Relationship of Cyrillic and Glagolitic scripts
As the 9th-century missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius undertook their mission to evangelize to the Slavs of Great Moravia, two writing systems were developed: Glagolitic and Cyrillic. Both scripts were based on the Greek alphabet and share commonalities, but the exact nature of relationship between the Glagolitic alphabet and the Early Cyrillic alphabet, their order of development, and influence on each other has been a matter of great study, controversy, and dispute in Slavic studies. Glagolitic precedence The theory that Glagolitic script was created before Cyrillic was first put forth by G. Dobner in 1785, and since Pavel Jozef Šafárik's 1857 study of Glagolitic monuments, Über den Ursprung und die Heimat des Glagolitismus, there has been a virtual consensus in the academic circles that St. Cyril developed the Glagolitic alphabet, rather than the Cyrillic. This view is supported by numerous linguistic, paleographic, and historical accounts. Points that support this view include: The Greek-derived Cyrillic script spread quickly across the Slavia Orthodoxa lands because it replaced the Glagolitic alphabet, which was designed to fit the sound system of Slavic speech. By comparison, the West Slavic languages, as well as Slovene and Croatian, took a longer time to adapt the Roman alphabet to their local needs with special digraphs and diacritics for Slavic phonemes becoming accepted only with the advent of printing in the 16th century. There are significantly fewer Glagolitic monuments, suggesting that the new writing system was replaced by a newer system that was more vigorous and voluminous in output. Old Church Slavonic canon monuments written in Glagolitic script are generally older than their Cyrillic counterparts. The most archaic features of Old Church Slavonic canon monuments (e.g., the uncontracted and unassimilated endings of definite adjective forms -aego, -aago, -aemu, -aamu, -uemu, -uumu as opposed to contracted forms; second- and third-person dual imperfect endings -šeta, -šete as opposed to the -sta, -ste in Cyrillic monuments; sigmatic aorist is not attested in Glagolitic monuments, which otherwise preserve more morphological archaisms) are generally much more common in Glagolitic than in Cyrillic canon. The evidence of pre-Moravian-mission phonetics the Glagolitic alphabet was devised for and which it indirectly reflects, characteristic of the phonological system of a South Slavic Macedonian dialect in a specific timeframe of the late 9th century, the đerv, št and dzelo, and are present in Glagolitic monuments either exclusively or predominantly, further corroborates their antiquity over Cyrillic in which these sounds are absent or changed by means of sound changes assumed to have occurred in the later period. Of surviving Old Church Slavonic palimpsests, the observed tendency is for Glagolitic or Cyrillic to be written over Glagolitic, or Cyrillic over Cyrillic, but never Glagolitic over Cyrillic. All extant palimpsests are written in Cyrillic and modern photographic analysis has shown a previous layer of Glagolitic letters. Some Cyrillic canon monuments contain occasional Glagolitic letters, words or sentences, all of which are written by the hand of the same scribe. Conversely, Cyrillic words or letters found in the Glagolitic monuments are seen as