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Heru Ⱈ

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

Heru is the twenty-fourth letter of Glagolitic and writes the voiceless velar fricative kh. It carries the numeral 600, the value of Greek chi, from which the letter takes both its place and its number. Unlike f, this sound did exist in Slavonic, so the letter is common in native words as well as in Greek names, and it stands at the head of the Slavonic spelling of Christ. A second encoded form, spidery ha, is a distinct and much rarer shape found in Croatian material. The name heru has no recovered Slavonic sense and is generally read as a reflex of the Greek letter name. It is one of the letters whose Glagolitic and Cyrillic shapes have nothing in common, the Cyrillic form being the Greek chi taken over unaltered.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius 2
Place of Origin
Byzantium and Great Moravia; the letters were made in Constantinople or Thessalonica and carried north for the mission 2
Origin of the Name
A reflex of the Greek letter name chi, taken over along with the letter's numeral value 600 and its place in the sequence; no separate Slavonic derivation is recorded. 1
Identity
Script Type
An alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1
Position
The twenty-fifth letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Attributions
Associated Sound
The consonant kh, a voiceless velar fricative 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Heru is common in both native Slavonic words and Greek-derived ones, standing at the head of the Slavonic spelling of Christ, unlike its neighbor fritu which appears only in loanwords; a rarer spidery variant is found separately in Croatian material. 1
Open Questions
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Heru's own description states plainly that the name "has no recovered Slavonic sense," naming genuine uncertainty rather than an unrecovered but real answer. One of the letters the already-live OpenQuestion names by name.
Learn More
Heru: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 600)

Heru writes a voiceless velar fricative, the sound conventionally transliterated kh, and takes the numeral six hundred. Unlike the letter for f, this one records a sound Slavonic genuinely had, and the letter is used in native words as well as in borrowings.

Its name is opaque. The reference literature records it, and the corresponding Cyrillic name kher, without an etymology, and it belongs to the run of names at the end of the alphabet whose sense cannot be recovered. That is the second of the two things the letter is chiefly cited for.

The first is its shape, or rather its shapes. Glagolitic has a second sign for a sound close to this one, encoded in the Unicode Standard under the name spidery ha, and that second sign belongs to the Croatian branch of the tradition rather than to the common inventory of the earliest manuscripts. Two signs for one sound, one of them regional, is exactly the situation that makes the total number of Glagolitic letters a matter of how you count.

The numeral six hundred follows from counting the Glagolitic letters in order, this being the twenty fourth sign, and it agrees with the value Cyrillic inherits from Greek chi.

The sound itself is one of the more useful ones in the alphabet for a comparative reader. Where Slavonic writes it in a native word, the modern Slavic languages generally still have it, and where it stands in a borrowed word it usually renders a Greek chi, so the letter marks the seam between the inherited vocabulary and the imported one. Reading a page of Old Church Slavonic with that in mind gives a rough sense of how much of the text came in with the translation and how much was already there.

Heru and Its Cyrillic Counterpart

Cyrillic kher writes the same fricative and takes the same numeral, six hundred, inherited from Greek chi where Glagolitic counts to it. Both names are opaque and both are recorded without an etymology.

The pair is the last letter at which the two numeral systems agree. At the letter that follows, the second sign for the vowel o, Glagolitic counts seven hundred while Cyrillic inherits eight hundred from Greek omega, and after that the two systems have nothing further in common. Glagolitic simply stops numbering: the Slavic letters that fill the end of its order carry no values at all. Cyrillic continues, giving numbers to two more Greek letters that Glagolitic does not have and fitting one Slavic affricate into a Greek slot that had fallen vacant.

That divergence at the end of the alphabet is the clearest structural difference between the two systems, and it is a difference of principle rather than of detail. One alphabet numbers what it has, in the order it has it. The other numbers what Greek numbered, and leaves the rest unnumbered. Which principle came first is part of the same argument as which script came first, and it is no better settled.

Both names in the pair are opaque, and the atlas records the fact rather than supplying an etymology for either. Heru and kher belong to the run of letter names at the end of the Slavonic alphabet for which no sense has been established, and an open question in the atlas states what a study of that whole set would have to do to close it.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived From

Chi χ, Alphabet Letters

Why this is disputed. Glagolitic Heru was added partly to spell Greek loanwords and names, inheriting Chi's numeral value directly (600), even though the kh sound itself also occurs natively in Slavonic. What remains disputed is the letterform Cyril gave it: the mainstream palaeographic school derives its ornamental shape from medieval Greek cursive minuscule, the same source claimed for the alphabet's core letters, while the rival idiographic school holds Glagolitic's letterforms, this one included, were substantially invented rather than borrowed from any existing script.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

Originates in Language

Old Church Slavonic, Languages

Glagolitic was devised in the 860s so that Greek scripture and liturgy could be read in Slavonic, and Heru belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.

Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik

Related To

Cyril of Thessalonica, Historical Figures
Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik
Kher Х, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic kher answers to Glagolitic heru, both writing kh with the value 600.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996on the Slavic alphabets, their letters and their numeral systemsView the Source
2. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius
Francis Dvornik, Rutgers University Press, 1970on the Moravian mission and the making of the Slavic lettersView the Source
The Unicode Standard
The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Consortiumon the encoded characters, their names and their block assignmentView the Source
Open Questions (1 open question)
Did the opaque Glagolitic letter names, fritu, heru, tsi and sha among them, ever carry a sense in Slavonic?

The first twenty letter names of Glagolitic are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. From fritu onwards the names stop meaning anything recoverable, and the reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin without offering a reading. This is an absence rather than a disagreement: no camps hold rival etymologies for these names, and no investigation has settled whether they are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never carried a sense. The same gap stands over the corresponding Cyrillic names, which are the same names.

What would resolve this A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses the plain lists do not. A demonstration that the names never carried a sense would close the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.
Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philologyPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems
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