Pokoji Ⱂ

Pokoji writes the consonant p and takes the numeral ninety. Its name is a Slavonic noun, peace or rest, and it is the point at which the recited alphabet becomes harder to read as continuous sense: up to here the names make clauses that most readers accept, and from here the readings diverge.

The sound is a plain labial stop, stable across the history of Slavic, and the letter carries no evidence about dialect or date. It is common in prefixes, which is where a reader meets it most often, since Slavonic builds a great deal of its vocabulary by prefixing.

The numeral ninety comes from counting the Glagolitic alphabet through in its own order, this being the eighteenth letter and the last of the tens before the hundreds begin.

The transition from tens to hundreds at this point in the order is one of the structural facts about the Glagolitic numeral system, and it falls in a different place from the equivalent transition in Cyrillic. That is a direct consequence of the two systems counting on different principles, and it is one of the reasons a figure written in letters cannot be transliterated from one script to the other and left to stand.

The letter appears in both hands of the script without much alteration between them, which is not true of every sign. Some Glagolitic letters are barely recognisable as the same character in the rounded Bulgarian and Macedonian books and in the angular Croatian ones, while others carried across with their essential form intact. Cataloguing which did and which did not is one of the routine tasks of Glagolitic palaeography and one of the ways the relationship between the two hands is worked out.

Cyrillic pokoy writes the same consonant and takes the numeral eighty, the value of Greek pi, against the ninety that Glagolitic counts. The names agree, both continuing the Slavonic word for peace or rest, and the position agrees.

The interesting divergence here is structural rather than arithmetical. In Cyrillic the value ninety belongs to a different letter altogether, one of the Slavic affricates further down the order, which was fitted into a slot that Greek numeration had left vacant when an old letter dropped out of the language. Glagolitic had no such vacancies to fill, because it was not using Greek numbers at all, and it arrived at ninety simply by counting to eighteen.

Two different design decisions are visible in that. The Cyrillic arrangement is careful work on an existing system, finding places in Greek arithmetic for Slavic letters and leaving unnumbered the ones it could not place. The Glagolitic arrangement dispenses with the problem by not inheriting the system in the first place. Neither is obviously better, and the difference is one of the few pieces of evidence about the alphabets that concerns how they were made rather than how they look.

The names agree closely, pokoji beside pokoy, and both are the Slavonic noun for peace or rest. This is among the last of the letter names in either alphabet that can be glossed with confidence, and the recitation grows harder to construe from about this point onward. Where it does, the atlas says so instead of supplying a reading.