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Comment by Antibabelic

5 hours ago

Oddly, the article doesn't mention the most interesting part. Most scholars believe that Cyril and Methodius did not design Cyrillic, but instead something called Glagolitic.[0]

Glagolitic very quickly got pushed out by what were essentially Greek letters. If you look at Bulgarian and Byzantine manuscripts from the time, they are almost impossible to tell apart, unless you know the languages.

The reason for that is pretty obvious if you look at the Glagolitic letters themselves: they are horrible UX. You need a lot more strokes than for something like Greek or Latin to record the same information. Because Glagolitic was contrived and not polished with use over the centuries, there was very little reason to use it over Greek.

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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script

7 comments

Antibabelic

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matusp  3 hours ago

Cyrillic is probably a successor to Glagolitic. Glagolitic was the first Slavic alphabet, but when they tried to use it in Bulgaria, it had all the UX problems you mentioned. What they did is replace most of the characters with their Greek counterparts, while keeping the Glagolitic writing system and some of the characters with no counterparts. Bulgaria was close to Byzantium, and people were more likely to know and use Greek letters already. Nevertheless, Cyril and Methodius should still get some recognition, as the shape of the letters is not as important as having the system to write down the Slavic language into letters.

culebron21  4 hours ago

Interestingly, it was also a derivative of Greek, but the cursive version. It's harder to write, but apart from that, I like it. Ⱂⱃⰺⰲⰵⱅ, ⱂⰺⱎⰺⱅⰵ Ⰳⰾⰰⰳⱁⰾⰺⱌⰵⰻ!