Alphabet Letters
Myslite Ⰿ
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
Myslite is the fifteenth letter of Glagolitic and writes m. Its name is a Slavonic verb form meaning think, and it carries the numeral 60. It closes the clause kako ljudije myslite, how people think, which together with the opening azu buky vede is the part of the recitation most often cited to show that the alphabet's letter names read as connected Slavonic. The letter has a second encoded form, latinate myslite, used in the Croatian angular tradition where the shape was reworked under the influence of the Latin M; that form is a later variant and does not belong to the original inventory. In Cyrillic the same letter carries 40, taken from Greek mu, so the two scripts differ here for reasons that have nothing to do with the sound.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodDevised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius 2 Place of OriginByzantium and Great Moravia; the letters were made in Constantinople or Thessalonica and carried north for the mission 2 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 Namemyslite is a Slavonic verb form meaning you think or think 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1 PositionThe sixteenth letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attributions
Associated SoundThe consonant m 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceMyslite has a second encoded form, latinate myslite, reworked under Latin influence in the Croatian angular tradition; that shape is a later variant and does not belong to the alphabet's original inventory. 1 Learn More
Myslite: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 60)
Myslite writes the consonant m and takes the numeral sixty. Its name is the plural imperative of the verb to think, think, and it is one of the letter names that make the recited alphabet read as a set of instructions rather than as a list.
The sound is a plain nasal and it is entirely stable across the history of Slavic, so the letter offers none of the evidence about sound change that the yus letters or the jers or yat provide. What it does offer is a very high frequency. Old Church Slavonic uses m in some of its commonest endings, and the letter appears many times on every page of a gospel manuscript, which makes it one of the signs by which a hand can most quickly be characterised.
The numeral sixty follows from counting the Glagolitic letters in their own order, this being the fifteenth sign.
In the angular Croatian hand the letter is one of the most distinctive shapes on the page, and it is among the forms that make a Croatian missal look at first glance like a different script from a Bulgarian gospel book rather than a later stage of the same one. Both are Glagolitic, and the change from one to the other happened gradually over several centuries in a tradition that never lost continuity with its own past.
Myslite and Its Cyrillic Counterpart
Cyrillic myslete writes the same consonant, holds the same place and takes the numeral forty, the value of Greek mu. Glagolitic gives it sixty. The gap of twenty between the two figures is the accumulated effect of every Slavic letter earlier in the order that Glagolitic numbered and Cyrillic did not.
The name is the same verb in both scripts with a slightly different vowel in the middle, myslite beside myslete, and neither form can be shown to be the original. The names travelled by recitation, and a recited list picks up small changes in a way a copied text does not.
For anyone comparing the two alphabets, this is a convenient letter at which to stop and see the pattern whole. In fifteen letters the two scripts have kept the same order, the same sounds and the same names, and have shared none of their shapes and almost none of their numbers. Any account of their relationship has to explain both halves of that. An account that makes one script a modification of the other has to explain why nothing of the appearance carried over. An account that makes them independent has to explain why the order and the names agree so exactly.
Neither half is easy, and the evidence that would settle it does not exist in the form anyone wants. There is no manuscript from the mission, no abecedary from the ninth century, and no statement in the early sources that names either script by a term a modern reader can be sure of.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Why this is disputed. Glagolitic Myslite is read as Greek Mu'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 Mu 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 Myslite belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.
Related To
Cyrillic myslete answers to Glagolitic myslite: the same name and the same sound m.
Sources
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