Cyrillic Script - Letters

Letters

Cyrillic script spread throughout the East and South Slavic territories, being adopted for writing local languages, such as the Old East Slavic. Its adaptation to local languages produced a number of Cyrillic alphabets, discussed hereafter.

Capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts.

Yeri (Ы) was originally a ligature of Yer and I (Ъ + I = Ы). Iotation was indicated by ligatures formed with the letter I: Ꙗ (not ancestor of modern Ya, Я, which is derived from Ѧ), Ѥ, Ю (ligature of I and ОУ), Ѩ, Ѭ. Many letters had variant forms and commonly used ligatures, for example И = І = Ї, Ѡ = Ѻ, ѠТ = Ѿ.

The letters also had numeric values, based not on Cyrillic alphabetical order, but inherited from the letters' Greek ancestors.

The early Cyrillic alphabet is difficult to represent on computers. Many of the letterforms differed from modern Cyrillic, varied a great deal in manuscripts, and changed over time. Few fonts include adequate glyphs to reproduce the alphabet. In accordance with Unicode policy, the standard does not include letterform variations or ligatures found in manuscript sources unless they can be shown to conform to the Unicode definition of a character.

The Unicode 5.1 standard, released on 4 April 2008, greatly improves computer support for the early Cyrillic and the modern Church Slavonic language.