On the issue of the formation of the cyrillic alphabet: Some observations

Abstract

While making an indisputably relevant contribution to scholarship and Slavic culture, the discussions about the primacy of one or the other Slavic alphabet, Glagolitic or Cyrillic, and the presentations of their results or the elaborations on the issue that have ensued over the following decades, were very often burdened with stereotypes, errors and other shortcomings. A particularly peculiar case is the construction of an ideological narrative about inventing the Cyrillic alphabet at the behest of the Bulgarian prince, later Emperor Symeon, and its promotion as the official state and church alphabet at the Council of Preslav (893), which Angel Nikolov demonstrated to be unproven and questionable as a historical event, due to which anything related to it could not be verified. The hypothesis that Constantine the Philosopher (Cyril) followed the common patterns of Byzantine literacy of the time (primarily the practice of the Studite Monastery) to create a Slavic alphabet with two complementary graphical variants, Proto-Glagolitic and Proto-Cyrillic, should be taken seriously into consideration. To meet the need to simplify the complex model, but also to adapt it to the sensitivity of the Western Church, it had to be reduced to the Glagolitic alphabet, although the Cyrillic alphabet was also passively retained. Regardless of the sequence of creating the alphabets and the date when the Cyrillic alphabet was finally created, there are at least two cases where the presence of the Greek alphabet must be assumed. In the analysis and transcription of the Slavic phonological system, Constantine used the Greek alphabet. The created provisional Greek apparatus was the prototype of ?both? Slavic alphabets, and especially of the Cyrillic alphabet. Also, the process of introducing others to the Slavic alphabet and spreading literacy must have been accompanied by deciphering already in the initial stages, where, again, the Greek alphabet was used. Thus, it can be assumed that the creation of the Slavic-Greek and Slavic-Latin abecedaria as interpretative-mnemonic compositions is related to Constantine (863-869).