І and А, and used today only in Church Slavonic. It is unusual among early Cyrillic letters in having no direct counterpart in Glagolitic: Ⱑ (jat’) is used for both /ě/ and /ja/. Accordingly, many early Cyrillic texts may use Ѣ for both these purposes; this practice continues into the fourteenth century, but is much more common in the South Slavonic than the East Slavonic area. Nevertheless, Ꙗ is attested in the earliest extant Cyrillic writings, including for example the Codex Suprasliensis and Savvina Kniga - this was not supported to other fonts in other applications.
The Golden Age of Bulgaria is the period of the Bulgarian cultural prosperity during the reign of emperor Simeon I the Great (889—927). The term was coined by Spiridon Palauzov in the mid 19th century. During this period there was an increase of literature, writing, arts, architecture and liturgical reforms.
Glagolitic numerals are a numeral system derived from the Glagolitic script, generally agreed to have been created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril. They are similar to Cyrillic numerals, except that numeric values are assigned according to the native alphabetic order of the Glagolitic alphabet. Use of Glagolitic script and numerals declined through the Middle Ages and by the 17th century Glagolitic was used almost only in religious writings. It is unclear if the use of Glagolitic numerals persisted as long as the use of Glagolitic script.