Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme

Switch Atlas

The Inner World

The Civil World

The Natural World

Alphabet Letters

Tsi Ⱌ

Glagolitic Letters

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Origin Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius

Tsi is the twenty-eighth letter of Glagolitic and writes the affricate ts. The sound is native to Slavonic and has no Greek equivalent, so the letter is one of the signs the alphabet had to supply for itself rather than borrow. Its shape is shared with the Hebrew and Samaritan letter tsade closely enough that the resemblance has been offered as evidence in the long argument about where the shapes of Glagolitic came from, and it is one of the handful of letters cited on both sides of that argument. Its numeral value is given differently in different sources, and this atlas leaves it unassigned rather than choose.

Facts
Open Questions
Origin of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Tsi's own description discusses its shape's resemblance to Hebrew and Samaritan tsade, not its name's origin, and gives none. Tsi is one of the letters the already-live OpenQuestion names by name.
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name
Tsi's own description gives no sense for its name at all. Tsi is one of the letters the already-live OpenQuestion names by name.
Attributions
Associated Sound
The affricate ts 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-ninth letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Tsi's shape is close enough to the Hebrew and Samaritan letter tsade that the resemblance is cited on both sides of the long argument over where Glagolitic's letterforms came from. 1
Learn More
Tsi: The Glagolitic Letter

Tsi writes the affricate ts and carries no numeral value in the Glagolitic system, standing past the end of the counted series. It is one of the Slavic letters at the far end of the order, and it records a sound that Greek did not have and could not have supplied a sign for.

The affricate arose in Slavic through a softening of an original velar before certain vowels, and its distribution is therefore regular rather than arbitrary. A reader who knows the alternation can predict where it will appear, and can see the same root behind two spellings that look unconnected. That regularity is one of the reasons the second half of the Slavonic alphabet looks as it does: the letters there are not a miscellany but a set of signs for the outputs of a small number of sound changes.

The letter's name is opaque, and the reference literature records it without an etymology, along with the other names at this end of the alphabet.

Its shape is one of the Glagolitic forms most often pointed to by the scholars who look for Semitic models for the script, and the atlas records that proposal as a debated relation rather than as a finding.

Like every letter in this stretch of the order it carries no number, because the Glagolitic count runs through the letters that answer to Greek ones and stops. Cyrillic, working differently, does give its own letter for this sound a value, fitting it into a Greek slot that had fallen vacant, so the same sound is numbered in one Slavonic script and unnumbered in the other.

Tsi and the Semitic Model Proposal

One of the long standing proposals about the origin of the Glagolitic letterforms is that some of them come from a Semitic script rather than from Greek, and the signs for the Slavic sibilants and affricates are where that case has always been made. Greek had nothing to offer for these sounds, so a designer needed a source, and Hebrew and Samaritan have letters for sounds of the right kind in shapes that some scholars have found suggestive.

The proposal is not a fringe one and it is not established either. It rests on visual resemblance, which is the weakest kind of evidence in palaeography, and on the historical plausibility of a Byzantine scholar knowing a Semitic alphabet, which the sources make entirely credible for Constantine without demonstrating anything about the letters. Against it stand the readings that derive the same shapes from Greek cursive or that treat them as composed for the purpose.

The atlas records the link between this letter and Hebrew tzaddi as debated, with the camps named and no verdict, which is what the state of the evidence supports. A resemblance recorded as a resemblance is useful. The same resemblance recorded as a descent would be a claim the sources do not carry, and it would look identical on the page.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Derived From

Tzaddi צ, Alphabet Letters

Why this is disputed. Glagolitic Tsi writes the affricate ts, a sound native to Slavonic with no Greek equivalent, so the letter is one the alphabet had to supply for itself rather than borrow from Greek. Its shape is close enough to the Hebrew and Samaritan letter Tzaddi that the resemblance has been offered as evidence for a Hebrew-Samaritan source, consistent with Cyril's documented contact with Hebrew and Samaritan speakers on his mission to Cherson. The rival idiographic school holds the resemblance is coincidental, since Glagolitic's whole alphabet is built from a small set of basic shapes that could converge on a Semitic letterform without borrowing.

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

Derived from This

Tsy Ц, Alphabet Letters

Why this is disputed. Tsy writes ts, a sound Greek had no letter for, and Cyrillic paleographers broadly treat it as borrowed from the Glagolitic tsi. As with sha, the harder question is what stands behind the Glagolitic letter itself: a proposed link to the Hebrew tsade is argued by some Slavists and rejected by others who see no secure model beyond the Glagolitic alphabet's own internal design.

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 Tsi 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
Tsy Ц, Alphabet Letters

Cyrillic Tsy writes the same sound and stands in the same place in the Slavonic alphabet. Glagolitic leaves it unnumbered, its counted series having ended earlier in the order; Cyrillic numbers it 900 from the Greek series. 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.)
Tsy Ц, Alphabet Letters

Tsy answers to Glagolitic Tsi: the same sound and the same place in the Slavonic alphabet. Glagolitic leaves it unnumbered, its counted series having ended earlier in the order; Cyrillic numbers it 900 from a vacant Greek slot.

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
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.