Re: How did I miss this one?

On 04/05/24 20:13, Ross Clark wrote:

There was a Serbian restaurant at one time in Auckland (though
Croatians are much more numerous here), and the one time we ate
there, I remember seeing, pinned to the wall, a little poem about
"Наша Кириллица" (Our (dear?) Cyrillic alphabet). Googling that
phrase brings up a lot of Russian sites with similar sentiments.
>
Looking further into it will show that while the above is basically
true, it is a lot more complicated.
>
(i) They have several different feast days depending on which church
you ask.
>
(ii) They invented two quite different alphabets -- Glagolitic, which
 looks a bit like Elvish; and Cyrillic, which is simpler and more
obviously based on Greek, and has lasted longer.
>
(iii) And maybe they didn't invent them just like that...but such is
the way of writing systems.

Yike! I see what you mean by Elvish. The users of Glagolitic must have
had low reading speeds.
Now that I've looked it up, I see that I've had a false belief for
years. I had always believed that Cyrillic was invented by the Greek
monk Cyril (and, perhaps, his partner Methodius). Now I see that Cyril
introduced Glagolitic, and that others later modified his script to turn
it into Cyrillic.
That's a little surprising. You'd expect a Greek, faced with the problem
of creating an alphabet for the Slavs, to come up with something similar
to the Greek alphabet. (With, of course, additions to deal with the fact
that the Greek alphabet is too small.) Indeed, Cyrillic does show
obvious derivation from Greek, but Glagolitic does not.
--
Peter Moylan                         http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW