Early Cyrillic Alphabet
The Cyrillic script was a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the tenth century, to write the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language. It was named after St Cyril, who with his brother Methodius had created the earlier Glagolitic Slavonic script. Cyrillic was based on Greek uncial script, and adopted Glagolitic letters for some sounds which were absent in Greek—it also had some letters which were only used almost exclusively for Greek words or for their numeric value: Ѳ, Ѡ, Ѱ, Ѯ, Ѵ.
The early Cyrillic alphabet was brought to Kievan Rus’ at the end of the first millennium, along with Christianity and the Old Church Slavonic language. The alphabet was adapted to the local spoken Old East Slavic language, leading to the development of indigenous East Slavic literary language alongside the liturgical use of Church Slavonic. The alphabet changed to keep pace with changes in language, as regional dialects developed into the modern Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian languages. Spoken Ukrainian has an unbroken history, but the literary language has suffered from two major historical fractures.
Various reforms of the alphabet by scholars of Church Slavonic, Ruthenian, and Russian languages caused the written and spoken word to diverge by varying amounts. Etymological rules from Greek and South Slavic languages made the orthography imprecise and difficult to master.
Meletiy Smotrytsky's Slavonic Grammar of 1619 was very influential on the use of Church Slavonic, and codified the use of the letters Я (ja), Е (e), and Ґ (g). Various Russian alphabet reforms were influential as well, especially Peter the Great's Russian Civil Script of 1708 (the Grazhdanka). It created a new alphabet specifically for non-religious use, and adopted Latin-influenced letterforms for type. The Civil Script eliminated some archaic letters (Ѯ, Ѱ, Ѡ, Ѧ), but reinforced an etymological basis for the alphabet, influencing Mykhaylo Maksymovych's nineteenth-century Galician Maksymovychivka script for Ukrainian, and its descendent, the Pankevychivka, which is still in use, in a slightly modified form, for the Rusyn language in Carpathian Ruthenia.
Read more about this topic: Ukrainian Alphabet, History
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