Old Permic alphabet

Old Permic; or Abur;
Type	alphabet
Languages	Komi
Time period	1372–17th century
Parent systems	Phoenician Greek Cyrillic Old Permic; or Abur; ; ;
Direction	Left-to-right
ISO 15924	Perm, 227
Unicode alias	Old Permic
Unicode range	U+10350–U+1037F ; Final Accepted Script Proposal

Last updated April 29, 2019

The Old Permic script (Komi : Важ Перым гижӧм), sometimes called Abur or Anbur, is a "highly idiosyncratic adaptation"^[1] of the Cyrillic script once used to write medieval Komi (Permic).^[2]

The Komi language is a Uralic macrolanguage spoken by the Komi peoples in the northeastern European part of Russia. Komi may be considered a single language with several dialects, or a group of closely related languages, making up one of the two branches of the Permic branch of the family. The other Permic language is Udmurt, to which Komi is closely related.

The Cyrillic script is a writing system used for various alphabets across Eurasia, particularly in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and North Asia. It is based on the Early Cyrillic alphabet developed during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, especially those of Orthodox Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 250 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages, with Russia accounting for about half of them. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following Latin and Greek.

History

The alphabet was introduced by a Russian missionary, Stepan Khrap, also known as Saint Stephen of Perm (Степан Храп, св. Стефан Пермский) in 1372. The name Abur is derived from the names of the first two characters: An and Bur. The alphabet derived from Cyrillic and Greek, and Komi "Tamga" signs, the latter being similar in the appearance to runes or siglas poveiras, because they were created by incisions, rather than by usual writing. The inclusion of the latter aided the alphabet in greater acceptance among the medieval Permic speakers of the time.

Russia, officially the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country in Eastern Europe and North Asia. At 17,125,200 square kilometres (6,612,100 sq mi), Russia is by a considerable margin the largest country in the world by area, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, and the ninth most populous, with about 146.77 million people as of 2019, including Crimea. About 77% of the population live in the western, European part of the country. Russia's capital, Moscow, is one of the largest cities in the world and the second largest city in Europe; other major cities include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a wide range of environments and landforms. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares land borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia and North Korea. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk and the U.S. state of Alaska across the Bering Strait. However, Russia recognises two more countries that border it, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which are internationally recognized as parts of Georgia.

Stephen of Perm was a fourteenth-century painter and missionary credited with the conversion of the Komi to Christianity and the establishment of the Bishopric of Perm'. Stephen also created the Old Permic script, which makes him the founding-father of Permian written tradition. "The Enlightener of Perm" or the "Apostle of the Permians", as he is sometimes called, is commemorated by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches on April 26.

The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many different local variants, but, by the end of the fourth century BC, the Eucleidean alphabet, with twenty-four letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used to write Greek today. These twenty-four letters are: Α α, Β β, Γ γ, Δ δ, Ε ε, Ζ ζ, Η η, Θ θ, Ι ι, Κ κ, Λ λ, Μ μ, Ν ν, Ξ ξ, Ο ο, Π π, Ρ ρ, Σ σ/ς, Τ τ, Υ υ, Φ φ, Χ χ, Ψ ψ, and Ω ω.

The alphabet was in use until the 17th century, when it was superseded by the Cyrillic script. Abur was also used as cryptographic writing for the Russian language.

Russian is an East Slavic language, which is official in the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as being widely used throughout Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia. It was the de facto language of the Soviet Union until its dissolution on 25 December 1991. Although nearly three decades have passed since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian is used in official capacity or in public life in all the post-Soviet nation-states, as well as in Israel and Mongolia.

April 26, which is the saint's day of Stephen of Perm, is celebrated as Old Permic Alphabet Day.

Significance

Wikipedia logo in Old Permic and Cyrillic script

The Abur inscriptions are among the oldest relics of the Uralic languages. Only one of them has earlier documents: Hungarian, which had been written using the Old Hungarian script first before the Latin script was used after 1000.

The Uralic languages form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25 million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia and in the European Union. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, which are official languages in Hungary, Finland, and Estonia, respectively. Other Uralic languages with significant numbers of speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt, and Komi, which are officially recognized languages in various regions of Russia.

Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language spoken in Hungary and parts of several neighbouring countries. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Outside Hungary it is also spoken by communities of Hungarians in the countries that today make up Slovakia, western Ukraine (Subcarpathia), central and western Romania (Transylvania), northern Serbia (Vojvodina), northern Croatia and northern Slovenia. It is also spoken by Hungarian diaspora communities worldwide, especially in North America and Israel. Like Finnish and Estonian, Hungarian belongs to the Uralic language family. With 13 million speakers, it is the family's largest member by number of speakers.

For comparison, Finnish as a written language appeared only after the Reformation in 1543. However, an isolated birch bark letter, found in 1957 in Novgorod and written in a Finnic language, has been dated to the beginning of the 13th century.

Finnish is a Finnic language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland ; Finnish is also an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both Standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a Finnish dialect, are spoken. The Kven language, a dialect of Finnish, is spoken in Northern Norway by a minority group of Finnish descent.

Mikael Agricola was a Lutheran clergyman who became the de facto founder of literary Finnish and a prominent proponent of the Protestant Reformation in Sweden, including Finland, which was a Swedish territory at the time. He is often called the "father of literary Finnish".

The birch bark letter given the document number 292 is the oldest known document in any Finnic language. The document is dated to the beginning of the 13th century. It was found in 1957 by a Soviet expedition led by Artemiy Artsikhovsky in the Nerevsky excavation on the left coast side of Novgorod. It is currently in Novgorod City Museum.

Characters

Lytkin's 1952 work is often considered the authoritative source of documentation for this script.^[3] There are 24 primary characters, along with 10 secondary characters that are subordinate to the primary characters. There are also some combining marks that may have been used for phonological purposes, in addition to some combining letters from Latin and Cyrillic that have been found as well. Spaces, middle dots, and semi-apostrophes have also been seen as punctuation in documents. A Cyrillic combining titlo is used to indicate numerals.

Unicode

The Old Permic alphabet (U+10350–1037F) was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0.

Old Permic ^[1]^[2] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)
	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	A	B	C	D	E	F
U+1035x	𐍐	𐍑	𐍒	𐍓	𐍔	𐍕	𐍖	𐍗	𐍘	𐍙	𐍚	𐍛	𐍜	𐍝	𐍞	𐍟
U+1036x	𐍠	𐍡	𐍢	𐍣	𐍤	𐍥	𐍦	𐍧	𐍨	𐍩	𐍪	𐍫	𐍬	𐍭	𐍮	𐍯
U+1037x	𐍰	𐍱	𐍲	𐍳	𐍴	𐍵	𐍶	𐍷	𐍸	𐍹	𐍺
Notes 1. ^ As of Unicode version 10.0 2. ^ Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points

Related Research Articles

Latin alphabet Alphabet used to write the Latin language

The Latin or Roman alphabet is the writing system originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.

The Old Hungarian script is an alphabetic writing system used for writing the Hungarian language. Today Hungarian is predominantly written using the Latin-based Hungarian alphabet, but the Old Hungarian script is still in use in some communities. The term "old" refers to the historical priority of the script compared with the Latin-based one. The Old Hungarian script is a child system of the Old Turkic alphabet.

Uyghur is a Turkic language with a long literary tradition spoken in Xinjiang, China by the Uyghurs. Today, the Uyghur Arabic alphabet is the official writing system used for Uyghur in Xinjiang. Whereas other alphabets like the Uyghur Latin alphabet and Uyghur Cyrillic alphabets are still in use outside China, especially Central Asia.

Ezh, also called the "tailed z", is a letter whose lower case form is used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), representing the voiced postalveolar fricative consonant. For example, the pronunciation of "si" in vision and precision, or the "s" in treasure. See also Ž, the Persian alphabet letter ژ and the Cyrillic ж.

The Early Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system that was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th century on the basis of the Greek alphabet The objective was to make it possible to have Christian service in Slavic tongue, instead of in Greek, which locals did not understand, and to bring Bulgarian subjects closer to the cultural influence of Christianity, the official religion of the Byzantine Empire. It was used by Slavic peoples in South East, Central and Eastern Europe.

The Komi are a Uralic ethnic group whose homeland is in the north-east of European Russia around the basins of the Vychegda, Pechora and Kama rivers. They mostly live in the Komi Republic, Perm Krai, Murmansk Oblast, Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug, and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in the Russian Federation.

Komi-Zyrian language or simply Komi, Zyrian or Zyryan, is one of the two regional varieties of the pluricentric Komi language, the other regional variety being Komi-Permyak.

Dze (Ѕ ѕ) is a letter of the Cyrillic script, used in the Macedonian language to represent the voiced alveolar affricate, pronounced like ⟨ds⟩ in the English word "pods". It is derived from the letter dzelo or zelo of the Early Cyrillic alphabet, and it was used historically for Old Church Slavonic, Ukrainian, Russian, and Romanian.

The Tajik language has been written in three alphabets over the course of its history: an adaptation of the Perso-Arabic script, an adaptation of the Latin script, and an adaptation of the Cyrillic script. Any script used specifically for Tajik may be referred to as the Tajik alphabet, which is written as алифбои тоҷикӣ in Cyrillic characters, الفبای تاجیکی‎ with Arabic script, and alifboji toçikī in Latin script.

Latin or Roman script, is a set of graphic signs (script) based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet. This is derived from a form of the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet used by the Etruscans.

Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School by Saint Clement of Ohrid and Saint Naum and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the Byzantine theologians Cyril and Methodius. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, in parts of Southeastern Europe and Northern Eurasia, especially those of Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. Cyrillic is one of the most-used writing systems in the world.

The Cyrillic Molodtsov alphabet is an alphabet derived from Cyrillic that was used in the 1920s and 1930s to write two versions of the Komi language; Komi-Zyrian and Komi-Permyak. It was replaced by the Latin Molodtsov alphabet in 1931 and later by the Cyrillic alphabet in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable form of information storage and transfer. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script. Writing is usually recorded onto a durable medium, such as paper or electronic storage, although non-durable methods may also be used, such as writing on a computer display, on a blackboard, in sand, or by skywriting.

Russian Braille is the braille alphabet of the Russian language. With suitable extensions, it is used for languages of neighboring countries that are written in Cyrillic in print, such as Ukrainian and Mongolian. It is based on the Latin transliteration of Cyrillic, with additional letters assigned idiosyncratically. In Russian, it is known as Шрифт Брайля Shrift Braylya 'Braille Script'.

This article discusses the geographic spread of the Latin script throughout history, from its archaic beginnings in Latium to the dominant writing system on Earth in modernity.

References

↑ Bernard Comrie, 1996. "Adaptations of the Cyrillic Alphabet". In Daniels & Bright, The World's Writing Systems, p. 700.
↑ Everson, Michael (2012-04-26). "N4263: Revised proposal for encoding the Old Permic script in the SMP of the UCS" (PDF). Working Group Document, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2.
↑ Лыткин, В. И. 1952. Древнепермский язык: чтение текстов, грамматика, словарь. Москва

External links

"Abur at Minority languages of Russia on the Net" (in Russian).
"Abur". Omniglot.com.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[1] Bernard Comrie, 1996. "Adaptations of the Cyrillic Alphabet". In Daniels & Bright, The World's Writing Systems, p. 700.

[2] Everson, Michael (2012-04-26). "N4263: Revised proposal for encoding the Old Permic script in the SMP of the UCS" (PDF). Working Group Document, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2.

[3] Лыткин, В. И. 1952. Древнепермский язык: чтение текстов, грамматика, словарь. Москва

[1]

[2]