Pokoy П

Pokoy stands seventeenth, writes p, and carries the numeral 80 from Greek pi. Its name is the Slavonic noun for rest, quiet or repose, the word used in the prayers for the dead and in the liturgical formula asking that a soul be given rest.

The shape is the uncial pi and it has not changed, which makes this one of the letters that most visibly betrays the Greek parentage of the script to anyone who knows the Greek alphabet and not the Slavonic one.

As a numeral it is 80. It also does duty as an abbreviation in the rubrics of service books, where a single letter under a titlo can stand for a whole recurring instruction, on the assumption that a reader using the book already knows what the instruction says.

The name has one further use. Because the letter is shaped like a lintel resting on two posts, the tradition of teaching the alphabet from named letters gave a ready image to hang the sound on, and the primers made heavy use of that kind of visual association. A method of teaching that names letters after words and pictures rather than after their sounds is slower to reach fluent decoding, which is precisely the objection the eighteenth century reformers made when they replaced the names.

The move from manuscript to print reshaped the alphabet, because a printer must decide once and for all what the letters look like and how many there are, where a scribe can improvise.

Printing in Church Slavonic began outside the Slavonic Orthodox lands. Schweipolt Fiol, a printer working in Krakow, produced liturgical books in Cyrillic type in 1491, and they are the earliest printed Slavonic books known. Later, Francysk Skaryna printed a series of biblical books in Prague and then in Vilnius, in a Slavonic shaped by his own east Slavic speech, in the second and third decades of the sixteenth century.

Printing in Moscow began later and more painfully. The Apostol produced by Ivan Fyodorov in 1564 is the first dated Moscow imprint, and Fyodorov subsequently left the city and continued his work further west.

Three consequences followed for the letters. The type was cut on the model of the half ustav hand, so the printed alphabet preserves a fourteenth century compromise rather than the eleventh century book letter. The repertoire was fixed, including the superscripts, the accents and the several forms of o, which made the orthography of the printed books more uniform than any scriptorium had achieved. And the church books and the secular books began to diverge, a divergence that became a formal split when a separate civil type was cut in the early eighteenth century.