Hacker News Reader

Comment by kgeist | Hacker News Reader

The article uses the word "invention" several times, and makes it look like the alphabet was created to make Slavs independent from the West, the Byzantine empire, to create division etc.

It fails to mention the fact that, if you compare the earliest forms of Cyrillic to the contemporary Byzantine Greek alphabet, it's 100% identical to the Greek alphabet. The only difference is that Cyrillic added a few letters for Slavic sounds originally not found in Greek: sh, ch, nasal sounds, etc. Cyrillic was originally nothing more than the Greek alphabet with extra characters. Cyrillic and Greek diverged from each other much later, for purely technical reasons (e.g. letter H in cursive was often written as И and later became the norm).

So I'm not sure what the point of the article is.

View on HN

It's a bit more complicated. The OG cyclic was the the Glagolitic - which is very different from the greek alphabet. The proper Cyrillic, while based on the greek alphabet, was developed then specifically and consciously as a political project against Byzantium, as of course the byzantines would much prefer to use greek for church and business ...

In fact, the original alphabet was Glagolitic, and it was very very different from both Latin and Greek. What became the foundation of the modern Cyrillic came much later.

Yes the evolution is attested via intermediate "old Cyrillic" forms that still retain a shadow of glagolitic aesthetics but is likely spawned directly from Greek alphabet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script:

    Unlike the Churchmen in Ohrid, Preslav scholars were much more dependent upon Greek models and quickly abandoned the Glagolitic scripts in favor of an adaptation of the Greek uncial to the needs of Slavic, which is now known as the Cyrillic alphabet.[10]

That said, Glagolitic itself derives from the Greek script but it was clearly an attempt to explicitly create something that looks different and not just "branching off" whatever was the current Greek script version of the time. So that would count more as "invention" (similarly to how Georgian and Armenian scripts were invented by a single person, allegedly the same person for both). Whether ties with Greek script is about inspiration or origin is hard to define and perhaps just a matter of degree.

For example, consider alphabet ordering. Even if you totally invent a new script for aesthetic purposes, you may want to keep the letter ordering from your home alphabet just for simplicity. Other invented scripts like Georgian and Armenian, also retain the Greek alphabet ordering. Does that indicate origin/inspiration? Can the ordering be something that was added on later when the need of a stable ordering of words for building lexicons and teaching people was recognized?

> […] the letter ordering from your home alphabet just for simplicity. Other invented scripts like Georgian and Armenian, also retain the Greek alphabet ordering.

The Greek alphabet ordering ascends to the Phoenician alphabet ordering, which has inherited it from the Proto-Sinaic alphabet[0]. It remains a vexing enigma – why letters were originally arranged in the order that we know today.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet#Lett...

I find it more fascinating why the order was retained so faithfully (modulo minor drifts that accrued over time).

As far as I know, people have always practiced/learned alphabets by reciting/writing them one-by-one, in the "standard order", over and over again. We did it ourselves at school, too. Maybe that's why it's so retained - we just can't imagine any other order :) And authors of new alphabets were probably already versed in other alphabets and had to learn their "standard order".

The article is less interesting in how Cyrillic was “invented” but why.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com