The Cyrillic script (
/sɨˈrɪlɪk/) or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School.[1] It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, in Eastern Europe and Asia, especially those of Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011 around 252 million people in Europe and Asia use it as official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia.[2]
Cyrillic is derived from the Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and consonants from the older Glagolitic alphabet and Old Bulgarian for sounds not found in Ancient Greek. It is named in honor of the two Eastern Roman Empire brothers, Saints Cyril and Methodius, who created the Glagolitic alphabet earlier on. Modern scholars believe that Cyrillic was developed and formalized by early disciples of Cyril and Methodius (such as Clement of Ohrid).[3][4]
With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek scripts.
Cyrillic script spread throughout the East and South Slavic territories, being adopted for writing local languages, such as the Old East Slavic. Its adaptation to local languages produced a number of Cyrillic alphabets, discussed hereafter.
Capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts.
Yeri (Ы) was originally a ligature of Yer and I (Ꙑ). Iotation was indicated by ligatures formed with the letter I: Ꙗ (not ancestor of modern ya, Я, which is derived from Ѧ), Ѥ, Ю (ligature of I and ОУ), Ѩ, Ѭ. Many letters had variant forms and commonly used ligatures, for example И = І = Ї, Ѡ = Ѻ, Оу ⁄ ОУ = Ѹ, ѠТ = Ѿ.
The letters also had numeric values, based not on Cyrillic alphabetical order, but inherited from the letters' Greek ancestors.
Cyrillic numerals
| 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
| А |
В |
Г |
Д |
Є |
Ѕ |
З |
И |
Ѳ |
|
| 10 |
20 |
30 |
40 |
50 |
60 |
70 |
80 |
90 |
| І |
К |
Л |
М |
Н |
Ѯ |
Ѻ |
П |
Ч (Ҁ) |
|
| 100 |
200 |
300 |
400 |
500 |
600 |
700 |
800 |
900 |
| Р |
С |
Т |
Ѵ |
Ф |
Х |
Ѱ |
Ѿ |
Ц |
The early Cyrillic alphabet is difficult to represent on computers. Many of the letterforms differed from modern Cyrillic, varied a great deal in manuscripts, and changed over time. Few fonts include adequate glyphs to reproduce the alphabet. In accordance with Unicode policy, the standard does not include letterform variations or ligatures found in manuscript sources unless they can be shown to conform to the Unicode definition of a character.
The Unicode 5.1 standard, released on 4 April 2008, greatly improves computer support for the early Cyrillic and the modern Church Slavonic language.
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 today) show a marked tendency to be very tall and narrow, with strokes often shared between adjacent letters.
Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, mandated the use of westernized letter forms in the early 18th century. Over time, these were largely adopted in the other languages that use the script. Thus, unlike the majority of modern Greek fonts that retained their own set of design principles for lower-case letters (such as the placement of serifs, the shapes of stroke ends, and stroke-thickness rules, although Greek capital letters do use Latin design principles), 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 exceptions: Cyrillic ⟨а⟩, ⟨е⟩, ⟨р⟩, and ⟨у⟩ adopted Western lowercase shapes, lowercase ⟨ф⟩ is typically designed under the influence of Latin ⟨p⟩, lowercase ⟨б⟩ is a traditional handwritten form), although a good-quality Cyrillic typeface will still include separate small-caps glyphs.[5]
Comparison of some upright and hand-written letters (Ge, De, I, I kratkoye, Em, Te and Tse; top row is set in Georgia font, bottom in Kisty CY).
Cyrillic fonts, as well as Latin ones, have roman and italic type (practically all popular modern fonts include parallel sets of Latin and Cyrillic letters, where many glyphs, uppercase as well as lowercase, are simply shared by both). However, the native font terminology in Slavic languages (for example, in Russian) does not use the words "roman" and "italic" in this sense.[6] Instead, the nomenclature follows German naming patterns:
- A roman type is called pryamoy shrift ("upright type")—compare with Normalschrift ("regular type") in German
- An italic type is called kursiv ("cursive") or kursivniy shrift ("cursive type")—from the German word Kursive, meaning italic typefaces and not cursive writing
- Cursive handwriting is rukopisniy shrift ("hand-written type") in Russian—in German: Kurrentschrift or Laufschrift, both meaning literally ‘running type’
Similarly to Latin fonts, italic and cursive types of many Cyrillic letters (typically lowercase; uppercase only for hand-written or stylish types) are very different from their upright roman types. In certain cases, the correspondence between uppercase and lowercase glyphs does not coincide in Latin and Cyrillic fonts: for example, italic Cyrillic ⟨т⟩ is the lowercase counterpart of ⟨Т⟩ not of ⟨М⟩.
The standard Cyrillic letters compared to the ones used in Serbian and Macedonian, in regular shape and italic/cursive
As in Latin typography, a sans-serif face may have a mechanically sloped oblique type (naklonniy shrift—"sloped", or "slanted type") instead of italic.
A boldfaced type is called poluzhirniy shrift ("semi-bold type"), because there existed fully boldfaced shapes which are out of use since the beginning of the 20th century.
A bold italic combination (bold slanted) does not exist for all font families.
In Serbian, as well as in Macedonian,[7] some italic and cursive letters are different from those used in other languages. These letter shapes are often used in upright fonts as well, especially for advertisements, road signs, inscriptions, posters and the like, less so in newspapers or books. The Cyrillic lowercase ⟨б⟩ has a slightly different design both in the roman and italic types, which is similar to the lowercase Greek letter Delta, ⟨δ⟩.
The following table shows the differences between the upright and italic Cyrillic letters of the Russian alphabet. Italic forms significantly different from their upright analogues, or especially confusing to users of a Latin alphabet, are highlighted.
Also available as a graphical image.
| а |
б |
в |
г |
д |
е |
ё |
ж |
з |
и |
й |
к |
л |
м |
н |
о |
п |
р |
с |
т |
у |
ф |
х |
ц |
ч |
ш |
щ |
ъ |
ы |
ь |
э |
ю |
я |
| а |
б |
в |
г |
д |
е |
ё |
ж |
з |
и |
й |
к |
л |
м |
н |
о |
п |
р |
с |
т |
у |
ф |
х |
ц |
ч |
ш |
щ |
ъ |
ы |
ь |
э |
ю |
я |
Note: in some fonts or styles lowercase italic Cyrillic ⟨д⟩ (⟨д⟩) may look like Latin ⟨g⟩ and lowercase italic Cyrillic ⟨т⟩ (⟨т⟩) may look exactly like a capital italic ⟨T⟩ (⟨T⟩), only small.
Distribution of the Cyrillic script worldwide.
Dark green: Cyrillic is the sole official script.
Medium green: Cyrillic is co-official with Latin. In the cases of Georgia, and Moldova, this is in breakaway regions not recognized by the central government.
Light green: Cyrillic is not official, but is in common use as a legacy script.
Among others, Cyrillic is the standard script for writing the following national languages:
Slavic languages: Bosnian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, Ukrainian
Non-Slavic languages: Abkhaz, Bashkir, Aleut (now mostly in church texts), Erzya, Kazakh, Kildin Sami, Komi, Kyrgyz, Mari, Moksha, Mongolian, Ossetic, Romani (some dialects), Sakha/Yakut, Tajik, Tatar, Tlingit (now only in church texts), Tuvan, Udmurt, Yuit (Siberian Yupik), and Yupik (in Alaska).
The Cyrillic script has also been used for languages of Alaska,[8] Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia, and the Russian Far East.
The first alphabet derived from Cyrillic was Abur, used for the Komi language. Other Cyrillic alphabets include the Molodtsov alphabet for the Komi language and various alphabets for Caucasian languages.
Since the script was conceived and popularised by the followers of Cyril and Methodius, rather than by Cyril and Methodius themselves, its name denotes homage rather than authorship. The name "Cyrillic" often confuses people who are not familiar with the script's history, because it does not identify a country of origin (in contrast to the "Greek alphabet"). Some call it the "Russian alphabet" because Russian is the most populous and influential alphabet based on the script. Some Bulgarian intellectuals, notably Stefan Tsanev, have expressed concern over this, and have suggested that the Cyrillic script be called the "Bulgarian alphabet" instead, for the sake of historical accuracy.[9]
The Cyrillic script is also known as azbuka, derived from the old names of the first two letters of most Cyrillic alphabets (just as the term alphabet came from the first two Greek letters alpha and beta).
A page from Azbuka, the first
Russian textbook, printed by
Ivan Fyodorov in 1574. This page features the Cyrillic script.
The Cyrillic script was created in the First Bulgarian Empire[1] and is derived from the Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and consonants from the older Glagolitic alphabet for sounds not found in Greek. Tradition holds that Cyrillic and Glagolitic were formalized either by the two Greek brothers born in Thessaloniki, Saints Cyril and Methodius who brought Christianity to the southern Slavs, or by their disciples.[10][11][12][13] Paul Cubberley posits that while Cyril may have codified and expanded Glagolitic, it was his students at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire that developed Cyrillic from Greek in the 890s as a more suitable script for church books.[1] Later Cyrillic spread among other Slavic peoples: Russians, Serbs and others, as well as among non-Slavic Vlachs and Moldavians.
Cyrillic and Glagolitic were used for the Church Slavonic language, especially the Old Church Slavonic variant. (See Early Cyrillic alphabet.) Hence expressions such as "И is the tenth Cyrillic letter" typically refer to the order of the Church Slavonic alphabet; not every Cyrillic alphabet uses every letter available in the script.
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Kana (From Chinese Character) 8 c. CE
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Hangul (partly from Brahmic) 1443
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Yi Script (Origin not known) after the 1970s became syllabic
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The Cyrillic script came to dominate Glagolitic in the 12th century. The literature produced in the Old Bulgarian language soon spread north and became the lingua franca of Eastern Europe, where it came to also be known as Old Church Slavonic.[14][15][16][17][18] The alphabet used for the modern Church Slavonic language in Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic rites still resembles early Cyrillic. However, over the following ten centuries, Cyrillic 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 Cyrillic alphabets.
A number of languages written in a Cyrillic alphabet have also been written in a Latin alphabet, such as Azerbaijani, Uzbek and Romanian (Republic of Moldova only). After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, some of the former republics officially shifted from Cyrillic to Latin. The transition is complete in most of Moldova (except Transnistria, where Moldovan Cyrillic is official), Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, but Uzbekistan still uses both systems. The Russian government has mandated that Cyrillic must be used for all public communications in all federal subjects of Russia, to promote closer ties across the federation.[citation needed] This act was controversial for speakers of many Slavic languages; for others, such as Chechen and Ingush speakers, the law had political ramifications. For example, the separatist Chechen government mandated a Latin script (which, in fact, is noted by observers such as Johanna Nichols to be a much better representation of the language),[citation needed] and is still used by many Chechens. Those in the diaspora especially refuse to use the Chechen Cyrillic alphabet, which they associate with Russian imperialism.
Serbia uses both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Nominally for the Serbian language Cyrillic is the only official script according to the Serbian constitution,[19] but Serbia chooses not to legislate the issue further. In practice the scripts are equal, with Latin being used more often in less official capacity.
The Zhuang alphabet, used between the 1950s and 1980s in portions of the People's Republic of China, used a mixture of Latin, phonetic, numeral-based, and Cyrillic letters. The non-Latin letters, including Cyrillic, were removed from the alphabet in 1982 and replaced with Latin letters that closely resembled the letters they replaced.
There are various systems for Romanization of Cyrillic text, including transliteration to convey Cyrillic spelling in Latin letters, and transcription to convey pronunciation.
Standard Cyrillic-to-Latin transliteration systems include:
See also Romanization of Belarusian, Bulgarian, Kyrgyz, Russian, Macedonian and Ukrainian.
Representing other writing systems with Cyrillic letters is called Cyrillization.
In Unicode 6.0, letters of Cyrillic, including national and historical alphabets, are represented by four blocks:
Two more Cyrillic(-derived) characters are U+1D2B and U+1D78.
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 as a general rule does not include accented Cyrillic letters. Few exceptions are:
- combinations that are considered as separate letters of respective alphabets, like Й, Ў, Ё, Ї, Ѓ, Ќ (as well as many letters of non-Slavic alphabets);
- two most frequent combinations orthographically required to distinguish homonyms in Bulgarian and Macedonian: Ѐ, Ѝ;
- few Old and New Church Slavonic combinations: Ѷ, Ѿ, Ѽ.
To indicate stressed or long vowels, combining diacritical marks can be used after the respective letter (for example, U+0301 ◌́ combining acute accent: ы́ э́ ю́ я́ etc.).
Some languages, including Church Slavonic, are still not fully supported.
Unicode 5.1, released on 4 April 2008, introduces major changes to the Cyrillic blocks. Revisions to the existing Cyrillic blocks, and the addition of Cyrillic Extended A (2DE0...2DFF) and Cyrillic Extended B (A640...A69F), significantly improve support for the early Cyrillic alphabet, Abkhaz, Aleut, Chuvash, Kurdish, and Mordvin.[20]
Punctuation for Cyrillic text is similar to that used in European Latin-alphabet languages.
Other character encoding systems for Cyrillic:
- CP866 – 8-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by Microsoft for use in MS-DOS also known as GOST-alternative. Cyrillic characters go in their native order, with a "window" for pseudographic characters.
- ISO/IEC 8859-5 – 8-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by International Organization for Standardization
- KOI8-R – 8-bit native Russian character encoding. Invented in the USSR for use on Soviet clones of American IBM and DEC computers. The Cyrillic characters go in the order of their Latin counterparts, which allowed the text to remain readable after transmission via a 7bit line which removed the senior bit from each byte - the result became a very rough, but readable, Latin transliteration of Cyrillic. Standard encoding of early 90s for UNIX systems and the first Russian Internet encoding.
- KOI8-U – KOI8-R with addition of Ukrainian letters
- MIK – 8-bit native Bulgarian character encoding for use in DOS
- Windows-1251 – 8-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by Microsoft for use in Microsoft Windows. The simplest 8bit Cyrillic encoding - 32 capital chars in native order at 0xc0-0xdf, 32 usual chars at 0xe0-0xff, with rarely used "YO" characters somewhere else. No pseudographics. Former standard encoding in some Linux distributions for Belarusian and Bulgarian, but currently displaced by UTF-8.
- GOST-main
- GB 2312 - Principally simplified Chinese encodings, but there are also the basic 33 Russian Cyrillic letters (in upper- and lower-case).
- JIS and Shift JIS - Principally Japanese encodings, but there are also the basic 33 Russian Cyrillic letters (in upper- and lower-case).
Each language has its own standard keyboard layout, adopted from typewriters. With the flexibility of computer input methods, there are also transliterating or phonetic/homophonic[21] keyboard layouts made for typists who are more familiar with other layouts, like the common English qwerty keyboard. When practical Cyrillic keyboard layouts or fonts are not available, computer users sometimes use transliteration or look-alike "volapuk" encoding to type languages which are normally written with the Cyrillic alphabet.
See Keyboard layouts for non-Roman alphabetic scripts.
- ^ a b c Paul Cubberley (1996) "The Slavic Alphabets". In Daniels and Bright, eds. The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507993-0.
- ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population
- ^ http://www.ohridnews.com/index.php?servis=7wonders
- ^ <http://www.omniglot.com/writing/cyrillic.htm
- ^ Bringhurst (2002) writes "in Cyrillic, the difference between normal lower case and small caps is more subtle than it is in the Latin or Greek alphabets,..." (p 32) and "in most Cyrillic faces, the lower case is close in color and shape to Latin small caps" (p 107).
- ^ Name ital'yanskiy shrift (Italian font) in Russian refers to a particular font family [1], whereas rimskiy shrift (roman font) is just a synonym for Latin font, Latin alphabet.
- ^ Serbian Cyrillic Letters BE, GHE, DE, PE, TE, Janko Stamenovic (collection of selected commented answers received in Unicode mailing list (unicode@unicode.org) between 29.12.1999 and 17.01.2000).
- ^ "Orthodox Language Texts", Retrieved 2011-06-20
- ^ Tsanev, Stefan. Български хроники, том 4 (Bulgarian Chronicles, Volume 4), Sofia, 2009, p.165
- ^ Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05, s.v. "Cyril and Methodius, Saints"; Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica Incorporated, Warren E. Preece - 1972, p.846, s.v., "Cyril and Methodius, Saints" and "Eastern Orthodoxy, Missions ancient and modern"; Encyclopedia of World Cultures, David H. Levinson, 1991, p.239, s.v., "Social Science"; Eric M. Meyers, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, p.151, 1997; Lunt, Slavic Review, June, 1964, p. 216; Roman Jakobson, Crucial problems of Cyrillo-Methodian Studies; Leonid Ivan Strakhovsky, A Handbook of Slavic Studies, p.98; V. Bogdanovich, History of the ancient Serbian literature, Belgrade, 1980, p.119
- ^ The Columbia Encyclopaedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05, O.Ed. Saints Cyril and Methodius "Cyril and Methodius, Saints) 869 and 884, respectively, “Greek missionaries, brothers, called Apostles to the Slavs and fathers of Slavonic literature."
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica, Major alphabets of the world, Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets, 2008, O.Ed. "The two early Slavic alphabets, the Cyrillic and the Glagolitic, were invented by St. Cyril, or Constantine (c. 827–869), and St. Methodii (c. 825–884). These men from Thessaloniki who became apostles to the southern Slavs, whom they converted to Christianity."
- ^ Kazhdan, Alexander P. (1991). The Oxford dictionary of Byzantium. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 507. ISBN 0-19-504652-8. "Constantine (Cyril) and his brother Methodius were the sons of the droungarios Leo and Maria, who may have been a Slav."
- ^ "On the relationship of old Church Slavonic to the written language of early Rus'" Horace G. Lunt; Russian Linguistics, Volume 11, Numbers 2-3 / January, 1987
- ^ Schenker, Alexander (1995). The Dawn of Slavic. Yale University Press. pp. 185–186, 189–190.
- ^ Lunt, Horace. Old Church Slavonic Grammar. Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 3–4.
- ^ Wien, Lysaght (1983). Old Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian)-Middle Greek-Modern English dictionary. Verlag Bruder Hollinek.
- ^ Benjamin W. Fortson. Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, p. 374
- ^ http://www.srbija.gov.rs/cinjenice_o_srbiji/ustav_odredbe.php?id=217
- ^ n3194r-cyrillic<! --Bot-generated title -->
- ^ http://Phonetic.WinRus.com
- Cyrillic Character Transliteration free software
- Russian Alphabet with sound and animated handwriting of letters and words.
- Sounds of the Russian alphabet, Listen to how the alphabet sounds and download the audio to your desktop
- Russian alphabet audio, Hear the Russian alphabet both at normal speed and slowly, five letters at a time.
- Minority Languages of Russia on the Net, a list of resources.
- Information on Cyrillic alphabet and the handwritten script form of Cyrillic.
- Using Cyrillic (Russian) under non-Russian MS Windows and on the Web - fonts, keyboard layouts, applications tune-up
- Old Cyrillic Keyboard Layout, Old Bulgarian Cyrillic, it includes the characters Ѫ and Ѣ
- A Survey of the Use of Modern Cyrillic Script, including the complete required repertoire of graphic characters, by J. W. van Wingen.
- Tipometar: Serbian Cyrillic typography and typefaces
- The Cyrillic Charset Soup, Roman Czyborra’s overview and history of Cyrillic charsets.
- Unicode Code Charts "Cyrillic"PDF (174 KB)
- Unicode Code Charts "Cyrillic Supplement"PDF (69.8 KB)
- Transliteration of Non-Roman Scripts, a collection of writing systems and transliteration tables, by Thomas T. Pedersen. Includes PDF reference charts for many languages' transliteration systems.
- Modern (not mouse-only) Virtual Real-time Russian Keyboard
- Rusklaviatura: Real-time Cyrillic Converter
- Uzbek Cyrillic - Latin converter
- Russian Keyboard (Cyrillic Virtual Keyboard) with Russian Spell Checking.
- RuWriter, a Russian Phonetic Keyboard Driver for Windows 7, Vista, and XP.
- History and development of the Cyrillic alphabet
- Ancient Scripts: Cyrillic
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vep:Kirilline kirjamišt
![[1]](http://web.archive.org./web/20130411181649/http://citforum.univ.kiev.ua/open_source/fonts/theory/thumbs/ris320.jpg){kind=link}