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An interactive walkthrough
The Cyrillic alphabet
Where the great Slavic script came from, how an emperor and an academy trimmed it, and why the Russian keyboard keeps its commonest letters under your strongest fingers. Three modules, about ten minutes; wander through them in any order.
He did invent an alphabet for the Slavs. It just was not this one. The script that carries his name was built by other hands, in another country, after he was dead.
Two brothers and a brand-new script
In 863 the Byzantine emperor sent two brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine and Methodius, on a mission to Great Moravia. For it, Constantine devised Glagolitic, the first alphabet ever made for a Slavic language: some forty letters of loops, circles and crosses that look like no other script on earth. Only on his deathbed in Rome, in 869, did Constantine take the monastic name Cyril.
So the myth starts from something true: Cyril really was the first person to give the Slavs an alphabet. Hold that thought while the plot moves to Bulgaria.
From Moravia to your phone
863Prince Rastislav of Great Moravia asks Byzantium for teachers who can preach in Slavic. Cyril and Methodius arrive, carrying Glagolitic.
869 · 885Cyril dies in Rome; Methodius dies in Moravia. Their students are expelled as Latin clergy reclaim the region.
886Boris I of Bulgaria takes the exiles in and sets them teaching. Literary schools grow at Preslav and Ohrid.
c. 900Around Preslav a second Slavic script emerges: Greek uncial letters for the shared sounds, new letters for the rest. It is named for the teacher: Cyrillic.
988Vladimir of Kiev adopts Christianity, and the script travels north into Rus.
2007Bulgaria joins the European Union, and Cyrillic becomes the Union's third official script, after Latin and Greek.
Eleven centuries in six lines. Now open the toolbox.
Where the letters came from
So who did build Cyrillic?
Cyril died in 869. The script named after him appears in Bulgaria around the year 900. Who made it?
His students' students. The scholars of the Preslav literary school, heirs of the expelled Moravian mission, built the new script from the Greek uncial letters they wrote every day and kept Glagolitic-derived signs for the sounds Greek could not spell. They named it in honour of the teacher.
Glagolitic did not die quietly: in Croatia it was still being carved and printed into the nineteenth century.
An alphabet named for a man who never wrote it. And it was about to meet an editor with absolute power.
Module 02
The tsar's red pen
Myth we'll unpick: "the alphabet the monks made is the one on screens today"
Between the monastery and your keyboard stand two great prunings: an emperor's, done with his own pen, and an academy's, finished by a revolution.
1708 · the civil script
Between 1708 and 1710 Peter the Great created the civil script (гражданский шрифт) for secular printing: letterforms redrawn to sit comfortably beside the Latin type of Western Europe, and several Greek-inherited letters struck out along with the thicket of accent marks above the line. Peter edited the proofs himself; a sheet with his own crossings-out survives. The first book off the press in the new type, in 1708, was a geometry textbook.
The Church kept the old letters, and Church Slavonic is still printed in them today. Among Peter's casualties for civil use: psi (ѱ) and omega (ѡ), Greek guests that Russian never needed.
Before Peter, numbers were letters
In manuscripts a wavy stroke called a titlo ran above the letters to mean "read me as a number"; here it is drawn as a plain line. Peter's reform swept the whole system away in favour of Arabic digits.
1918 · the academy's cut
The reform that finally deleted four letters was not a Bolshevik invention: it was drafted by the orthographic commission of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, first convened in 1904. The Provisional Government ordered the change in 1917, and the Soviet decree of October 1918 made it stick. Two words became one: миръ (peace) and міръ (world) collapsed into мир.
Tolstoy's title was always War and Peace (Война и миръ); the old spelling is exactly what lets you check the legend that it "really meant" War and the World.
Meet the deleted
Four letters gone, and the Russian alphabet settled at the 33 letters it has today. Now to lay them on a machine.
Module 03
Thirty-three keys
Myth we'll unpick: "ЙЦУКЕН is just QWERTY wearing Cyrillic"
The Russian keyboard is not a translation of the American one. It is a different answer to the same problem, and in one respect a plainly better one.
Named by its own top row
Typewriters fitted for Russian went on sale in the late nineteenth century, and the layout that won the market is the direct ancestor of every Russian keyboard since. Like QWERTY, its name is simply the top row read left to right: Й Ц У К Е Н. Machines built before 1918 carried keys for ѣ and і; when the spelling reform killed those letters, the reform reached into the hardware and the dead keys were reassigned.
Thirty-three letters in three rows leaves little room for anything else: on the standard Russian layout the full stop and the comma share a single key, at the far right of the bottom row.
Where the common letters live
the language's ten commonest lettersridged home keys, where the index fingers rest
The letter in exile
The youngest letter on the board sits alone in the far top-left corner: ё. Princess Yekaterina Dashkova, head of two academies, proposed it at a session of the Russian Academy in 1783; the writer Nikolai Karamzin helped carry it into print. Two centuries on its dots are still optional in most Russian text, required mainly in dictionaries and children's books, and the keyboard shrugs it off to the corner key QWERTY uses for the tilde.
The dots do real work when they appear: все means "everyone" and всё means "everything". Most printed text simply trusts you to know which is meant.
Now you read the board
The keyboard module put the ten commonest Russian letters under the strongest fingers, and one of them is the single commonest letter in the language. Your right index finger rests on it.
Which letter?
О.Its deskmate on QWERTY is j, one of the rarest letters in printed English. Same finger, opposite logic.
Before 1918, every Russian word ending in a consonant carried one extra letter that made no sound at all; typewriter keys and compositors' cases were built around it.
Which letter fell off the ends of words?
Ъ, the hard sign.It kept its quieter job inside words, where it still separates a prefix from a vowel, as in объект.
You met letter-numerals in Module 02: values simply add, and ҂ marks thousands. The converter's opening example is all the help you need.
What year is ҂аѱи?
1708.҂а is 1000, ѱ is 700, и is 8: the year Peter's geometry textbook came off the press in the new civil type.
Why this matters
An alphabet looks eternal and is anything but. Cyrillic was assembled by exiles from Greek capitals and missionary invention, pruned by an emperor's pen, trimmed by an academy, and finally sorted onto three rows of keys by the arithmetic of tired fingers. Every key on a Russian keyboard is a decision somebody made, and you can now read the reasons off the board.
Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Cyrillic alphabet" and "Saints Cyril and Methodius"; P. Cubberley, "The Slavic Alphabets", in Daniels and Bright (eds), The World's Writing Systems (Oxford, 1996); Decree on the introduction of the new orthography, Sovnarkom, 10 October 1918; Wikipedia, "Civil script", "Reforms of Russian orthography", "Cyrillic numerals", "JCUKEN" and "Yo (Cyrillic)"; letter-frequency ordering from published counts of the Russian National Corpus. Letterforms are shown in your system's fonts.