From: peter@pmoylan.org.invalid   
      
   On 04/05/24 20:13, Ross Clark wrote:   
      
   > There was a Serbian restaurant at one time in Auckland (though   
   > Croatians are much more numerous here), and the one time we ate   
   > there, I remember seeing, pinned to the wall, a little poem about   
   > "Наша Кириллица" (Our (dear?) Cyrillic alphabet). Googling that   
   > phrase brings up a lot of Russian sites with similar sentiments.   
   >   
   > Looking further into it will show that while the above is basically   
   > true, it is a lot more complicated.   
   >   
   > (i) They have several different feast days depending on which church   
   > you ask.   
   >   
   > (ii) They invented two quite different alphabets -- Glagolitic, which   
   >  looks a bit like Elvish; and Cyrillic, which is simpler and more   
   > obviously based on Greek, and has lasted longer.   
   >   
   > (iii) And maybe they didn't invent them just like that...but such is   
   > the way of writing systems.   
      
   Yike! I see what you mean by Elvish. The users of Glagolitic must have   
   had low reading speeds.   
      
   Now that I've looked it up, I see that I've had a false belief for   
   years. I had always believed that Cyrillic was invented by the Greek   
   monk Cyril (and, perhaps, his partner Methodius). Now I see that Cyril   
   introduced Glagolitic, and that others later modified his script to turn   
   it into Cyrillic.   
      
   That's a little surprising. You'd expect a Greek, faced with the problem   
   of creating an alphabet for the Slavs, to come up with something similar   
   to the Greek alphabet. (With, of course, additions to deal with the fact   
   that the Greek alphabet is too small.) Indeed, Cyrillic does show   
   obvious derivation from Greek, but Glagolitic does not.   
      
   --   
   Peter Moylan                         http://www.pmoylan.org   
   Newcastle, NSW   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)