Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 476

THE GREEK ALPHABET AND ITS OFFSHOOTS 475
1913-1915: Om Codex Argenteus, Uppsala, 1928; and A. Grape, Introduction to Codex Argenteus Upsaliensis (A facsimile reproduction), Uppsala, 1928.
W. Streitberg, Die gotische Bibel etc., 2nd ed., Heidelberg, 1919-1928.
F. L. Stamm and M. Heyne, Ulfilas oder die uns erhaltenten Denkmaler der gatischen Sprache, 14th ed., Paderbom, 1920.
M. H. Jellinek, Geschichte der gotischen Sprache, Berlin and Leipsic, 1926. E. Kieckers, Handbuch der vergleichenden gotischen Grammatik, Munich,
1928,
E. Hermann, in "NACHRICHTEN DER GESELLSCHAFT ZU GETTINGEN, 1930
Early Slavonic Alphabets
(Fig. 212-218) Much more important than the preceding alphabets were the two early Slavonic alphabets, the Cyrillic and the Glagolitic.
The name "Old Slavonie" is applied to the literary language which was employed by the brothers St. Cyril (the ecclesiastical name of Constantine, the more learned and literary of the two brothers), b. ca, 826, d. 869, and St. Methodius, b. ca. 815. d. 885, and their disciples. The brothers were Greeks from Salonica, and they became the Apostles of the Southern Slavs, whom they converted to Christianity. Other terms are also used to denote the language: it is known as Old Church Slavonic or Old Bulgarian or Pannonian Slavonie, and in the indigenous documents of the ninth-tenth centuries A.1). simply as slovenskij jezyku, the "Slovene" or Slavonic language, but none of these terms is exact; they indicate either too much or too little. Thus "Old Slavonie" would include also the other languages spoken by Slavonic peoples in ancient times; Ecclesiastical Slavonic," or "Old Church Slavonic," would not include profane literature and vulgar speech; "Pannonian Slavonic" would be too restricted in place, and "Old Bulgarian" would indicate not a Slavonic speech, but a Turkic language, since the early Bulgarians were a Turki tribe who ar the end of the seventh century A.B. immigrated into the Slavonic country called nowadays Bulgaria. At the same time each term describes to a certain extent the language in question, which was the speech of early Slavonic peoples, living approximately near Salonica, in Macedonia, und the neighbouring regions; the language, while it provided a liturgical vehicle for the early Slavonic Church, yet belonged so the group which nowadays includes the Bulgarian language. It is now a dead language, except as still read in the churches.
The earliest old Slavonic documents (Fig. 215) belong to the end of the tenth and to the eleventh centuries A.D. There is a funerary inscription of 993. All the other early documents are religious manuscripts.
The two alphabets, the Cyrillic and the Glagolitic, employed for the early Slavonic language, differed widely in the form of their letters and in the history of their development, and partly also in the number of the letters, but they were alike in representing adequately the many sounds of the Slavonic language and were richer than any other European alphabet.