Ritsi Ⱃ

Ritsi writes the consonant r and takes the numeral one hundred, the first of the hundreds in the Glagolitic count. Its name is an imperative, say, and it opens the last stretch of the recitation whose sense is generally agreed: ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly.

The sound is a trill, and in Old Church Slavonic it can carry a syllable on its own, standing between consonants where a modern English speaker would expect a vowel. The writing system handles that by writing the r with one of the reduced vowel letters beside it, which is not the same as recording a vowel that was pronounced, and the correct reading of such sequences is a standing question in the phonology of the language.

The numeral one hundred is reached by counting the Glagolitic letters in their own order, this being the nineteenth letter. From here the alphabet counts in hundreds to the end of its numbered series.

At this letter the two Slavonic numeral systems briefly agree again, which is a coincidence of where the unnumbered letters fall in the Cyrillic count rather than a return to a common scheme. They agree for a short run and then part for good at the end of the alphabet.

The letter is also one of the most frequent in the script, since Slavonic uses r heavily in its verb endings and in a large share of its vocabulary, so it is among the shapes by which a hand is most readily characterised. In the angular Croatian tradition it takes a form that a reader of the rounded books has to learn again, and the two forms sit at opposite ends of several centuries of continuous use in one liturgical tradition.

Cyrillic rtsy writes the same consonant and takes the numeral one hundred, exactly as Glagolitic does. This is the first agreement between the two systems since the very first letter of the alphabet, and it is worth being clear that it is an accident of arithmetic. Cyrillic gets one hundred from Greek rho. Glagolitic gets it from counting nineteen letters. The two roads happen to arrive at the same place because the number of Slavic letters Cyrillic passed over in the first half of the order equals the number of Greek letters that stand between the two counts.

The agreement holds for the letters immediately following, through two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred, six hundred, and then breaks at the second o sign, where Glagolitic counts seven hundred and Cyrillic inherits eight hundred from Greek omega. After that Glagolitic stops numbering altogether while Cyrillic continues with two Greek letters and one Slavic affricate.

The names agree in sense, both being an imperative of the verb to say, and differ in form. The mnemonic sentence is the same in both traditions, and this is the letter at which most readers agree the sentence still makes plain sense.

Whether that sentence was composed as a text or emerged from a set of words chosen for their sounds is a separate question, and one on which the atlas takes no side. The first twenty names read as connected Slavonic and the rest do not, which is the fact everyone starts from; what is built on it varies. Reading the whole recitation as a devotional composition by the alphabet's maker is a position held in the literature, not a settled result, and it is recorded here as such.