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Shta Ⱋ

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

Shta is the twenty-seventh letter of Glagolitic and writes the cluster sht, a sequence Slavonic needed constantly and Greek could not supply. It has no numeral value, because it stands outside the borrowed Greek series and outside the run of native letters that Glagolitic numbers. In Cyrillic the corresponding letter is written as sha with a descender, which makes its composite origin visible on the page: it is the sign for sh with the sign for t joined beneath. The sound it records is one of the marks that distinguish the South Slavic recensions of Church Slavonic from the East Slavic ones. Its Cyrillic counterpart shows its workings in its shape and the Glagolitic letter does not, which is one of the clearest cases in which the younger script is the more transparent of the two.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Shta's own description discusses the cluster sht it writes and its more transparent Cyrillic construction, and gives no origin for its own name. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion on the opaque tail of Glagolitic letter names.
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Shta's own description gives no sense for its name at all. Covered by the already-live OpenQuestion on the opaque tail of Glagolitic letter names.
Attributions
Associated Sound
The cluster sht, written as a single sign 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Origins
Origin Period
Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius 2
Place of Origin
Byzantium and Great Moravia; the letters were made in Constantinople or Thessalonica and carried north for the mission 2
Identity
Script Type
An alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1
Position
The twenty-eighth letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Shta's Cyrillic counterpart is written as sha with a descender, visibly built from the sign for sh plus the sign for t, while the Glagolitic letter shows none of that construction on its face, making the younger script the more transparent of the two at this point. 1
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Shta: The Glagolitic Letter

Shta writes a cluster, the sequence conventionally transliterated sht, and it carries no numeral value. It belongs to the Slavic end of the alphabet, where the letters record sounds Greek did not have and the counted series has already stopped.

The sound is one of the clearest dialect markers in the whole of Slavic. The cluster this letter writes developed from an earlier consonant combination, and the different Slavic languages resolved that combination in different ways: the South Slavic reflex that Old Church Slavonic records is not the one that West or East Slavic produced. A word written with this letter in an early Slavonic manuscript therefore appears with quite different consonants in the modern languages, and the correspondences are among the first things a student of comparative Slavic learns.

That makes the letter useful evidence about the language of the surviving canon. The manuscripts that preserve early Glagolitic writing come from the south, from Bulgaria and Macedonia and later from the Adriatic coast, and the reflex this letter records is the southern one. Whether the alphabet as first designed for Moravia handled the sound the same way is a separate question, and the surviving evidence cannot answer it directly.

Its name is opaque, like the other names at this end of the order.

Shta and Its Cyrillic Counterpart

Cyrillic shta writes the same cluster and, like the Glagolitic letter, carries no numeral value in either system. Neither alphabet could give it one from Greek, because Greek had no such sound, and Glagolitic had already stopped counting before reaching this part of the order.

The two letters make the same point about the design of the alphabets from opposite directions. Both scripts needed a sign here, and both put one in the same place, at the Slavic end of an order that follows Greek for as long as Greek is any use. That agreement of arrangement, in a stretch where Greek offered nothing to agree about, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the two alphabets belong to one tradition rather than to two.

The Cyrillic form is generally described as built from the letter for sh with a further element beneath, which makes it a compound rather than a borrowing, and the Glagolitic form is not obviously a compound of anything. Where the Cyrillic signs for the Slavic sounds came from is the same argument as where the Glagolitic signs came from, and it has the same three candidate answers: the other Slavonic script, a Semitic model, or invention. The atlas records the pairing and does not choose.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived from This

Shta Щ, Alphabet Letters

Why this is disputed. Shta writes the consonant cluster sht and is usually read as built from Cyrillic sha with an added stroke rather than borrowed as a whole new shape from Glagolitic, which has its own, differently constructed shta. Whether the Cyrillic sign is best described as derived from the Glagolitic letter at all, rather than assembled locally from Cyrillic's own sha, is exactly the kind of case where letter by letter derivation claims break down and scholars differ.

Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik

Originates in Language

Old Church Slavonic, Languages

Glagolitic was devised in the 860s so that Greek scripture and liturgy could be read in Slavonic, and Shta belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.

Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik

Related To

Cyril of Thessalonica, Historical Figures
Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and MethodiusFrancis Dvornik
Shta Щ, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic Shta writes the same sound and stands in the same place in the Slavonic alphabet. Neither script numbers the letter. Which of the two Slavonic scripts came first, and how much either owes the other, is argued rather than settled.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Shta Щ, Alphabet Letters

Shta answers to Glagolitic Shta: the same sound and the same place in the Slavonic alphabet. Neither script numbers the letter.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996on the Slavic alphabets, their letters and their numeral systemsView the Source
2. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius
Francis Dvornik, Rutgers University Press, 1970on the Moravian mission and the making of the Slavic lettersView the Source
The Unicode Standard
The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Consortiumon the encoded characters, their names and their block assignmentView the Source
Open Questions (1 open question)
Did the opaque Glagolitic letter names, fritu, heru, tsi and sha among them, ever carry a sense in Slavonic?

The first twenty letter names of Glagolitic are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. From fritu onwards the names stop meaning anything recoverable, and the reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin without offering a reading. This is an absence rather than a disagreement: no camps hold rival etymologies for these names, and no investigation has settled whether they are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never carried a sense. The same gap stands over the corresponding Cyrillic names, which are the same names.

What would resolve this A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses the plain lists do not. A demonstration that the names never carried a sense would close the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.
Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philologyPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems
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