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Sacred Correspondences
Alphabet Letters

Uku Ⱆ

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

Uku is the twenty-second letter of Glagolitic and writes the vowel u. Its name is a Slavonic word for learning or teaching, from the root behind the verb to teach, and it carries the numeral 400. In Cyrillic the same vowel was written not with a single letter but with the digraph of o and u taken from Greek usage, so this is one of the points where Glagolitic is the more economical of the two scripts: it has a single sign where Cyrillic needs two. The Cyrillic monograph uk, a single letter for the same sound, appears later as a simplification of that digraph. The name comes from the root behind the Slavonic vocabulary of teaching and of the disciple, so the letter for u is named for learning itself.

Facts
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
uku is a Slavonic word for learning or teaching 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-third letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Attributions
Associated Sound
The vowel u 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Uku writes with a single sign the vowel that Cyrillic originally wrote with a two-letter digraph borrowed from Greek usage, making Glagolitic the more economical of the two scripts at this one point. 1
Learn More
Uku: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 400)

Uku writes the vowel u and takes the numeral four hundred. Its name is one of those whose sense is no longer recoverable with confidence, and it stands at the head of the run of opaque names that occupies the rest of the alphabet.

The vowel is a back rounded vowel and it is common in Slavonic, but the way the two alphabets came to write it is not straightforward. Greek by the ninth century wrote that vowel with a pair of letters rather than a single one, and the Slavonic scripts had to decide whether to follow. Cyrillic did, producing a compound sign that was written as two letters and later fused. Glagolitic's treatment of the same sound is described differently by different authorities, and the forms in the manuscripts do not all agree.

The numeral four hundred follows from counting the Glagolitic letters in order, this being the twenty second sign, and it agrees with the Cyrillic value inherited from Greek.

The letter is common enough that its forms are well attested in both the rounded and the angular hands, so the uncertainty is about its history rather than about its appearance.

It is worth being explicit about the shape of that uncertainty, because it recurs throughout the second half of the alphabet. What is well recorded is the repertoire of signs the surviving manuscripts use, since the manuscripts are there to be read. What is not recorded is how the alphabet looked when it was made, because nothing survives from the mission itself and the earliest books are a century or more later and were produced in a different country. Statements about the original inventory are reconstructions, and the atlas marks them as such rather than presenting the reconstruction as the thing reconstructed.

Uku and Its Cyrillic Counterpart

Cyrillic uk writes the same vowel and carries the same numeral, four hundred, and here the shared figure is genuinely instructive rather than coincidental. Cyrillic takes four hundred from Greek upsilon, the second letter of the Greek pair that wrote the u sound, and Glagolitic arrives at the same number by counting to twenty two. That the two agree at all through this stretch of the order is what makes numerals in mixed or copied manuscripts so easy to misread: the systems look interchangeable in the middle of the alphabet and are not.

The Cyrillic letter began as two letters written together and was reduced over time to a single sign, and the stages of that reduction are visible across the manuscript tradition. It is one of the clearest cases of a Slavonic letterform having a documented history rather than an assumed one, because the compound and the fused form both survive.

The Glagolitic side has no comparable record, which is the general condition of the script: fewer manuscripts, none of them close in date to the alphabet's making, and a tradition that was displaced in most of its territory before it could leave the trail that Cyrillic left. That imbalance in the evidence shapes every comparison between the two scripts.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Originates in Language

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

Related To

Cyrillic uk answers to Glagolitic uku, both writing the vowel u with the value 400. Glagolitic uses a single sign where Cyrillic writes a digraph.

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
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