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Early Cyrillic alphabet
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The old Cyrillic alphabet was a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the tenth century to write the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language.
Slavic scripts were developed in what is now the Republic of Macedonia (Glagolitic) and later in Bulgaria (Cyrillic). The earliest form of manuscript Cyrillic, known as ustav, was based on Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and by letters from the Glagolitic alphabet for consonants not found in Greek.

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Encyclopedia
The old Cyrillic alphabet was a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the tenth century to write the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language.
History
The Slavic scripts were developed in what is now the Republic of Macedonia (Glagolitic) and later in Bulgaria (Cyrillic). The earliest form of manuscript Cyrillic, known as ustav, was based on Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and by letters from the Glagolitic alphabet for consonants not found in Greek. There was no distinction of capital and lowercase letters, though manuscript letters were rendered larger for emphasis, or in various decorative initial and nameplate forms.
Tradition holds that the two Slavic scripts were invented by two brothers, the monks Saint Methodius and Saint Cyril, who brought Christianity to Bulgaria in the 860s. However, Glagolitic appears to be older, and Cyrillic later. It appears that Glagolitic may have predated Christianity, and was only formalized by St Cyril and expanded by him to cover non-Greek sounds, possibly under commission of Boris I when Christianity was made the official state religion in 864. Cyrillic, on the other hand, may have been a creation of Cyril's students, perhaps at the Preslav Literary School, who derived it from a more 'dignified' Greek in the 890s as a more suitable script for church books, though retaining Cyril's non-Greek additions from Glagolitic.
Since its creation, the Cyrillic alphabet has adapted to changes in spoken language and developed regional variations to suit the features of national languages. It has been the subject of academic reforms and political decrees. Variations of the Cyrillic alphabet are used to write languages throughout Eastern Europe and Asia.
The form of the Russian alphabet underwent a change when Tsar Peter I of Russia introduced the Civil Script (Russian graždanskij šrift, or graždanka, in contrast to the prevailing Church Typeface, cerkovnoslavjanskij šrift) in 1708. Some letters and breathing marks which were only used for historical reasons were dropped. Medieval letterforms used in typesetting were harmonized with Latin typesetting practices, exchanging medieval forms for Baroque ones, and skipping the western European Renaissance developments. The reform subsequently influenced Cyrillic orthographies for most other languages. Today, the early orthography and typesetting standards only remain in use in Church Slavonic.
A comprehensive repertoire of early Cyrillic characters is included in the Unicode 5.1 standard, published on April 4, 2008. These characters and their distinctive letterforms are represented in specialized computer fonts for Slavistics.
The alphabet
In addition to the basic letters, there were a number of scribal variations, combining ligatures, and regionalisms used, all of which varied over time.
Numerals, diacritics and punctuation Each letter had a numeric value also, inherited from the corresponding Greek letter. A titlo over a sequence of letters indicated their use as a number. See Cyrillic numerals, Titlo.
Several diacritics, adopted from Polytonic Greek orthography, were also used (these may not appear correctly in all web browsers; they are supposed to be directly above the letter, not off to its upper right):
- trema, diaeresis (U+0308)
- varia (grave accent), indicating stress on the last syllable (U+0340)
- oksia (acute accent), indicating a stressed syllable (Unicode U+0341)
- titlo, indicating abbreviations, or letters used as numerals (U+0483)
- kamora, indicating palatalization (U+0484), similar to an inverted breve
- dasy pneuma, rough breathing mark (U+0485)
- zvatel'tse, or psilon pneuma, soft breathing mark (U+0486)
- Combined zvatel'tse and varia is called apostrof.
- Combined zvatel'tse and oksia is called iso.
Punctuation marks:
- ano teleia (U+0387), a middle dot used as a word separator
- comma (U+002C)
- full stop (U+002E)
- Armenian full stop (U+0589), resembling a colon
- Georgian paragraph separator (U+10FB)
- triangular colon (U+2056, added in Unicode 4.1)
- diamond colon (U+2058, added in Unicode 4.1)
- quintuple colon (U+2059, added in Unicode 4.1)
- Greek question mark (U+037E), similar to a semicolon
- exclamation mark (U+0021)
See also
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