Alphabet Letters
Azu Ⰰ
Glagolitic Letters
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Origin Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius
Azu is the first letter of Glagolitic and writes the vowel a. Its name is the Slavonic word azu, meaning I, so the alphabet opens on the word for the self rather than on a sound with no sense. Its shape is a cross, and readers of the script have long taken that as deliberate in an alphabet devised so that the Gospels could be read in Slavonic. It carries the numeral 1 in a system that numbers the letters by their own sequence rather than by the Greek values, which is the point at which Glagolitic and Cyrillic arithmetic part company. The recitation of the alphabet by its letter names begins here, and the first three names, azu buky vede, read in Slavonic as the sentence I know letters.
Facts
Disputed
Attributed Author / CompilerConstantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, is credited with devising the script 2Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Two positions are held. The Slavonic lives of the brothers and the medieval Slavonic tradition credit Constantine with inventing the letters outright. Historians of writing hold that the alphabet is an original system but read its shapes against Greek minuscule and other models, and disagree over how much was invented and how much adapted. The atlas records the ascription and the argument about it rather than settling either. A Rival System's AttributionThe alphabet named after Cyril is not this one. Cyrillic bears his name while Glagolitic is the script the sources credit him with making 2Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic The naming is the awkward part of the record. The script called Cyrillic was developed after Constantine's death, most probably in the First Bulgarian Empire among his disciples, and took his name; the script he is credited with devising is Glagolitic. Scholars agree that the two facts sit badly together and differ over how the transfer of the name happened. Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic PositionThe first letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Origins
Origin PeriodDevised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius 2Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Place of OriginByzantium and Great Moravia; the letters were made in Constantinople or Thessalonica and carried north for the mission 2Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Origin of the NameA Slavonic word used as the letter name, shared by both Slavic alphabets 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Sense of the Nameazu is the Old Church Slavonic word for I, the first person singular pronoun 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural RoleThe script in which the Slavonic liturgy was first written down, and the vehicle of the earliest Old Church Slavonic canon 3Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attributions
Associated SoundThe vowel a 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceGlagolitic letters carry numeric values assigned in their own alphabetical order, so the second letter is 2 and the ninth is 9, unlike Cyrillic which borrowed the Greek values 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Meaning in the Attesting SourceOne of the very few scripts in recorded history devised expressly so that scripture and liturgy could be translated, rather than growing out of an older writing tradition 2Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Open Questions
Manuscript TraditionNo manuscript survives from the mission period itself. The oldest Glagolitic codices are tenth and eleventh century copies, a century or more after the alphabet was made 2Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Nobody holds a position on the exact inventory and order of the alphabet as Constantine left it, because there is no ninth century witness to compare the surviving codices against. This is a gap in the evidence rather than a disagreement between scholars, and it is recorded with an open question naming what would close it. Learn More
Azu: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 1)
Azu opens the Glagolitic order, and it opens it where Greek opens. The alphabet Constantine built for the Slavs keeps the sequence of the Greek alphabet and pushes the signs it needed for Slavonic sounds into the gaps between, so a reader who knows the Greek order can follow the Glagolitic one for most of its length. The vowel azu writes is a plain low vowel, long or short by position and never marked as either, and it is among the commonest letters on a page of Old Church Slavonic, because a great many of the grammatical endings of that language finish in it.
As a numeral azu is the figure one, and the way a Glagolitic scribe wrote a numeral is worth knowing before reading any manuscript. The letter is lifted out of the words around it, commonly by a point set on each side of it and by a horizontal stroke drawn over the top, so that the eye is told at once that the sign is to be counted and not sounded. Chapter divisions, psalm numbers, the numbering of the gatherings that make up a bound codex and the figures in a colophon all appear in that form.
The letter survives in two hands that do not resemble each other closely. The rounded forms of the Bulgarian and Macedonian manuscripts and the angular forms the Croatian tradition later developed are the same alphabet drawn on different principles, one built from curves and closed loops and the other from squares, verticals and hard corners. A reader trained on one of them has to learn the other more or less from the beginning.
Azu and Its Cyrillic Counterpart
Cyrillic azu writes the same vowel and stands in the same first place, and at this one letter the two Slavonic alphabets agree completely: both give the sign the numeral value one. That agreement does not last. Glagolitic numbers its letters by counting its own sequence, one after another, so every Slavic letter in the order takes a value of its own. Cyrillic instead keeps the Greek values, giving a number only to the letters that answer to a Greek letter and passing over the rest. From the third letter onward the two systems drift apart, and by the middle of the alphabet the same letter name carries different arithmetic in the two scripts.
The names are the second point of contact. Both alphabets call the letter azu, and both recite it at the head of the same sequence of Slavonic words, so the mnemonic passed from one script to the other intact even though almost nothing of the letterforms did.
Which of the two came first is the long argument of Slavic palaeography, and it is not settled here or anywhere. The dominant reading makes Glagolitic the older alphabet, devised for the Moravian mission, and Cyrillic a later arrangement built on Greek uncial letters by the generation that followed, keeping the Slavic sounds Greek had no signs for. A minority position, older in the literature and still argued, reverses the two. What is agreed is that the two scripts wrote one language, for a time side by side.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Why this is disputed. Glagolitic Azu is read as Greek Alpha's counterpart in an alphabet Cyril modeled on Greek order and numeral values, but which theory explains where its rounded letterform actually came from is a live paleographic dispute. The mainstream palaeographic school, developed since Isaac Taylor's nineteenth century study, derives Glagolitic's ornamental shapes from medieval Greek cursive minuscule redesigned for Slavonic use. A rival idiographic school reads Glagolitic as substantially an original invention, its shapes built from basic forms such as the cross, circle and triangle rather than borrowed from any existing script, so this specific correspondence to Alpha is accepted by one camp and denied by the other.
Originates in Language
Glagolitic was devised in the 860s so that Greek scripture and liturgy could be read in Slavonic, and Azu belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.
Related To
Cyrillic azu and Glagolitic azu carry the same name, the same sound and the same numeral value of 1. They differ in shape.
Sources
Open Questions (2 open questions)
What was the exact letter inventory and order of the alphabet Constantine-Cyril devised in 863?
No manuscript survives from the Moravian mission itself. The oldest Glagolitic codices are tenth and eleventh century copies made a century or more after the alphabet was made, and they differ among themselves in which letters they carry and in what order they list them. Scholars do not hold opposing positions on the original inventory, because there is nothing to hold a position against: the question is left open for want of a ninth century witness rather than argued between camps. The letters this atlas records for Glagolitic follow the order and inventory of the surviving tradition as the Unicode Standard arranges it, which is the best available reconstruction and not the ninth century original.
What would resolve this A ninth century Glagolitic witness, whether a codex, a fragment, a palimpsest under-text or a dated inscription, carrying an abecedary or enough continuous text to establish which letters were in use during the mission itself. Palimpsest recovery by multispectral imaging of the surviving early codices is the most likely route, since several of them are known to overlie earlier writing.
Slavic palaeography; codicology; multispectral imaging of palimpsestsFrancis Dvornik, Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius
Where do the Glagolitic letterforms come from?
Three explanations are held in the literature and none has carried the field. One derives the letters from the Greek minuscule cursive of the ninth century. One looks to Semitic and Caucasian models, among them Hebrew and Samaritan, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian. One holds that Constantine composed the signs from a small set of Christian figures, the cross, the circle and the triangle, so that the alphabet would belong to no existing script and would carry a Christian sense in its shapes. This is a genuine disagreement rather than a gap: camps exist and each can be read. What none of them has is a witness close in date to the alphabet, since the earliest Glagolitic manuscripts are a century or more later than the mission and were produced in a different country.
What would resolve this A securely dated ninth century Glagolitic witness, or the recovery of one from the under-text of a palimpsest by multispectral imaging, would give the shapes a form early enough to be compared against the proposed models rather than against their tenth and eleventh century descendants. Failing that, a systematic morphological comparison of the whole Glagolitic repertoire against dated Greek minuscule hands and against the Semitic and Caucasian scripts proposed, published with the negative results as well as the positive ones, would establish how much of the resemblance survives measurement.
Slavic palaeography; Greek palaeography; comparative script studies; multispectral imaging of palimpsestsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems
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