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Cyrillic alphabet
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The Cyrillic alphabet (; also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters in Bulgarian) is a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by five Slavic national languages (Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian) as well as non-Slavic (Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Tajik of the former Soviet Union, and Mongolian). It is also used by many other languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and other languages in the past. Not all letters in the Cyrillic alphabet are used in every language that is written with it.
The alphabet has official status with many organizations.
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Encyclopedia
The Cyrillic alphabet (; also called azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters in Bulgarian) is a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by five Slavic national languages (Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian) as well as non-Slavic (Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Tajik of the former Soviet Union, and Mongolian). It is also used by many other languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and other languages in the past. Not all letters in the Cyrillic alphabet are used in every language that is written with it.
The alphabet has official status with many organizations. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official alphabet of the EU, along with Latin and Greek.
History
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. It along with Glagolitic was formalized by the two Greek brothers born in Thessaloniki, Saints Cyril and Methodius, who brought Christianity to the southern Slavs, or their disciples. Paul Cubberly posits that while Cyril may have codified and expanded Glagolitic, it was his students, perhaps at the Preslav Literary School in Bulgaria, that developed Cyrillic from Greek in the 890s as a more suitable script for church books.
The Cyrillic alphabet came to dominate over Glagolitic in the 12th century. It was disseminated as the Old Bulgarian language, and the alphabet used for 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 was originally a ligature of Yer and I. Iotation was indicated by ligatures formed with the letter I: ?? (ancestor of modern ya, ?), , ? (ligature of I and ??), , . Many letters had variant forms and commonly-used ligatures, for example ?=?=?, =, ?? / ??=, =.
The letters also had numeric values, based not on the native Cyrillic alphabetical order, but inherited from the letters' Greek ancestors.
Cyrillic numerals | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | | | | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 60 | 70 | 80 | 90 | | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | | | | 100 | 200 | 300 | 400 | 500 | 600 | 700 | 800 | 900 | | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
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. The current Unicode standard does not represent some significant letterform variations, and omits some characters, such as Cyrillic dotless I, iotified Yat, abbreviated Yer (Yerok), and many ligatures.
The Unicode 5.1 standard, released on April 4, 2008, greatly improves computer support for the early Cyrillic and the modern Church Slavonic language.
Letterforms and typography
The 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 (Emperor) 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 ?, ?, p, and y adopted Western lowercase shapes, lowercase ? is typically designed under the influence of Latin p, lowercase ? is a traditional handwritten form), although a good-quality Cyrillic typeface will still include separate small-caps glyphs.
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. Instead, the nomenclature follows German naming patterns:
- A roman-style font (Cyrillic, Latin, Greek...) is simply called pryamoy shrift ("upright font")—compare with Normalschrift ("regular font") in German
- An italic font is called kursiv (literally "cursive") or kursivniy shrift ("cursive font")—from the German word Kursive, meaning italic typefaces and not actual cursive
- Cursive handwriting is rukopisniy shrift ("hand-written font") in Russian—in German: Kurrentschrift or Laufschrift, both meaning literally ‘running font’
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) doesn't exist for all font families.
In Serbian, 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, ?, has a slightly different design both in the regular and italic/cursive shape, which is similar to the lowercase Greek letter Delta, d.
The following table shows the differences between the upright and italic/cursive Cyrillic letters as used in Russian. Those entirely different from their analogues are highlighted.
Note: in some fonts or styles small cursive Cyrillic ? (?) may look like Latin g and small cursive Cyrillic ? (?) may look exactly like a capital cursive T (T), only small.
As used in various languages
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 ??? (yego, 'him/his'), which is pronounced instead of .
Note that transliterated spellings of names may vary, especially y/j/i, but also gh/g/h and zh/j.
Derived alphabets
The 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.
Relationship to other writing systems
Latin alphabet
A number of languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet have also been written in the Latin alphabet, such as Azerbaijani, Uzbek and Moldavian. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, official status shifted from Cyrillic to Latin. The transition is complete in most of Moldova and Azerbaijan, but Uzbekistan still uses both systems.
Romanization
There 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:
- Scientific transliteration, used in linguistics, is based on the Latin Croatian alphabet.
- The of the United Nations recommends different systems for specific languages. These are the most commonly used around the world.
- ISO 9:1995, from the International Organization for Standardization.
- American Library Association and Library of Congress Romanization tables for Slavic alphabets (ALA-LC Romanization), used in North American libraries.
- BGN/PCGN romanization (1947), United States Board on Geographic Names & Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use).
- GOST 16876, a now defunct Soviet transliteration standard. Replaced by GOST 7.79, which is ISO 9 equivalent.
- Volapuk encoding, an informal rendering of Cyrillic text over Latin-alphabet ASCII.
See also romanization of Belarusian, Bulgarian, Kyrgyz, Russian, and Ukrainian.
Cyrillization
Representing other writing systems with Cyrillic letters is called Cyrillization.
Computer encoding
In Unicode 5.1, letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, including national and historical varieties, are represented by four blocks:
- Cyrillic 0400–04FF
- Cyrillic Supplement 0500–052F
- Cyrillic Extended-A 2DE0–2DFF
- Cyrillic Extended-B A640–A69F
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:
- combinations that are considered as separate letters of respective alphabets, like ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ? (as well as many letters of non-slavic alphabets);
- two most frequent combinations orthographically required to distinguish homonyms in Bulgarian : ?, ?;
- few Old and New Church Slavonic combinations: ?, ?, ?.
To indicate stressed or long vowels, combining diacritical marks can be used after respective letter (for example, "combining acute accent" U+0301: ?´ ?´ ?´ ?´ etc.).
Some languages, including New Church Slavonic, are still not fully supported.
Unicode 5.1, released on April 4, 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.
Punctuation for Cyrillic text is similar to that used in European Latin-alphabet languages.
Other character encoding systems for Cyrillic:
- CP866 – 8-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by Microsoft for use in MS-DOS also known as GOST-alternative. Cyrillic characters go in their native order, with a "window" for pseudographic characters.
- ISO/IEC 8859-5 – 8-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by International Organization for Standardization
- KOI8-R – 8-bit native Russian character encoding. Invented in the USSR for use on Soviet clones of American IBM and DEC computers. The Cyrillic characters go in the order of their Latin counterparts, which allowed the text to remain readable after transmission via a 7bit line which removed the senior bit from each byte - the result became a very rough, but readable, Latin transliteration of Cyrillic. Standard encoding of early 90ies for UNIX systems and the first Russian Internet encoding.
- KOI8-U – KOI8-R with addition of Ukrainian letters
- MIK – 8-bit native Bulgarian character encoding for use in DOS
- Windows-1251 – 8-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by Microsoft for use in Microsoft Windows. The simplest 8bit Cyrillic encoding - 32 capital chars in native order at 0xc0-0xdf, 32 usual chars at 0xe0-0xff, with rarely used "YO" characters somewhere else. No pseudographics. Former standard encoding in some Linux distributions for Belarusian and Bulgarian, but currently displaced by UTF-8.
- GOST-main
- GB 2312 - Principally simplified Chinese encodings, but there are also basic 33 Russian Cyrillic letters (in upper- and lower-case).
- JIS and Shift JIS - Principally Japanese encodings, but there are also basic 33 Russian Cyrillic letters (in upper- and lower-case).
Keyboard layouts
Each language has its own standard keyboard layout, adopted from typewriters. With the flexibility of computer input methods, there are also transliterating or phonetic/homophonic 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.
See also
External links
- , Listen to how the Russian alphabet sounds and download the audio to your desktop
- , a list of resources.
- and the handwritten script form of Cyrillic.
- - fonts, keyboard layouts, applications tune-up
- , including the complete required repertoire of graphic characters, by J. W. van Wingen.
- , Roman Czyborra’s overview and history of Cyrillic charsets.
- , a collection of writing systems and transliteration tables, by Thomas T. Pedersen. Includes PDF reference charts for many languages' transliteration systems.
- , type Russian/Ukrainian even in Tokio same way as you do it at home
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