Dzelo Ⰷ

Dzelo writes an affricate, a dz sound made as a single unit rather than as a d followed by a z, and it carries the numeral eight. It belongs to the group of Slavic letters that arose from the softening of an original velar, and in the earliest Slavonic it was a sound in its own right, kept apart from plain z in writing and presumably in speech.

The distinction did not last in most of the Slavic world. The affricate fell together with z in the great majority of the languages, and once that had happened scribes copying older texts had no reason to keep the two letters apart and began to use them interchangeably. A manuscript that maintains the distinction is following an older norm than one that does not, which makes the letter one of the more useful diagnostics in the canon of early Slavonic writing.

Its name is the Slavonic word dzelo, meaning very or exceedingly, an adverb rather than a noun or a verb form, and it continues the recited alphabet.

Where the sound survived, the letter survived with it. Macedonian retains a distinct dz and writes it with the descendant of this sign, so the letter is not a purely historical curiosity but a working part of a modern orthography, which is not true of most of the signs at this end of the Slavonic alphabet.

Cyrillic dzelo writes the same affricate and stands in the same place, and the two alphabets number it differently in a way that is more interesting than the usual offset. Glagolitic gives it eight by counting its own letters in order. Cyrillic gives it six, and six is a Greek value that belongs to no letter of the classical Greek alphabet still in use: it is the slot occupied in Greek numeration by the old sign for the sound that had dropped out of the language, kept in the counting even though it was no longer a letter anyone wrote words with.

Cyrillic therefore did something more than copy the Greek values across. It fitted a Slavic letter into a gap that Greek arithmetic had left behind, which shows the system being adapted rather than merely inherited, and it means the Cyrillic numeral for this letter is evidence about how carefully the arrangement was made.

The names agree in both alphabets and the sound agrees. What separates them, once again, is the shape and the arithmetic, and those are the two things on which the argument about the relationship of the scripts has always turned. The atlas records the pairing as a correspondence of sound, name and position, and leaves the direction of descent open.