From: benlizro@ihug.co.nz   
      
   On 4/05/2024 10:38 p.m., Peter Moylan wrote:   
   > 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.   
   >   
      
   A lot of Glagolitic can be derived from Greek cursive forms, whereas   
   Cyrillic is from the uncials. For sounds found in Slavic but not in   
   Greek, Armenian may be a source for Glagolitic, and Coptic for Cyrillic.   
   I'm taking this from the discussion by Paul Cubberley in The World's   
   Writing Systems (pp.346ff.). He suggests that at least the Greek part of   
   Glagolitic had been devised by Slavic speakers in western Macedonia   
   before C&M came along. Cyril "formalized" it and added some letters.   
   Some decades later, followers of his decided they needed a "more   
   dignified" (and probably easier to read) alphabet and created Cyrillic.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)