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480
THE ALPHABET
b and sh, were probably modifications of other Greek letters, the nasal vowel-sounds a and e (a, e) were perhaps formed from the letter a. Some other Cyrillic letters, "mostly it appears subsequent developments," as Sir Ellis Minns has rightly suggested, are simple ligatures and combinations; placed either in the logical order of the alphabet (for instance sht, the combination of sh and t; or ou, formed by the ligature of o and u) or
37. S.GOUTSVED. "/Liberto-desno. 37...
no314077:
крака воладный андрђави? По Votal Baccan, muse to himmend
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2.
prrempo porgasaras wir uns very funamnand,
Rota Type X Jan (7m 1939 6 7 Ret
ая
Th
Fig. 216 Specimens of Cyrillic cursive writing
1, Cryptic annotation in a manuscript of the sixteenth century A.D. 2, Cursive writing. 1555. 3, Cursive variety of 1562. 4, Manuscript, 1668
towards the end of the alphabet, where ya, ye, yo, ya, ye are combinations of a short y with the vowel-signs a, o, and so forth. Some Cyrillic letters, on the other hand, appear to have been arbitrary inventions.
The Cyrillic alphabet developed, with slight modifications, in course of time into the national scripts of the Slavonic peoples who accepted their religion from Byzantium, that is the Bulgarians, the Russians, the
