Cyrillic alphabet

Cyrillic Alphabet: Birch Bark Paper No. 591 of Novgorod (1025-1050)

The Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system used in several Eurasian languages and is used as the national script in several Slavic, Turkic, Mongolian, Uralic and Iranic-speaking countries of Southeast Europe, Europe Asia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia, continues to be used in several Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Belarusian) and non-Slavic (Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Azeri, Gagauz, Turkmen, Mongolian).

It is based on the Greek alphabet, with characters from the Glagolitic alphabet and exclusively Slavic sounds. Glagolitic was invented by Saints Cyril and Methodius, missionaries from the Byzantine Empire in the 9th century, who used it to translate the Bible in the cultural context of the Slavic peoples. This Bible was written in Old Church Slavonic (based on a Slavic dialect learned in Thessaloniki, Greece). This language was used for the Christianization of Kievan Rus between the IX and XII. In the XIV century arose Church Slavonic, used today in worship by the Russian Orthodox Church and other Slavic Orthodox churches.

In the IX century d. C., the Bulgarian tsar Simeon I the Great, following the cultural and political trajectory of his father Boris I, commissioned the development of a new script, the archaic Cyrillic alphabet, at the Preslav Literary School, in the First Bulgarian Empire, which it would replace the Glagolitic script, developed earlier by Saints Cyril and Methodius and the same disciples who created the new Slavic script in Bulgaria. The use of the Cyrillic script in Bulgaria became official in 893. The new script became the basis for alphabets used in various languages, especially those of Orthodox Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Bulgarian. For centuries, Cyrillic was also used by Catholic Slavs and Muslims (see Bosnian Cyrillic). As of 2019, around 250 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages, of which Russia accounts for about half. With Bulgaria's accession to the European Union on 1 January 2007, the Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, after Latin and Greek.

Use

The Cyrillic script spread throughout the East Slavic territory and some South Slavic territories, being adopted to write local languages, such as Old East Slavic. Among the languages that use this alphabet are Abkhazian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Chechen, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Komi, Macedonian, Moldavian, Mongolian, Russian, Serbian, Tatar, Tajik, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Yakut, and various others. Some of these languages are also written in the Latin alphabet. In the case of the Slavs, Serbo-Croatian is the only language that officially uses both alphabets, although the Latin version is more widely used. The composition of the original Cyrillic alphabet is not known. Its adaptation to local languages gave rise to a series of Cyrillic alphabets that are discussed below:

History

A page of Asia (Santiago) (ABC (Lector)), the first book of text in the Ruthenian language, printed by Ivan Fyodorov in 1574. This page presents the Cyrillic alphabet.

The Cyrillic script was created in the First Bulgarian Empire. Its first variant, the archaic Cyrillic alphabet, was created at the Preslav Literary School. Several prominent Bulgarian writers and scholars worked at the school, such as Naum of Preslav until the year 893; Constantine of Preslav; Joan Ekzarh (also transcr. John the Exarch); and Cernorizec Hrabar, among others. The school was also a translation center, especially for Byzantine authors. The Cyrillic script is derived from the letters of the Greek uncial script, augmented with ligatures and consonants from the ancient Glagolitic alphabet for sounds not found in Greek. Tradition holds that Glagolitic and Cyrillic were formalized by Saints Cyril and Methodius and their disciples, such as Saints Naum, Clement, Angelar, and Sava. They spread and taught Christianity throughout Bulgaria. Paul Cubberley argues that although Cyril may have codified and expanded Glagolitic, it was his students in the First Bulgarian Empire under Tsar Simeon the Great who developed Cyrillic from it. Greek letters in the 890s as a more suitable script for church books. Cyrillic spread among other Slavic peoples, as well as non-Slavic Vlachs.

Cyrillic and Glagolitic were used for the Church Slavonic language, especially the Old Church Slavonic variant. Hence expressions like "И is the tenth Cyrillic letter" normally refer to the order of the Church Slavonic alphabet; not all Cyrillic alphabets use all available letters in the script. The Cyrillic script came to dominate the Glagolitic script in the 12th century.

Literature produced in the Old Bulgarian language soon spread northward and became the lingua franca of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, where it also became known as Old Church Slavonic.

The alphabet used for the Modern Church Slavonic language in Orthodox and Eastern Catholic rites continues to resemble Primitive Cyrillic. However, over the next millennium, Cyrillic adapted to changes in the spoken language, developed regional variations to suit the characteristics of national languages, and was the subject of academic reforms and political decrees. A notable example of such language reform can be attributed to Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, who updated the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet by removing certain graphemes that were no longer represented in the vernacular and introducing Serbian-specific graphemes (i.e., Љ Ђ Ћ Џ Ј), distancing it from the Church Slavonic alphabet in use before the reform. Today, many languages in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and northern Eurasia are written in the Cyrillic script.

Name

Monument to Cyrillic Writing in Antarctica

Since the script was conceived and popularized by the followers of Cyril and Methodius, and not by themselves, its name denotes homage and not authorship. The name "Cyrillic" it often confuses people unfamiliar with the history of writing, because it does not identify a country of origin (unlike the "Greek alphabet"). Among the general public, it is often called 'the Russian alphabet', because Russian is the most popular and influential script-based alphabet. Some Bulgarian intellectuals, notably Stefan Tsanev, have expressed concern about this and have suggested that the Cyrillic alphabet be called the "Bulgarian alphabet" instead, for the sake of historical accuracy. that "alphabet" is not the same as "writing" (for example, the letter Її has existed in the Cyrillic script since its very invention and is still used in Ukrainian, but it is absent in the modern Bulgarian alphabet, i.e. Cyrillic as used in Bulgarian), so the correct name is actually "the Bulgarian script".

In Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Czech, and Slovak, the Cyrillic alphabet is also known as azbuka, derived from the ancient names of the first two letters of most Cyrillic alphabets (just as the term alphabet comes from the first two Greek letters alpha and beta). In the Russian language, syllabaries, especially Japanese kana, are often called "syllabic azbukas" instead of "syllabic writings".

Relationship with other writing systems

Latin script

Several languages written in Cyrillic have also been written in Latin, such as Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Serbian and Romanian (the language that used Cyrillic in the Republic of Moldova until 1989, and in Romania throughout the century XIX). After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, some of the former republics officially switched from Cyrillic to Latin. The transition is complete in most of Moldova (except for the breakaway region of Transnistria, where Moldovan Cyrillic is official), Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan. Uzbekistan continues to use both systems, and Kazakhstan has officially started the transition from Cyrillic to Latin (expected in 2025). The Russian government has mandated that Cyrillic be used in all public communications in all federal subjects of Russia, to promote closer ties across the federation. This law was controversial for the speakers of many Slavic languages; for others, such as Chechens and Ingush, the law had political ramifications. For example, the separatist Chechen government imposed a Latin script that is still used by many Chechens. Those in the diaspora especially refuse to use the Chechen Cyrillic alphabet, which they associate with Russian imperialism.

Distribution of Cyrillic writing worldwide:
Cyrillic is the only official writing. Cyrillic is co-official with another alphabet. In the cases of Moldova and Georgia, these are scindida regions not recognized by the central government. Cyrillic is not official, but is still of common use.Cyrillic is not very used

Standard Serbian uses both Cyrillic and Latin scripts. Cyrillic is nominally the official alphabet of the Serbian administration under the Serbian constitution; however, the law does not regulate alphabets in the standard language, nor the standard language itself. In practice, the scripts are the same, with Latin being used more often in a less official character.

The Zhuang alphabet, used between the 1950s and the 1980s in parts of the People's Republic of China, used a mixture of Latin, phonetic, numerical, and Cyrillic letters. Non-Latin letters, including Cyrillic, were removed from the alphabet in 1982 and replaced with Latin letters that closely resembled those they replaced.

Romanization

There are several systems for romanizing Cyrillic text, such as transliteration to convey Cyrillic spelling in Latin letters, and transliteration to convey pronunciation.

Standard systems of transliteration from Cyrillic to Latin include:

• Scientific transliteration, used in linguistics, is based on the Bosnian and Croatian Latin alphabet.
• The United Nations Working Group on Romanization Systems recommends different systems for certain languages. These are the most used in the world.
• ISO 9:1995 of the International Organization for Standardization.
• Romanization tables of the American Library Association and the Library of Congress for the Slavic alphabets (ALA-LC Romanization), used in the American libraries.
• BGN/PCGN (1947), United States Geographical Names Board and United States Standing Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use.
• GOST 16876, a rule of Soviet transliteration already disappeared. Substituted by GOST 7.79, which is equivalent to ISO 9.
• Various informal romanizations of the Cyrillic, which adapt the Cyrillic writing to the Latin glyphs and sometimes to the Greeks to be compatible with small character sets.

Cyrilization

The representation of other writing systems with Cyrillic letters is called Cyrillization.

Computer coding

Unicode

Starting with Unicode version 13.0, Cyrillic letters, including national and historical alphabets, are encoded in several blocks:

• Cyrillic: U+0400–U+04FF
• Cyrillic Supplement: U+0500–U+052F
• Extended-A Cyrillic: U+2DE0–U+2DFF
• Extended-B Cyrillic: U+A640–U+A69F
• Extended Cyrillic-C: U+1C80–U+1C8F
• Phonetic Extensions: U+1D2B, U+1D78
• Combination of Media Tintas: U+FE2E–U+FE2F

The characters in the range U+0400 to U+045F are essentially the ISO 8859-5 characters shifted 864 positions up. Characters in the range U+0460 to U+0489 are historical letters, which are not currently used. Characters in the range U+048A to U+052F are additional letters for various languages that are written in Cyrillic.

As a rule, Unicode does not include accented Cyrillic letters. Some exceptions are:

• combinations that are considered separate letters of the respective alphabets, as He,, Ё, Ё,,,); (as well as many letters of alphabets not Slavos);
• two more frequent combinations that are required orthographically to distinguish the homonyms in Bulgarian and Macedonian:;,;;
• some combinations of old and new ecclesiastical Slave:.,.,..

To indicate stressed or long vowels, combination diacritical marks can be used after the respective letter (for example, U+0301 ◌́ COMBINED ACUTE ACCENT: ы́ э́ ю́ я́ etc.).

Some languages, such as Church Slavonic, are not yet fully supported.

Unicode 5.1, released on April 4, 2008, introduces major changes to Cyrillic blocks. Revisions to the existing Cyrillic blocks and the addition of Extended Cyrillic A (2DE0...2DFF) and Extended Cyrillic B (A640...A69F) significantly improves compatibility with Archaic Cyrillic, Abkhazian, Aleut, Chuvash, Kurdish and Moksha.

Other

Cyrillic text punctuation is similar to that used in European Latin-script languages.

Other character encoding systems for Cyrillic:

• CP866 - Codification of 8-bit Cyrillic Characters 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 - Codification of 8-bit Cyrillic Characters established by the International Organization for Standardization.
• KOI8-R - Codification of 8-bit native Russian characters. Invented in the USSR for use in the Soviet clones of American IBM and DEC computers. Cyrillic characters go in the order of their Latin counterparts, which allowed the text to remain legible after transmission through a 7-bit line that eliminated the most significant bit of each byte; the result was a Latin transliteration of the very rough, but legible Cyrillic. It is the standard encoding of the early 90s for Unix systems and the first Russian encoding of the Internet.
• KOI8-U - KOI8-R with addition of Ukrainian letters.
• MIK - Codification of 8-bit native Bulgarian characters for use in Microsoft DOS.
• Windows-1251 - 8-bit Cyrillic Character Coding established by Microsoft for use in Microsoft Windows. The easiest 8-bit Cyrillic encoding: 32 characters in native order in 0xc0-0xdf, 32 characters usual in 0xe0-0xff, with "YO" characters rarely used elsewhere. There are no pseudographs. Old standard encoding in some Linux distributions for Belarus and Bulgarian, but currently displaced by UTF-8.
• GOST-main.
• GB 2312 - Mainly simplified Chinese encoding, but there are also the 33 basic Russian Cyrillic letters (in uppercases and lowercases).
• JIS and Shift JIS - Mainly Japanese encoding, but there are also the 33 basic Russian Cyrillic letters (in uppercases and lowercases).

Keyboard Layout

Each language has its own standard keyboard layout, borrowed from typewriters. With the flexibility of data entry methods on the computer, there are also transliterated or phonetic/homophonic keyboard layouts for typists who are more familiar with other layouts, such as the English QWERTY keyboard. When practical Cyrillic fonts or keyboard layouts are not available, computer users sometimes use transliteration or "volapuk" to write in languages that are normally written with the Cyrillic alphabet.

Controversy

The Cyrillic alphabet has sometimes been the subject of controversy because of its strong association with Russian or Serbian. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, some of the former republics stopped using the Cyrillic alphabet in favor of Latin. The transition has been almost fully done in Moldova (except Transnistria region), Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, but Uzbekistan still uses both systems. In Romania the transition to the Latin alphabet had been made throughout the XIX century and therefore there were no changes. In Croatia, for example, there have been protests against the project to put double signage in Latin and Cyrillic alphabets in areas where Serbs represent a third or more of the population, since it reopens the wounds of the war in Yugoslavia. In Vukovar, protesters tore down signs with Cyrillic text.