Relationship of Cyrillic and Glagolitic scripts

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.

Glagolitic precedence

The theory that Glagolitic script was created before Cyrillic was first put forth by G. Dobner in 1785, and since Pavel Jozef Šafárik's 1857 study of Glagolitic monuments, ''Über den Ursprung und die Heimat des Glagolitismus'', there has been a virtual consensus in the academic circles that St. Cyril developed the Glagolitic alphabet, rather than the Cyrillic. This view is supported by numerous linguistic, paleographic, and historical accounts. Points that support this view include:
# The Greek-derived Cyrillic script spread quickly across the ''Slavia Orthodoxa'' lands because it replaced the Glagolitic alphabet, which was designed to fit the sound system of Slavic speech. By comparison, the West Slavic languages, as well as Slovene and Croatian, took a longer time to adapt the Roman alphabet to their local needs with special digraphs and diacritics for Slavic phonemes becoming accepted only with the advent of printing in the 16th century.
# There are significantly fewer Glagolitic monuments, suggesting that the new writing system was replaced by a newer system that was more vigorous and voluminous in output.
# Old Church Slavonic canon monuments written in Glagolitic script are generally older than their Cyrillic counterparts.
# The most archaic features of Old Church Slavonic canon monuments (e.g., the uncontracted and unassimilated endings of definite adjective forms ''-aego'', ''-aago'', ''-aemu'', ''-aamu'', ''-uemu'', ''-uumu'' as opposed to contracted forms; second- and third-person dual imperfect endings ''-šeta'', ''-šete'' as opposed to the ''-sta'', ''-ste'' in Cyrillic monuments; sigmatic aorist is not attested in Glagolitic monuments, which otherwise preserve more morphological archaisms) are generally much more common in Glagolitic than in Cyrillic canon. The evidence of pre-Moravian-mission phonetics Glagolitic alphabet was devised for and which it indirectly reflects, characteristic of the phonological system of a South Slavic Macedonian dialect in a specific timeframe of the late 9th century, the ''đerv'', ''št'' and ''dzelo'', and are present in Glagolitic monuments either exclusively or predominantly, further corroborates their antiquity over Cyrillic in which these sounds are absent or changed by means of sound changes assumed to have occurred in the later period.
# Of surviving Old Church Slavonic palimpsests, the observed tendency is for Glagolitic or Cyrillic to be written over Glagolitic or Cyrillic over Cyrillic but never Glagolitic over Cyrillic. All extant palimpsests are written in Cyrillic and modern photographic analysis has shown a previous layer of Glagolitic letters.
# Some Cyrillic canon monuments contain occasional Glagolitic letters, words or sentences, all of which are written by the hand of the same scribe. Conversely, Cyrillic words or letters found in the Glagolitic monuments are seen as later additions.
# Cyrillic glosses are present in Glagolitic manuscripts but not the other way around.
# Some scribal errors in Cyrillic monuments indicate that the Cyrillic manuscript was copied from a Glagolitic original. For example, in Sava's book is written instead of . The digraph is written in Glagolitic as , while is written as . The similarity of Glagolitic letters and has caused an obvious spelling mistake.
# The numerical value of Glagolitic letters is an orderly progression in agreement with the sequence of letters in the alphabet allowing for the writing of numbers past at least 2,000. Cyrillic numerals, on the other hand, follow Greek numerical usage and does not assign numerical values to certain non-Greek Slavic letters (''b'', ''ž'', ''št'', ''š'', ''y'', ''ĕ'', ', '). This makes necessary the use of a thousands sign similar to the Greek sampi for marking numbers larger than 999. This also means letters pronounced similarly have different numerical values in the Glagolitic and Cyrillic numeral systems. Discernable scribal errors indicate transposition ''from'' Glagolitic numeral system ''into'' Cyrillic, not the other way around.
# Glagolitic monuments contain many more untranslated Greek words, which implies they are preserving the original text of translations conducted by St. Cyril. Furthermore, Glagolitic monuments contain many errors in translated phrases, and Cyrillic monuments have significantly rectified those errors.
# The style of the Glagolitic monuments is often unclear and sometimes almost completely unintelligible without the Greek original (e.g. a series of pages in the Glagolita Clozianus). This should indicate their creation toward the early period of Slavic literacy when there was no skill in translation.
# The relation between the Glagolitic monuments in Moravia and those in the Balkans is best explained by presuming expansion of the Glagolitic tradition from Moravia, before the 10th Century when the Magyar–German wedge separated Western and Southern Slavs.

The later development of the angular Croatian Glagolitic and its different appearance from the rounded Old Church Slavonic/Bulgarian form of the alphabet caused some confusion as to the precedence of Glagolitic over Cyrillic.

Chernorizets Hrabar's account

In his famous treatise ''On the Letters'' ( cu, О Писмєньхъ), written as early as the end of the 9th or beginning of the 10th Century, the Bulgarian monk Chernorizets Hrabar stated:

:''Being still pagans, the Slavs did not have their own letters, but read and communicated by means of tallies and sketches. After their baptism they were forced to use Roman and Greek letters in the transcription of their Slavic words but these were not suitable ... At last, God, in his love for mankind, sent them St. Constantine the Philosopher, called Cyril, a learned and upright man, who composed for them 38 letters, some 4 of themsimilar to the Greek, but some 4 of themdifferent, suitable to express Slavic sounds.''

According to , Hrabar's account points to an earlier usage of Greek and Roman alphabet for writing by the Slavs, which was a very difficult task. The initial letters of the words he cites illustrate that. The initial consonants in (''ž''; IPA: �, (''dz''; IPA: z, (''c''; IPA: s, (''č''; IPA: ʃ, and (''š''; IPA: � were completely absent in the contemporary Byzantine Greek phonology, as well as the initial nasal vowels illustrated by (''ǫ'') and (''ę''). The same is true for the initial syllable in (''ju'' or ''ü''). In other cases, changes in pronunciation from Ancient Greek to Byzantine Greek made the letters no longer suitable for Slavic versions of the letters. For example, in the word , the Greek letters and , by the time of Byzantine Greek, were pronounced as labial and velar fricatives instead of voiced bilabial and velar stops. Similarly, the Greek letter had acquired the phonetic value of in Byzantine Greek, making it no longer suitable to represent the initial yus in the word .

Hrabar's phrase "," which translates as "tallies and sketches" or "strokes and incisions," has long puzzled scholars. Possible meanings range from simple marks used as an aid in counting, to adaptations of Turkic (as in Proto-Bulgar epigraphy) and Germanic (such as of the Gothic alphabet created by Wulfila) runes. However, no authentic Slavic runic writing been discovered, despite linguistic traces of Bulgar and Gothic tribes interacting with Slavic tribes and the Proto-Slavic Urheimat. Furthermore, the Glagolitic alphabet does not contain any runic elements.

Hrabar's account further describes how St. Cyril was sent by God to the Slavs "to compose 38 letters, some according to the shape of Greek letters, some according to the Slavic word." This particular statement has led some philologists to conclude Hrabar is speaking of the Cyrillic script. However, that theory is disputed by the analysis of St. M. Kuljbakin in ''Beleške o Hrabrovoj Apologiji'' (Glas SKA, Beograd, 1935). According to Kuljbakin, Hrabar's 38 letters corresponds to the number of letter in the Glagolitic alphabet, while the Early Cyrillic script had more than 40 graphemes.

According to I. Gošev, another statement by Hrabar points to the Glagolitic alphabet. When Hrabar writes that the first letter of the alphabet compiled by St. Cyrill, (), was "God's gift" to the Slavs and therefore was markèdly different from pagan Greek (alpha). In this interpretation, represents the sign of the cross and is a symbolic invocation of God's blessing.

Bulgarian scholar is the most vocal supporter of the theory of the development of Cyrillic from a Slavic Greek-based writing alphabet; however, no examples of such a script have been preserved. Georgiev does not deny that St. Cyril developed the Glagolitic script, but he argues Cyrillic is the older script, deriving from cursive Greek.

The "Russian letters" in ''Vita Constantini''

"And he found there the Evangel and Psalter written with Russian letters, and upon finding a man who spoke the language, talked with him; and perceiving the power of the speech, he added various letters for his own language, consonant vocal sounds; and praying to God, immediately began to compose and reveal, and many marvelled at him, glorifying God."

The phrase "" (often translated as "Russian letters") in ''Vita Constantini'' is another enigmatic statement that has puzzled Slavists for a long time. This chronicle of the life of St. Cyril and the first Slavic hagiography describes his early mission to the Khazars in southern Crimea. There, in Cherson, he discovered a gospel text and psalter written in "Russian letters."

Although Crimea circa 860 was probably a multiethnic community (especially its main port city, Cherson), it is considered unlikely that Slavs had yet settled there, as the Slavs of the Southern Dnieper region were at that time still separated from the northern shores of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov by the steppe, which was controlled by Khazars and later Pechenegs, who remained heathens until long after the conversion of the Rus' in 966. For this reason, scholars generally reject the connection of "" in ''Vita Constantini'' with Eastern Slavs, although some Russian nationalists do maintain that St. Cyril found an Old East Slavic text and encountered a man who spoke that language.

argues it is highly unlikely St. Cyril would have been as concerned as Chapter XIV of ''Vita Constantini'' records about the need to develop a writing systems for the Slavs of Moravia had he earlier encountered a Slavic script in Crimea.

According to the hypothesis originally propounded by French Slavist André Vaillant and further developed by Roman Jakobson

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