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The Cyrillic (pronounced /sɨˈrɪlɪk/) script writing system is an alphabet developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in 9th century[1], and used in the Slavic national languages of Russian, Bulgarian, Belarusian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian, and in the non-Slavic languages of Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Tuvan, and Mongolian. It also was used in (past) languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Siberia. The Cyrillic alphabet also is known as azbuka, derived from the old names of the first two letters of most variant Cyrillic alphabets. Since the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official alphabet of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek alphabets. Cyrillic is one of the two alphabets (together with Glagolitic) used in the Church Slavonic language, especially the Old Church Slavonic variant (see Early Cyrillic alphabet). Hence, expressions such as “И is the tenth letter of the Cyrillic alphabet” typically denote that meaning; moreover, not every Cyrillic-based language uses every letter of the alphabet.
[edit] History Main article: Early Cyrillic alphabet The Cyrillic alphabet was based on the Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and consonants from the older Glagolitic alphabet for sounds not found in Greek. Tradition holds that Cyrillic and Glagolitic were formalized either by the two Greek[2][3][4] brothers born in Thessaloniki, Saints Cyril and Methodius, who brought Christianity to the southern Slavs, or by their disciples.[2][3][4]. Paul Cubberly posits that while Cyril may have codified and expanded Glagolitic, it was his students at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire that developed Cyrillic from Greek in the 890s as a more suitable script for church books.[5] Later the alphabet spread among other Slavic peoples - Russians, Serbs and others, as well as among non-Slavic Vlachs and Moldavians.
The Cyrillic alphabet came to dominate over Glagolitic in the 12th century. The literature produced in the Old Bulgarian language soon began spreading north and became the lingua franca of Eastern Europe where it came to also be known as Old Church Slavonic.[6][7][8][9][10] The alphabet used for the modern Church Slavonic language in Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic rites still resembles early Cyrillic. However, over the following ten centuries, the Cyrillic alphabet adapted to changes in spoken language, developed regional variations to suit the features of national languages, and was subjected to academic reforms and political decrees. Today, dozens of languages in Eastern Europe and Asia are written in the Cyrillic alphabet. As the Cyrillic alphabet spread throughout the East and South Slavic territories, it was adopted for writing local languages, such as Old Ruthenian. Its adaptation to the characteristics of local languages led to the development of its many modern variants, below.
Capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts.  Yeri (Ы) was originally a ligature of Yer and I (ЪІ). Iotation was indicated by ligatures formed with the letter I: ІА (ancestor of modern ya, я), Ѥ, Ю (ligature of I and ОУ), Ѩ, Ѭ. Many letters had variant forms and commonly-used ligatures, for example И=І=Ї, Ѡ=Ѻ, Оу ⁄ ОУ=Ѹ, ѠТ=Ѿ. The letters also had numeric values, based not on the native Cyrillic alphabetical order, but inherited from the letters' Greek ancestors.
The early Cyrillic alphabet is difficult to represent on computers. Many of the letterforms differed from modern Cyrillic, varied a great deal in manuscripts, and changed over time. Few fonts include adequate glyphs to reproduce the alphabet. In accordance with Unicode policy, the standard does not include letterform variations or ligatures found in manuscript sources unless they can be shown to conform to the Unicode definition of a character. The Unicode 5.1 standard, released on 4 April 2008, greatly improves computer support for the early Cyrillic and the modern Church Slavonic language. [edit] Letterforms and typographyThe development of Cyrillic typography passed directly from the medieval stage to the late Baroque, without a Renaissance phase as in Western Europe. Late Medieval Cyrillic letters (still found on many icon inscriptions even today) show a marked tendency to be very tall and narrow; strokes are often shared between adjacent letters. Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, mandated the use of westernized letter forms in the early eighteenth century. Over time, these were largely adopted in the other languages that use the alphabet. Thus, unlike modern Greek fonts that retained their own set of design principles (such as the placement of serifs, the shapes of stroke ends, and stroke-thickness rules), modern Cyrillic fonts are much the same as modern Latin fonts of the same font family. The development of some Cyrillic computer typefaces from Latin ones has also contributed to the visual Latinization of Cyrillic type. Cyrillic uppercase and lowercase letterforms are not as differentiated as in Latin typography. Upright Cyrillic lowercase letters are essentially small capitals (with exceptions: Cyrillic а, е, p, and y adopted Western lowercase shapes, lowercase ф is typically designed under the influence of Latin p, lowercase б is a traditional handwritten form), although a good-quality Cyrillic typeface will still include separate small-caps glyphs.[11]  Comparison of some upright and hand-written letters (Ge, De, I, I kratkoye, Em, Te and Tse. Top row is set in Georgia font, bottom in Kisty CY) Cyrillic fonts, as well as Latin ones, have roman and italic variants (practically all popular modern fonts include parallel sets of Latin and Cyrillic letters, where many glyphs, uppercase as well as lowercase, are simply shared by both). However, the native font terminology in Slavic languages (for example, in Russian) does not use the words "roman" and "italic" in this sense.[12] Instead, the nomenclature follows German naming patterns:
Similarly to the Latin fonts, italic and handwritten shapes of many Cyrillic letters (typically lowercase; uppercase only for hand-written or stylish types) are very different from their upright shapes. In certain cases, the correspondence between uppercase and lowercase glyphs does not coincide in Latin and Cyrillic fonts: for example, handwritten Cyrillic m is a possible lowercase counterpart of T instead of M.  As in Latin typography, a sans-serif face may have a mechanically-sloped oblique font (naklonniy shrift—"sloped," or "slanted font") instead of italic. A boldfaced font is called poluzhirniy shrift ("semi-bold font"), because there existed fully-boldfaced shapes which are out of use since the beginning of the twentieth century. A bold italic combination (bold slanted) does not exist for all font families. In Serbian, as well as in Bulgarian and Macedonian, some italic and cursive letters are different from those used in other languages. These letter shapes are often used in upright fonts as well, especially for advertisements, road signs, inscriptions, posters and the like, less so in newspapers or books. The Cyrillic lowercase B, б, has a slightly different design both in the regular and italic/cursive shape, which is similar to the lowercase Greek letter Delta, δ. The following table shows the differences between the upright and italic or cursive Cyrillic letters as used in Russian. Those entirely different from their analogues are highlighted.
Note: in some fonts or styles small cursive Cyrillic д (д) may look like Latin g and small cursive Cyrillic т (т) may look exactly like a capital cursive T (T), only small. [edit] As used in various languagesMain articles: Cyrillic alphabet variants, Languages using Cyrillic, List of Cyrillic letters, and Cyrillic digraphs  Sounds are indicated using the IPA. These are only approximate indicators. While these languages by and large have phonemic orthographies, there are occasional exceptions-for example, Russian его (yego, 'him/his'), which is pronounced [jɪˈvo] instead of *[jɪˈɡo]. Note that transliterated spellings of names may vary, especially y/j/i, but also gh/g/h and zh/j. [edit] Derived alphabetsThe first alphabet partly derived from Cyrillic is Abur, applied to the Komi language. Other writing systems derived from Cyrillic were applied to Caucasian languages and the Molodtsov alphabet for Komi language. [edit] Relationship to other writing systems[edit] Latin alphabetA number of languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet have also been written in the Latin alphabet, such as Serbian, Azerbaijani, Uzbek and Moldavian. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, official status shifted there from Cyrillic to Latin. The transition is complete in most of Moldova (except Transnistria, where Cyrillic is official) and Azerbaijan, but Uzbekistan still uses both systems, as does Serbia. [edit] RomanizationThere are various systems for romanization of Cyrillic text, including transliteration to convey Cyrillic spelling in Latin characters, and transcription to convey pronunciation. Standard Cyrillic-to-Latin transliteration systems include:
See also romanization of Belarusian, Bulgarian, Kyrgyz, Russian, Macedonian and Ukrainian. [edit] CyrillizationRepresenting other writing systems with Cyrillic letters is called Cyrillization. [edit] Computer encodingFurther information: Cyrillic characters in Unicode In Unicode 5.1, letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, including national and historical varieties, are represented by four blocks:
The characters in the range U+0400 to U+045F are basically the characters from ISO 8859-5 moved upward by 864 positions. The characters in the range U+0460 to U+0489 are historic letters, not used now. The characters in the range U+048A to U+052F are additional letters for various languages that are written with Cyrillic script. Unicode as a general rule does not include accented Cyrillic letters. Few exceptions are:
To indicate stressed or long vowels, combining diacritical marks can be used after respective letter (for example, "combining acute accent" U+0301: ы́ э́ ю́ я́ etc.). Some languages, including Church Slavonic, are still not fully supported. Unicode 5.1, released on 4 April 2008, introduces major changes to the Cyrillic blocks. Revisions to the existing Cyrillic blocks, and the addition of Cyrillic Extended A (2DE0...2DFF) and Cyrillic Extended B (A640...A69F), significantly improve support for the early Cyrillic alphabet, Abkhaz, Aleut, Chuvash, Kurdish, and Mordvin.[13] Punctuation for Cyrillic text is similar to that used in European Latin-alphabet languages. Other character encoding systems for Cyrillic:
[edit] Keyboard layoutsEach language has its own standard keyboard layout, adopted from typewriters. With the flexibility of computer input methods, there are also transliterating or phonetic/homophonic[14] keyboard layouts made for typists who are more familiar with other layouts, like the common English qwerty keyboard. When practical Cyrillic keyboard layouts or fonts are not available, computer users sometimes use transliteration or look-alike "volapuk" encoding to type languages which are normally written with the Cyrillic alphabet. See Keyboard layouts for non-Roman alphabetic scripts. [edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] External links
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