Old century font alphabet how to#
Old century font alphabet code#

Medieval Glagolitic and Cyrillic letters are shown in BukyVede font, cf. [The article in the original Russian can be found here: “Staroslavjanskij jazyk i slavjanskija azbuki.” Uchebnik russkoj paleografii. Schepkin included a great table comparing the Greek cursive, Glagolitic, and Cyrillic forms for a good number of letters.Ĭhapter 2: Old Slavonic Language and the Slavonic AlphabetsĪ translation of Щепкин, В.Н. He ends with a comparison of how the older vowels may have been pronounced, and uses this to investigate where Cyrillic may have borrowed from Glagolitic or vice versa as the two alphabets developed side by side. The translation below is of Schepkin’s chapter on OCS and these two alphabets, their creation, and a comparison of the two and how some of the letter forms may have been created - from Greek block letters, from Greek cursive, or in some cases, by creatively combining forms to generate letters for Slavic sounds which didn’t translate well to either. I’ve been interested ever since in trying to learn more about how these alphabets originated and how they interrelate. It also used ь and ъ as pronounced vowels, rather than as silent orthographic markers like they are now in modern Russian.

Of course, that didn’t help me make any sense of a text like ⰵⰲⰰⰳⰳⰾⰻⰵ ⱁⱅⱏ ⰿⰰⱃⱏⰽⰰ!Even today, I can only recognize a few of the Glagolitic letters without a reference table, and as we did back in my class I still have to parse the letters one by one to determine that the phrase above says “ evagglie otъ marъka” or “The Gospel of Mark.” Medieval Cyrillic looked more familiar, but had a number of odd characters I hadn’t seen before like Ѧ and Ѫ. Back when Cyril was creating Glagolitic, the people from his hometown of Thessaloniki were bilingual in Greek and Slavic, and they were most likely quite familiar with the Greek cursive forms. I learned later that this was because the letters were largely based on medieval Greek cursive forms, some of which look nothing like the Greek block characters.

Old century font alphabet code#

Whereas many of the Cyrillic letters are easy to decipher if you know some of the Greek alphabet (either from math or frat names, your choice…), the Glagolitic letters seemed kinda funky and looked like a “made up” code language to me. Cyril, but both forms were used in early period. Cyrillic was created later, named after St. Methodius started to minister to the Bulgarian Slavs. In one of the early classes, the professor introduced us to photocopied texts written in an alphabet called Glagolitic, which scholars now think was the original alphabet created by St. Almost all the reading passages were from the Gospels (as those are the main source of texts in OCS), and one day as I was walking to class, the Gideon Society was out and helpfully handed me an answer key to my reading passage for that day – a miniature copy of the New Testament.

Old century font alphabet how to#

He then proceeded to have us start reading passages from texts out loud and trying to translate them, teaching us on the fly how to pronounce the weird vowel symbols or the grammar which was quite different from the Russian we knew (although, luckily, there were quite a few helpful similarities with Serbo-Croatian, which I was taking in the hour immediately before OCS). But, we might be able to find a copy in a used book store…). My fellow students and I arrived in class on the first day, where the professor told us there was no text book (the best work, Lunt’s Old Church Slavonic Grammar, was out of print, he told us.

It developed in the Bulgarian region, however, and as such contains a heavy slant toward south-Slavic qualities, and developed separate from vernacular Russian and other modern Slavic languages. OCS is a preserved form of very early Slavic, as close to proto-Slavic as exists in any written form. My first year in grad school for Slavic Languages, one of my classes was on Old Church Slavonic (OCS) or Old Slavonic.