Glagoli Ⰳ

Glagoli writes the velar stop g and carries the numeral four. Its name is an imperative, speak, and of all the letter names it is the one that reached furthest, because the script itself is named from it: glagolitsa, the alphabet of the spoken word committed to writing. That naming is late rather than original. The earliest Slavonic sources describe the letters without giving the script a name of its own, and the term became standard only after Cyrillic had taken over most of the territory, at which point a word was needed to distinguish the older script from the newer one.

The sound has a more interesting history than most. Old Church Slavonic pronounced the letter as a full stop, and several later Slavic languages weakened it to a fricative, so that the descendant letter is read as h in Czech and Slovak and as a fricative in Ukrainian and in southern Russian speech. Standard Russian and Polish kept the stop. None of that is a change in the letter, which continued to be written in the same place in the same words; it is a change in the languages that inherited it, and the spelling preserves a pronunciation that many Slavic speakers no longer use.

In the numeral system the letter is the figure four, on the Glagolitic principle of counting the letters of the alphabet in their own sequence.

Cyrillic glagol writes the same consonant, sits in the same fourth place and is numbered three, against the four that Glagolitic gives it. The gap of one is the same gap that opened at the previous letter, and it comes from the same cause: Cyrillic follows the Greek values, gamma is the third Greek letter, and the Slavic b in second place takes no number in that system.

The names are close, glagoli beside glagol, and both continue the Slavonic verb glagolati, to speak. The Glagolitic form is the imperative and the Cyrillic form is a noun, word or speech, so the same root is being used in two grammatical shapes to name one letter in two scripts. Whether that difference is original or the product of centuries of recitation is not recoverable from the surviving lists.

Only Glagolitic took its name from this letter. Cyrillic is named for Constantine-Cyril, whom the Slavonic sources credit with making an alphabet for the Slavs in the 860s, and the reasons for attaching his name to the later of the two scripts rather than the earlier are a matter of how the tradition developed in Bulgaria after the Moravian mission collapsed. The name and the object it now denotes do not necessarily belong together.