Relationship of Cyrillic and Glagolitic Scripts - Question of Precedence

Question of Precedence

The theory of chronological precedence of Glagolitic script with regard to Cyrillic has been first put forth by G. Dobner in 1785, but ever since Pavel Jozef Šafárik's 1857 study of Glagolitic monuments Über den Urspung und die Heimat des Glagolitismus there has been a virtual consensus in the academic circles that the Glagolitic was the script Constantine (Cyril) devised, rather than Cyrillic. This view is supported by numerous linguistic, paleographic and historical accounts.

1. The reason why Greek-derived Cyrillic script spread so quickly in the lands of Slavia Orthodoxa is because it had the benefit of replacing an alphabet that was specifically designed to fit the sound system of Slavic speech. This leads to the conclusion that Cyrillic was but a mere transliteration of older Glagolitic alphabet. As a comparison, Slavic lands using the Latin alphabet (West Slavic languages, as well as Slovene and Croatian) took long to adapt Roman alphabet systematically for their local needs, inventing special digraphs and diacritics for Slavic phonemes only with the advent of printing in the 16th century.
2. Glagolitic monuments are significantly smaller in number, which suggests that the writing tradition which introduced them was subsequently replaced by a younger tradition, more vigorous and voluminous in output.
3. Generally, Glagolitic monuments of the Old Church Slavonic canon are older than their Cyrillic counterparts.
4. The most archaic features of OCS canon monuments (e.g. the uncontracted and unassimilated endings of definite adjective forms -aego, -aago, -aemu, -aamu, -uemu, -uumu as opposed to contracted forms in Sava's book; 2nd and 3rd person dual imperfect endings -šeta, -šete are common in the Glagolitic monuments as opposed to the -sta, -ste in the Cyrillic monuments; younger, sigmatic aorist is not attested at all in the Glagolitic monuments which otherwise preserve much more morphological archaisms) are generally much more frequent in Glagolitic than in Cyrillic part of the canon. The evidence of pre-Moravian-mission phonetics Glagolitic alphabet was devised for and which it indirectly reflects, characteristic of the phonological system of a South Slavic Macedonian dialect in a specific timeframe of the late 9th century—the đerv, št and dzelo, and which are present in Glagolitic monuments either exclusively or predominantly, further corroborates their antiquity over Cyrillic in which these sounds are absent or changed by means of sound changes assumed to have occurred in the later period.
5. Of surviving (Old) Church Slavonic palimpsests, the tendency has been to write Glagolitic over Glagolitic, Cyrillic over Glagolitic, Cyrillic over Cyrillic, but never Glagolitic over Cyrillic. All extant palimpsests are written in Cyrillic, and modern photographic analysis has shown a previous layer of Glagolitic letters.
6. Some Cyrillic monuments of the canon contain occasional Glagolitic letters, words, or even sentences, all written by the hand of the same scribe. Adversely, Cyrillic words or letters found in the Glagolitic monuments are provably later additions.
7. Cyrillic glosses are present in Glagolitic MSS, but not the other way around.
8. Some scribal errors in Cyrillic monuments indicate that the Cyrillic MS has been copied from Glagolitic original. For example, in Sava's book one can find a form ѫзоікомъ instead of ѫзꙑкомъ. If we assume that the text has been copied from the Glagolitic template, the scribal error becomes much more clear: оі is written in Glagolitic as ⰑⰊ, while ꙑ is written as ⰟⰊ. Similarity of Glagolitic graphemes Ⱏ and Ⱁ has caused an obvious spelling mistake.
9. The numerical value of Glagolitic letters is an orderly progression in agreement with the sequence of letters in the alphabet. On the other hand, the Cyrillic script simply follows the Greek numerical usage and does not assign numerical values at all to certain non-Greek letters (b, ž, št, š, y, ĕ, ь, ъ). Moreover, Cyrillic script had the so-called episemons, graphemes whose sole purpose was the notation of numerals. Therefore, most Glagolitic and Cyrillic numerals are represented by different letters of the alphabet. Furthermore, discerned scribal errors indicate the transposition from Glagolitic numeral system into Cyrillic, and not the other way around.
10. Glagolitic monuments contain much higher number of untranslated Greek words, which indicates that they're the ones preserving the original text of the translation conducted by Constantine. Furthermore, Glagolitic monuments contain many errors in terms of unsuccessfully translated phrases, while such places in Cyrillic monuments have been significantly rectified.
11. The style of the Glagolitic monuments is often unclear and hardly intelligible, sometimes almost completely unintelligible without the Greek original (e.g. a series of pages in the Glagolita Clozianus). This should point to their antiquity, the very outset of Slavic literacy, when there was no skill in translation.
12. The relation between the Glagolitic monuments in Moravia and those in the Balkans is best explained by presuming expansion of the Glagolites tradition from Moravia, before the 10th century when the Magyar-German wedge separated Western from Southern Slavs.