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2014 2016 The Anomalies of Glagolitic I
2014 2016 The Anomalies of Glagolitic I
Willem Vermeer
By and large, the glagolitic alphabet obeys the principle “each phoneme its own
letter and vice versa”, but there are departures from that norm and other anoma-
lies, prompting the question: were those anomalies put there by Constantine/Cyril
– henceforthμ “C” – as he was designing the alphabet and, if so, why? Or did they
appear later for reasons that have to be figured out?
It has proved difficult to account for the anomalies without making matters
worse, e.g. by attributing untenable decisions to C, or introducing assumptions
that cannot be squared with crucial low-level facts or are unacceptable for other
reasons (phonological, historical, ...). And yet by now solutions are available that
account for all traditional problems without leaving loopholes.
In the text that follows, each anomaly is briefly sketched, together with its
traditional interpretation – if there is one – and the solution that accounts best for
the problem(s) involved. The stress is on “briefly”. Most of what I find indefen-
sible is skipped even if it is important or worth knowing. References to the liter-
ature – which is unmanageably vast and multilingual – have deliberately been
kept well below a responsible minimum. An overview of the entire field in the
same format, covering false scents and doing justice to the scholarly literature,
would be three times as long, defeating its purpose. For those wanting to delve
deeper, Marti (2000, 2004) is a good place to start.
The results are summarized in Appendices A-C below, some background is
given in Appendices D-F.
I’ve tried to do without Grand Academic Concepts like “grapheme” or
“Schriftdenken” or “Common Slavic”, not because they don’t have their uses,
but because of the dubious offspring they tend to spawn, notably artifacts and a
need for over-elaborate definitions, predictably followed by sterile controversy
about those very definitions. The term “dialect” is avoided because non-linguists
tend to associate it with rural backwardness and illiteracy, hence as inapplicable
to persons actively involved in the Cyrillo-Methodian enterprise.
1
This text was written in 2014. In this update (a) attention is drawn to the recent discovery of a
manuscript with independent use of the letter (section 6), and (b) Appendix B/6 has been recast
to remove a mistake and render it more coherent. Otherwise things have remained the same, apart
from some very minor additions and changes in wording.
2
In what follows, the word “element” refers to any object that has some role in
the writing system (letter, digraph, diacritic, ...) if its status does not need to be
specified, or is unclear. Angle brackets “<>” refer to letters, most often glagolitic,
sometimes Greek, as in <a> = or α, whereas “//” and “[]” are used according to
convention. If misunderstandings are unlikely to arise, italics are often used.
only in the case of the preposition o ‘about’, written as , vs. the exclamation o
‘oh!’, written as (cf. Trubetzkoy 1954: 27).
Commentary. Could be, but glagolitic has some quite similar redundancies
without exact counterparts in Greek, e.g. the two letters for /x/ and the three for
/i/. As long as they have not been accounted for, this explanation hangs in the air.
differently. Most prefer , the Kiev Folia . The Codex Assemanianus has it
both ways.
Cyrillic: works similarly, but with two <i> letters instead of three (ъи, ъі).
Question: why doesn’t glagolitic have a separate letter <y>?
Traditional answer: ever since Kopitar (1836: 51), there has been a virtual
consensus that this is because the reflex of *y actually was a diphthong [ъi],
which could best be represented by a sequence of letters.
Commentary on the traditional answer. The answer, though reasonable up
to a point, does not fit in very well with what is otherwise known about the pho-
nology of C’s Slavic. There were no other diphthongs and since the weak jers
were still present in it, one expects that it only had open syllables. An [ъi]-like or
[ъi̯ ]-like or [ъj]-like diphthong fits poorly into the overall picture.
Alternative answer. Nuorluoto (1994: 62-64) has argued that the mysterious
third <i> (section 4) originated as the missing <y> letter. If true, this would imply
a non-trivial change at some post-Constantinian stage, by which the <y> letter
was reinterpreted as rendering /i/, while the vowel /y/ came to be written with
digraphs. Marti (2000: 69-70) has shown how the change happened and why it
was inevitable. He starts from the uncontested fact that the Czecho-Slovak sec-
tion of the Slavic-speaking world had more contracted vowels than other areas
(cf., e.g., Shevelov 1964: 525-527). Because of this, Moravian Slavic often had
/y/ in cases where Thessaloniki had the bisyllabic sequence /ъi/. Accordingly,
newly recruited local users interpreted written sequences of the type <ъiρ as al-
ternative ways to spell /y/. It is only natural that sooner or later they started adding
<ъρ in front of as well, thus demoting the letter to the position of a third <i>.
Commentary on the alternative answer. The Nuorluoto-Marti hypothesis
solves three problems in one go: that of the absence of a letter for y, that of the
composition of the digraphs used to write y, and that of the presence of a third
<i>, including its position in the final section of the alphabet. Moreover, it does
so in a way that can be understood on the basis of a local difference that has to
be reconstructed on independent grounds.
General note. With the arrival of the Nuorluoto-Marti hypothesis, the last of
the traditional anomalies of glagolitic has received a tenable explanation, which
makes it a milestone in the history of Cyrillo-Methodian studies.
6. Nasal vowels
The element , if used as an independent letter, represents the nasal vowel ę.
Otherwise nasal vowels are most often written with digraphs containing as their
righthand component, most importantly (= <eρ+<ę>), , (= <oρ+<ęρ), and
(= <ςρ+<ęρ), traditionally read as (j)ę, ǫ, and ǫ̈ (or (j)ǫ) respectively. Manu-
scripts differ widely as to details. In some, does not occur as an independent
letter at all, most famously the Kiev Folia. In one manuscript (the Psalterium
6
Sinaiticum) the first syllable of the word ‘angel’ is written with a digraph (=
<aρ+<ęρ), possibly to represent a marginal nasal vowel */ą/ occurring in bor-
rowings that had the sequence an in the original language and that could not oth-
erwise enter open-syllable Slavic very well. In one or two manuscripts – notably
the Codex Zographensis – the letter is provided on the left with a diacritic-like
element (resulting in ) to mark a nasal vowel that is limited to the msc NAsg of
the active present participle, e.g. <ěd iρ ‘eating’ (determinate form).
Cyrillic: works differently (ѧ, ѫ, ѭ, ...).
Question. Too many questions to list. Why are nasal vowels most often writ-
ten with digraphs instead of independent letters? What are we to make of the
lefthand component of ? Why does the oldest alphabet-related evidence – e.g.
abecedaria – point to two places for nasal vowels instead of, say, three or one, or
even none? (Since digraphs are combinations of letters, they are not members of
the alphabet, so they do not show up in abecedaria and the like, or at best errati-
cally.) Why isn’t a digraph used for the nasal vowel that is written with ?
Traditional answer. C designed three digraphs , , and , in order to
write ę, ǫ and ǫ̈ (or jǫ), in which marked nasality. At some later stage, the
element was detached from to express the difference between ę and ję. (Cf.
Jagić 1κκ3μ 43ι.)
Commentary on the traditional answer. The answer just restates the facts
of the canonical manuscripts without explaining anything. It fails to make clear
why C departed from his model (a) in not making three separate letters denoting
his three nasal vowels, (b) in designing an element marking a vocalic feature
(nasality) for use in digraphs, and (c) in creating a letter with the sole purpose of
serving as the lefthand component of one of his digraphs ( ), where an existing
letter (say , or possibly ) would have served just as well. It assumes that later
users took apart one of the allegedly original digraphs, assigning the value ę to
the component that ordinarily marked nasality. It also fails to account for the
evidence that points to two original letters.
Alternative answer. The principal elements of a workable solution have been
around for a long time. Unfortunately it is not a simple story.
Abecedaria and the like point to two letters. Cyrillic appears to do the same (ѧ
and ѫ). The attested systems use two elements that do not also occur elsewhere
with values of their own, i.e. and (the lefthand component of the digraph ).
All this would fall into place if and could be shown to have started life as two
independent letters.
Combining this insight with a highly personal view of the Slavic nasal vowels,
Trubetzkoy (1925: 37, 1954: 20, 22, 80-82) assumed that originally stood for a
nasal consonant /N/ which was limited to postvocalic position, and a rounded
front vowel /ö/ which occurred only before /N/. This accounts for the number of
basic elements and interprets the digraphs as sequences of letters rendering se-
quences of sounds – e.g. /o/ plus /N/ –, hence as not anomalous after all.
7
and is bound to have suggested to users that marked the vowel indicated by
the preceding letter as nasalized. Quite naturally, it was now redundantly added
to as well, in a step that recalls the addition of <ъρ to the <yρ letter (section 5).
Independent use of is actually attested in a damaged folium that was identified
as glagolitic only very recently and has been published and discussed by Nina
Glibetić, e.g. <po ρ ‘I sing’ (recto line 14, see Glibetić 2015μ 15, 17-18, 36).
The construction of a digraph – however ephemeral and/or locally restricted
it may have been – is equally natural.
In this context , with its diacritic-like element added to , is anomalous. Why
wasn’t a digraph introduced here as well? The inconsistency is too striking to
overlook and suggests that there was some reason keeping users from simply
extending the existing pattern. This corroborates the idea, based on other consid-
erations, that the vowel involved was a nasal y (cf. Kortlandt 1979: 260). Since
plain /y/ was expressed by a digraph already, it was impossible to construct a
digraph in this case, so some other way had to be found.
Commentary on the alternative answer. I am not insisting on every single
detail of the chain of events reconstructed here. It is merely intended to illustrate
that Mošin’s hypothesis makes possible an account in which (a) the evidence
pointing to two original letters is respected, (b) C stuck to the Greek model while
providing for his nasal vowels, and (c) the attested systems are derived from C’s
on the basis of steps that made good sense at the time.
7. The letter ⰼ
The letter represents Greek g in palatal contexts in borrowings, for instance
<i emonъρ ‘governor’, Gr. ἡγε ώ /igemón/.
Cyrillic: has no counterpart.
Question: how is that possible, a separate letter for an allophone in a foreign
language?
Traditional answer: it is obviously possible, isn’t itς
Commentary. Without denying that it is possible, is it quite reasonable to
assume that C, who was developing an alphabet from scratch, created a letter for
it? And assuming that he did, where are the other velars? Both the assumption
that C made a letter with this function and the inconsistency are awkward.
9. The mysterious ⱋ
The element has the same value as the sequence consisting of + , i.e.
<šρ+<tρ. It occurs – optionally or obligatorily – in most canonical manuscripts,
but some do without it (Clozianus) or nearly so (Codex Zographensis).
Cyrillic: works more or less similarly (щ has the same value as ш+т).
Question: what is going on here?
Commentary on the question. The question needs asking because nowhere
else in glagolitic is there anything resembling this, nor does Greek offer credible
models. We would have to assume that C went out of his way to create a letter to
render a sequence of consonants that was expressed perfectly well already by a
sequence of letters. Both points – the fact of having a letter stand for a sequence
of sounds and the fact that it was redundant – depart too far from C’s model and
general practice to be acceptable without something in the way of evidence, or at
least some idea of why it was done.
Traditional answer: is a ligature – meaning a more or less adhoc welding
together into a single shape of letters that ordinarily occur separately and retain
their separate values – of <šρ and <t>.
Commentary on the traditional answer. If true, the problem would be gone,
but it isn’t true, for (a) whereas a ligature is not a member of the alphabet – i.e. a
distinct letter –, is treated in abecedaria etc. as if it is, (b) a ligature of and
would look different, and (c) some manuscripts that avoid ligatures do not avoid
(Euchologium Sinaiticum) and vice versa (Assemanianus). On the latter point
see Lunt (1957: 266).
Alternative answer. The only viable solution is by Durnovo (1929: 56-57)
and accounts for in connection with the letter (section 7) and the double <x>
letter (section 8). It is a complicated story.
Durnovo assumes that C created the letters and to render the reflexes of
*tj/dj in his variety of Slavic. Which happened to be palatal stops comprising a
second palatal row alongside the one consisting of č, š, ž. Velars in palatal con-
texts in Greek loans were identified with those stops and the row was extended
with a fricative to accommodate Greek x in the same position.
10
Since the letter happened not to occur in similar words, it tended to drop
ated.
out of use altogether, just like the letter <dz> may have done for comparable
The two <x> letters lived on as redundant doublets. Moravian users probably
reasons.
didn’t even realize that they originally stood for contrastively different
sounds, cf. the case of y and ъi (section 5). This led to increased use of ,
which was easier to write than , and no doubt also more salient to learners
because it came earlier in the alphabet.
So when finally glagolitic arrived in the “dritte Heimat”, its was firmly en-
sconced in biblical key words, its was busy falling by the wayside, and both its
<x> letters were still in use, but was on the increase and may well have been
on the verge of crowding out the spider.
The author of the influential alphabet acrostich beginning with the words “azъ
slovomь simь ...”, who is assumed to have been active shortly before 900 CE at
an early stage of the Bulgarian-Macedonian phase, and who is bound to have
been as thoroughly at home in the writing system of his time as anybody, appears
11
to have been at a loss what to do with and , at least judging by the surviving
copies.
The attested use of with the value št resulted from a confusion similar to the
one that earlier gave rise to digraphs to write y (section 5): local users who did
not realize what the letter originally stood for, proceeded to read it with their own
reflex of *tj. To them it appeared as just an alternative way of writing the se-
quence št, alongside <šρ+<tρ. As in comparable cases, they need not have been
aware of what they were doing. The misunderstanding presupposes the availabil-
ity of manuscripts in which the letter was written more or less correctly. It goes
without saying that those same users proceeded to write the letter also in cases –
a minority – where št did not reflect *tj.
If the letter <dz> had dropped out of use as well, as seems likely, it was picked
up again in a similar way.
Commentary on the alternative answer. Durnovo’s hypothesis differs from
all known alternatives in accounting for the evidence, a point that tends to be
downplayed by those who choose to remain sceptical about it.
11. No <j>
The alphabet has no letter <j>. The point is connected with various other prob-
lems, e.g.:
Traditionally, double values are attributed to the elements and . After
vowels they are read as sequences consisting of j plus a vowel (ju, jǫ), after
consonants as just vowels (u, ǫ). It has been clear since time immemorial
(Fortunatov 1888-1890/1919: 17 etc.) that that tradition cannot be correct for
the earliest phase, because nothing in Greek prompted C to create letters with
two clearly different values or denoting sequences of the type “/j/ plus
vowel”. There can be no doubt that the traditional way of reading and
results from an unwarranted extrapolation to C of the double value of the
modern Russian letter ю. There is no reason to feel bound by it.
Similarly it has been assumed that the letter <ěρ ( ) was read as /ě/ in post-
consonantal position and as /ja/ word-initially and after vowels. This is awk-
As we saw earlier (section 6), several manuscripts use the digraph with the
ward for the same reasons.
connection with the loss of the weak jers. C happened to live between those
events. If what we think we know about the phonological history of Slavic is
correct, we would not even expect glagolitic to contain a letter <j>.
Note on the reception of the alternative answer. The insight that j was not
contrastive in C’s Slavic has been with us since Meillet (1906: 390). Many spe-
cialists consider it decisive. Others do not, notably – at least as far as I can see –
those whose own work (e.g. in articulatory phonetics or the study of written texts)
or theoretical background (e.g. in generative or non-linear approaches to phonol-
ogy) happens not to assign much of a role to the contrastive level, and who there-
fore fail to realize that it was the level C strove to express.
And also:
/m, n, v, l, r/.
Oral vowelsμ low /a, ě/, low-mid /o, e/, high-mid /ь, ъ/, high /u, y, ü, (υ), i/.
15
In order to express the difference between /ǫ/ and /ǫ̈/, the digraph – i.e.
lished written language, unlike Greek or Latin.
Many speakers had a contrast between /ń, ĺ, ŕ/ and /n, l, r/. For a long time the
problem was met by underdifferentiation – meaning by doing nothing –, but
at some stage a diacritic was introduced to mark palatality. Underdifferentia-
tion and the use of diacritics were both novel principles, which had not been
part of C’s toolkit.
The letters , , and the difference between the two <x> letters corresponded
with nothing in Moravian or Bulgarian-Macedonian Slavic. The same holds
for <dz>, with the exception of part of the latter, notably the Ohrid area. The
function of expressing Slavic x gradually shifted from the spider ( ) to <x1>
( ). Eventually faded away, but its lengthy survival shows that the transi-
tion did not take place overnight. The spider was not continued in cyrillic.
The letter <dz>, which had a phonological counterpart in the language of at
least some speakers, is used – consistently or optionally – in most canonical
Bulgarian-Macedonian manuscripts, and lived on in cyrillic with a similar
optional status. The Kiev Folia use in a key borrowing from Greek (‘an-
gel’). That practice lived on in the “dritte Heimat”, but cyrillic did not adopt
it, preferring to extend the practice of using a diacritic to mark palatality,
which had arisen in glagolitic in the case of ḱ and x́. At some stage speakers
of Bulgarian-Macedonian Slavic reinterpreted the letter , which had been
threatening to go the way of the spider, as a means of writing the sequence
/št/, in accordance with their reflex of *tj. The use caught on and was contin-
The <i> and <o> doublets were largely redundant. In due course one member
ued in cyrillic.
No two changes were the same. In the case of some, as in that of the y digraphs,
users who introduced them are unlikely to have been aware of what they were
doing. Similarly, Moravian users may have perceived the two <x> letters right
from the start as just redundant members of a doublet, no different from the two
<o> letters. Understandably, phasing out letters that were redundant from a Mo-
ravian – etc. – perspective, such as or <dz>, did not happen overnight and man-
uscripts with pre-Moravian practices remained in circulation. In some cases this
made possible last-minute reprieves, as in the case of <dz> and , perhaps also
the nasal vowel . Contrasts not provided for by C because they happened not to
exist in Thessaloniki Slavic may have been ignored for a time, but at some point
some user would decide to express them in some way, which then would catch
on, no doubt because it made for easier reading aloud, which was the principal
activity for which the project had been undertaken in the first place. The problem
of /ǫ ~ ǫ̈/ was remedied on the example of the y digraphs (which had arisen spon-
taneously), that of /n ~ ń/ by using a diacritic, which was an innovation not clearly
18
modelled on Greek, where diacritics were redundant or marked the place of the
stress. The rise of the anomalous nasal element also shows that scribes started
experimenting at some stage with the use of diacritics to express phenomena that
were not prosodic.
No new letters were created at any stage, at least intentionally. The pe letter
and drifted apart by accident, after which the former dissolved into thin air.
The Greek writing system expressed all phonological contrasts present in the
contemporary language, thus encouraging thinking in terms of contrastive-
ness. In addition it contained a huge number of redundancies of various kinds
(letters, digraphs, diacritics). In both respects Greek differed from the Latin
system, which was far less redundant, but systematically ignored important
contrasts, inviting those who made writing systems on a Latin basis to do the
C knew one or two things about the writing systems of one or two other lan-
same.
guages that were accessible in Constantinople in his day if one looked for that
kind of thing, most obviously Hebrew, from which he took the shape of his
<šρ letter (Hebrew )ש.
All written languages of which C can reasonably have been aware – Greek,
Latin, Hebrew, Armenian, Arabic, ...– had alphabets of their own. Although
systems constructed on a foundation of Greek letters had existed (most prom-
inently Coptic and Gothic), that was long ago and they are unlikely to have
come to his notice. The chance that he had seen any writing systems on a
Latin basis – e.g. Old High German – is even slimmer. Against this back-
ground there would seem to be no need to assume that C had a specific mo-
acquired natively in Thessaloniki in the 830s and 840s. On historical and de-
mographic grounds it is as certain as anything that Thessaloniki had a sizea-
ble Slavic-speaking population at any given time between appr. 700 (if not
earlier) and 850 (if not later), so opportunities to acquire Slavic natively are
bound to have been plentiful there. Those who hold that C was monolingual
in Greek cannot account for his firm grasp of Slavic phonological contrasts
and his – and Methodios’s – ability to translate complex texts into more or
“C could read other languages than Greek.” The widespread assumption that
1984: 175-198, Bairoch 1985: 264-271.)
C has sometimes been credited with the possession of knowledge that did not
Pratsch 2005: 92-93.)
become available until long after his death. Trubetzkoy, for instance, ac-
counts for the y digraphs by attributing to C an awareness of the parallelism
of front and back vowels a full millennium before the rise of articulatory pho-
netics and structuralist thinking (Trubetzkoy 1954: 23-24). Other examples
could be given.
21
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