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Alphabet Letters

Slovo Ⱄ

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

Slovo is the twentieth letter of Glagolitic and writes s. Its name is the Slavonic word for word, and it carries the numeral 200. It is the object of the clause ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly, and the word it names is the same one that opens the Gospel of John in Slavonic, so the letter sits at the junction of the alphabet's ordinary vocabulary and the text the alphabet was made to carry. The letter is stable in shape across the round and the angular traditions, and it is among the signs a reader coming to Glagolitic from Cyrillic can identify without help. Its Cyrillic counterpart also carries 200, one of the few coincidences between the two numeral systems, and the two arrive at the value by entirely different routes.

Facts
Disputed
Origin of the Name
The name stands in the clause ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly, formed by the names of the letters around it. Whether the first twenty names were chosen so that the alphabet would read as connected speech, or read that way only in retrospect, is contested. 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Both positions are held. One holds that the names were chosen so that reciting the alphabet would itself be an utterance, a piece of design in keeping with an alphabet made for the reading of scripture. The other holds that the names are largely inherited mnemonic words, that the connected sense is a reading imposed later, and that the case is settled against composition by the names ceasing to mean anything from the twenty-third letter onward. Recorded as debated rather than unknown because both readings are argued in print. The open question on this page names the evidence that would bear on it.
Attributions
Associated Sound
The consonant s 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
Origin of the Name
A Slavonic word used as the letter name, shared by both Slavic alphabets 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Sense of the Name
slovo is the Slavonic word for word 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
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-first letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Slovo names the same word that opens the Gospel of John in Slavonic translation, so the letter sits at the junction of the alphabet's ordinary vocabulary and the very text the script was devised to carry. 1
Learn More
Slovo: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 200)

Slovo writes the consonant s and takes the numeral two hundred. Its name is the Slavonic word for word, and of all the letter names it is the one that carries the most weight in the tradition, because the opening of the Gospel of John, which the mission's translators rendered into Slavonic, begins with that word. A letter of the alphabet made for the translation of scripture is named with the noun that stands at the head of the text it was made to carry.

The sound is a plain sibilant. It is common, it is stable, and it takes part in the alternations that produced the palatal fricative earlier in the alphabet, so a reader meets the same root spelled two ways in related forms.

The numeral two hundred follows from counting the Glagolitic letters in order, this being the twentieth sign.

The name also completes the clause that most readings of the recitation accept: say the word firmly. Whether the letter names beyond this point continue that text, and whether the whole sequence was composed as a connected utterance at all, is a scholarly question rather than a settled one, and the atlas treats it that way.

Slovo is also one of the letters that the Slavonic tradition kept in continuous use as a numeral long after Glagolitic itself had been displaced. Two hundred is a common figure in a psalter or a gospel book, and the practice of numbering with letters outlasted the change of script, so a Cyrillic manuscript centuries later is still doing with its own slovo exactly what a Glagolitic scribe did with this one. The habit is older than either alphabet, having come to the Slavs from Greek along with the books.

Slovo and Its Cyrillic Counterpart

Cyrillic slovo writes the same consonant, holds the same place and takes the same numeral, two hundred. The agreement between the two systems that began at the previous letter continues here, and the name is identical in both scripts, the same Slavonic noun for word.

This is therefore the closest the two alphabets come to being the same letter in everything but appearance. Sound, position, name, sense and number all coincide. What does not coincide is the shape, and this letter is one of the places where that fact is at its starkest, because the Cyrillic form is a Greek sigma with almost no alteration and the Glagolitic form resembles no Greek letter at all.

The name carries a theological charge in both traditions equally. The Slavonic translation of the opening of John begins with this word, and the alphabet that was made for that translation names a letter with it, so the recitation of the alphabet and the opening of the gospel share a word in a way that the Greek alphabet's letter names, which are inherited labels with no sense in Greek, never could. That is a genuine difference between the Slavonic letter names and the Greek ones, and it does not depend on any particular reading of the recitation as a whole.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived From

Sigma σ, Alphabet Letters

Why this is disputed. Glagolitic Slovo is read as Greek Sigma's counterpart in an alphabet Cyril modeled on Greek order and numeral values, but which theory explains where its rounded letterform actually came from is a live paleographic dispute. The mainstream palaeographic school, developed since Isaac Taylor's nineteenth century study, derives Glagolitic's ornamental shapes from medieval Greek cursive minuscule redesigned for Slavonic use. A rival idiographic school reads Glagolitic as substantially an original invention, its shapes built from basic forms such as the cross, circle and triangle rather than borrowed from any existing script, so this specific correspondence to Sigma is accepted by one camp and denied by the other.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)

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 Slovo 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
Slovo С, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic slovo answers to Glagolitic slovo: the same name, the same sound s and the same numeral value of 200.

Source Old Church Slavonic GrammarHorace G. Lunt
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)
Were the Glagolitic letter names composed as a connected devotional text, or do they read as one only in retrospect?

The first twenty letter names are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected clauses, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. That much is not in question. What is in question is what follows from it. One position holds that the names were chosen deliberately so that the recitation of the alphabet would itself be an utterance, a piece of design in keeping with an alphabet made for the reading of scripture. Another holds that the names are largely inherited mnemonic words, that the sense of the sequence is a reading imposed later, and that the point is settled against composition by the fact that the names stop meaning anything at all from the twenty third letter onward. Both positions are held and both can be read.

What would resolve this A ninth or tenth century source that gives the letter names in full as a continuous text, rather than as a list, would show the sequence being read as an utterance at a date close to the alphabet's making. The acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the letters in verse, are the most likely place for such evidence, and a study that separated what those poems inherit from what they compose would bear directly on the question.
Old Church Slavonic philology; Slavic historical linguistics; medieval Slavonic literaturePeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems
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