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Inventing Cyrillic

21 points by lermontov

by Antibabelic

1 subcomments

Oddly, the article doesn't mention the most interesting part. Most scholars believe that Cyril and Methodius did not design Cyrillic, but instead something called Glagolitic.[0]
Glagolitic very quickly got pushed out by what were essentially Greek letters. If you look at Bulgarian and Byzantine manuscripts from the time, they are almost impossible to tell apart, unless you know the languages.
The reason for that is pretty obvious if you look at the Glagolitic letters themselves: they are horrible UX. You need a lot more strokes than for something like Greek or Latin to record the same information. Because Glagolitic was contrived and not polished with use over the centuries, there was very little reason to use it over Greek.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script

by culebron21

0 subcomment

This author is suggesting that Cyrillic is a sort of tool or weapon in the arms of the authority, and is imposed upon the people for purely political reasons. This is purely false projection of modern political alignments into old times.
In reality, at the time, it was the Eastern Christian church that was more liberal, than Rome. Rome insisted every local church make services in Latin, and didn't translate it. The Eastern church instead, had the bible in Greek, but allowed to translate it in local languages. Initially, those translations were made with Greek letters, which weren't fully reflecting the phonology of Slavic and other languages, so they were extended, which produced Cyrillic.
As I understand, the same way Coptic script in Egypt, and Ge'ez in Ethiopia were made, thanks to Eastern Christian church allowing this.
Saint Cyril, in fact, invented the Glagolitic script, which was a development of cursive Greek. Cyrillic was named after him, and it was mostly Greek alphabet, plus some characters from Glagolitic, like Ⱎ, ⱍ and ⱑ.