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Some more pondering about Glagolitic, a thread, but maybe you will find it interesting.
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Since we might be using different notions of the terms alphabet, similarity, writing, and script, I will try to unpack that. There are questions of origin/evolution and similarity of: (a) the systematic mapping of graphemes to phonemes and of (b) the visual appearance.
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1. Glagolitic is the first known writing system used by any Slavic language. It is possible they Macedonian Slavs used Greek before that.
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2. It has been established that Glagolitic predates Cyrillic. Interestingly, there are palimpsests with Cyrillic superimposed over Glagolitic, but none in the other direction.
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3. Glagolitic seems to have been derived from minuscule/cursive Greek letters with additions (probably by Constantin) for sounds/phonemes specific to Old Slavic (Old Church Slavonic), e.g. ts/c,č,š,ž. The Greek-derived shapes have marked ornamentation compared to the minuscule.
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4. When the script got banned in Moravia and the disciples of Constantin and Methodius fled, some of them ended up in Bulgaria where Cyrillic developed.
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5. Based on the visual similarities, Cyrillic seems based on the simpler Greek capitals/majuscule for the Greek sounds and, also simplified, Glagolitic for the Slavic sounds.
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6. Should we call Glagolitic or Cyrillic the versions of Greek (or anything older). I don’t think so. They are different both in the systematic mapping of the phonemes (there are more of them) and visually.
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7. Can we call Cyrillic a simplification of Glagolitic? I think so. The phonetic mapping is almost identical. They are visually distinct: the Greek letters use the simpler capital construction (see 5 above) where the Slavic letters use the simplified Glagolitic letters.
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8. In Old-Church-Slavonic Cyrillic there are two Greek letters that are not in Glagolitic (ksi, psi). I do not know what to think about that., but I don’t think that this addition makes Cyrillic a different beast altogether.
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9. As mentioned before, Cyrillic and Glagolitic were not distinguished by name until much later after their introduction. It seems to me that the term “style” is closer to their use at the time: two styles of the same script.
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10. Today, Unicode considers these two different scripts as that reflects the contemporary convention.
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I claim no expertise in this, but I hope you will take this _theory_ into consideration. As with my original tweet, it certainly challenges our immediate ideas of where things and ideas come from.
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Main reference: Cubberley, P. *The Slavic Alphabets* In: Daniels, PR & Bright W. The world’s writing systems, 1996. For visuals, see Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_minuscule