Rtsy Р

Rtsy stands eighteenth, writes r, and carries the numeral 100 from Greek rho. Its name is a Slavonic imperative meaning say or speak, addressed to one person.

Its numeral value is the point at which the Cyrillic and Glagolitic number series converge. Below 100 the two alphabets disagree throughout, because Glagolitic numbers its own letters in their own order while Cyrillic follows the Greek allocation; from 100 upward the two happen to agree letter for letter. That convergence is a small but real piece of evidence in the argument about how the two scripts are related, and it is used by both camps.

The shape is the uncial rho and is unchanged in the modern alphabets. In Slavonic the sound it writes could stand as the centre of a syllable without any vowel, and the earliest orthography wrote a reduced vowel beside it to mark this, which is why words that a modern Slav pronounces with a syllabic r appear in the old books with an extra letter that no longer corresponds to anything spoken.

The letter name, being a command to speak, was a gift to the compilers of primers and of the abecedarian poems, several of which build their line for this letter around the act of proclamation.

A page of printed Church Slavonic carries marks over almost every word: an acute, a grave, a curved mark that looks like a small arch, and, over an initial vowel, a hook. A reader coming from the manuscripts is entitled to be surprised, because the earliest Slavonic books have almost none of this.

The system is a later importation and a later systematisation. Greek manuscripts and Greek printing carried breathings and accents, and the South Slavic orthographic reforms of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries brought a comparable apparatus into Slavonic, which the printers then regularised because type demands a rule where a pen can hesitate. The result is a scheme in which the acute is used in most positions, the grave at the end of a word, and the arched mark on certain forms where two words would otherwise look identical.

The marks are therefore not a record of ninth century Slavonic prosody. They are a reading aid, made for a language that was by then nobody's mother tongue, in books meant to be sung and chanted aloud by clergy who needed to know where the stress fell without having to know the grammar.

That is worth saying plainly, because the marks are sometimes read as evidence for the accentuation of Old Church Slavonic. For the reconstruction of early Slavic accent, the comparative evidence of the living languages is the primary witness, and the printed accents are a late and secondary one.