Fita Ⱚ

Fita answers to Greek theta and exists to spell Greek words and names correctly. It carries no numeral value in the Glagolitic system, standing past the end of the counted series, although its Cyrillic counterpart does carry one.

Slavonic had no sound corresponding to Greek theta, and by the ninth century Greek itself pronounced the letter as a fricative that Slavonic speakers approximated in various ways. The letter therefore does not record a Slavonic sound at all. It records a Greek spelling, and its function is to let a Slavonic scribe write a Greek name in a form a reader could match against the Greek book it came from.

That is a real function in a translation culture. The scriptures, the liturgy and the theological vocabulary all came into Slavonic from Greek, and the proper names in them are numerous and had to be got right. An alphabet without this letter would have had to approximate every one of them.

Its presence in a word is therefore a reliable sign of Greek origin. No native Slavonic word needs it, and a scribe who used it in one had made an error or a deliberate learned gesture.

The letter therefore belongs with the small group of signs whose Greek ancestry is not in dispute. Whatever is argued about where the Glagolitic letterforms came from in general, this one answers to a particular Greek letter by function, occupies its place in the order for that reason, and is used for the words that came from Greek. The atlas records that correspondence as attested and keeps the question of the letterform separate.

Cyrillic fita writes the same borrowed Greek letter for the same purpose and takes the numeral nine, which is the value of Greek theta. Glagolitic gives it no value at all, having stopped counting several letters earlier when its own sequence ran out.

That single difference sums up the two numeral systems. Cyrillic numbers by asking what Greek letter stands in the slot, so a letter borrowed directly from Greek naturally keeps the Greek number, wherever in the Slavonic order it happens to sit. Glagolitic numbers by counting its own letters from the beginning, so a letter that falls after the twenty fifth position gets nothing, whatever its Greek ancestry. Two different questions, two different answers, and the same letter.

The letters that serve Greek spelling rather than Slavonic sound are the small group in which a derivation from Greek is not in dispute. Whatever is decided about the shapes of the Slavonic letters in general, this sign answers to Greek theta by function, in both scripts, and the atlas records that correspondence as attested. The separate question of where the Glagolitic letterform came from is recorded separately and marked debated, because the two questions have different answers and different evidence.