Who invented cyrillic

There are data that he first used the civil script letters, which later Peter I of Russia introduced in Various alphabet reforms were influential in Ukraine, besides Peter the Great's civil script of the Grazhdanka , which influenced Mykhaylo Maksymovych's nineteenth-century Galician Maksymovychivka script, and its descendent, the Pankevychivka , which is still in use, in a slightly modified form, for the Rusyn language in Carpathia Ruthenia.

Several other reforms attempted to introduce a phonemic Ukrainian orthography during the nineteenth century, based on the example of Vuk Karadzhich's Serbian Cyrillic. In Galicia, the Polish-dominated local government tried to introduce a Latin alphabet for Ukrainian, which backfired by prompting a heated War of the Alphabets , bringing the issue of orthography into the public eye.

The Cyrillic script was favoured, but conservative Ukrainian cultural factions the Old Ruthenians and Russophiles opposed publications which promoted a pure Ukrainian orthography. It was a personal union of the Russian part of Poland with the Russian Empire. It was gradually politically integrated into Russia over the course of the 19th century, made an official part of the Russian Empire in , and finally replaced during the Great War by the Central Powers in with the theoretically existing Regency Kingdom of Poland.

Though officially the Kingdom of Poland was a state with considerable political autonomy guaranteed by a liberal constitution, its rulers, the Russian Emperors, generally disregarded any restrictions on their power. Thus effectively it was little more than a puppet state of the Russian Empire. The Cyrillic script was used for short period during the Congress Poland era because required by Russian law.

In the middle of the 19th century, the Russian Tsar Nicholas I tried to replace the Polish Latin alphabet with the Cyr i llic one but the effort was not successful. Here is a sample text of that time:. Another variant of the same text:. Muravyov forbade printing in Latin letters for the Lithuanians, and everything had to be printed in Cyrillic up to However, it was used mainly for religious purposes — for creation of orthodox texts and dictionaries.

Works of national literatures were not created. The first Erzya religious texts appeared in In , a Primer was printed, too. A Gospel of John in the Moksha language was published in the modern alphabet was created in the second half of the 18 th century.

In the 19th century, a few books were published in Karelian using the Cyrillic script , too, notably A Translation of some Prayers and a Shortened Catechism into North Karelian and Olonets Aunus dialects in , and the G ospel of St. Matthew in South Karelian Tver dialect, in While the people in Croatia used the Latin and to some extent the Glagolitic alphabet , and in Bosnia even books in the Arabic script appeared during the th centuries, in Serbia the literary language was the Church Slavonic and its variant, the Serbian-Slavonic.

At the beginning of the 19 th century, Sava Mrkal simplified significantly the Serbian Cyrillic script the Russian Civil script was accepted first in that country. After that reform, the Serbian Cyrillic script was called after Karadzhich: vukovitsa. In , the so-called Vienna Literary Agreement was signed. A Lithuanian Cyrillic text from Source: Wikipedia. A modern Mongolian banknote Source: Wikipedia. A Serbian-Slavonic magazine Source: Wikipedia. The Serbian grammar written by Karadzhich Source: Wikipedia.

Printed books from Russia and Serbia came to that country, spreading the Russian and Serbian influence. At that period, Neofit Rilski and Ivan Momchilov completed several grammar works. In , the Cossack ataman Yermak Timofeyevich conquered the capital of the Siberian Tatar Khanate, and thus began the Siberian conquest.

It took a long time ; for example, the Chukchi people fought about years against the Russian invasion but finally surrendered by the end of the 19 th century the conquest of Middle Asia — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.

The Russian explorers even reached Alaska, which became a Russian territory, governed from to by the Russian-American Company, based in Irkutsk Siberia.

In , a Russian fortress was even built on the Hawaii islands but the idea of making that archipelago a Russian territory was given up.

Otherwise, even the people there could have used the Cyrillic alphabet. Later, attempts were made to publish books for the Siberian Tatars and the Buryats not only in Arabic and Old Mongol scripts but in Cyrillic letters, too. However, the native Siberian peoples did not like Christianity, and the printed materials were scarce — usually only the missionary had a single book, and the local people themselves could never see it. Only the situation among Buryats was a little better. At the end ot the 19 th century, and at the beginning of the 20th, a Russian missionary, St.

Unfortunately, there is no proof of attempts having been made to introduce the Cyrillic alphabet in that country. H owever, a system for Cyrillic transcription for the Japanese language, called Rosiadzi or Kiridzi , was created in by E. Bateman, who wanted to make it easier for Hungarians to learn Russian as a second language. The Russians sold Alaska to the Americans in However their culture, religion, and alphabet stayed there, among the native peoples the Aleut, the Inuit or Eskimos, and the Tlingit , and even were better accepted than in Siberia where the influence of Islam and Buddhism was strong.

In the Yupik Eskimo dialect, the word for a white person is still Kass'aq , a derivative of Cossack. At the end of the 19 th and at the beginning of the 20 th century, religious Cyrillic books were published in Aleut, Yupik, and Tlingit first, in the old medieval script.

Some of them did not have writing systems before see further ; others used the Mongolian the Buryats , the Arabic the Tatars, the Avars, the Kazakh , the Georgian the Abkhaz, part of the Ossetians or the Greek scripts the Alans or Ossetians, the Gagauz.

An Aleut Gospel with a parallel Russian text Source: www. A Tlingit Orthodox text with explanation in Russian Source: www. Many languages in Russia changed their alphabets several times in the 20 th century. For example, in the s, the Komi language was written with the Molodtsov alphabet, derived from Cyrillic. It was replaced by the Latin alphabet in which was accepted for a short period by many other peoples , and later by the Cyrillic alphabet in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

For Karelian, a number of Cyrillic-based spelling systems were developed during the Soviet period, though none of them took off due to Stalin's suppression and outlawing of Karelian. Some of the languages are already extinct. Ter Sami which used the Cyrillic alphabet after the Second World War , in the northeast of the Kola Peninsula in Russia in was spoken only by two people. The rapid decline in the number of speakers was caused by Soviet collectivization , during which use of the language was prohibited in schools in the s.

Ukraine enjoyed a brief period of independence from to when an official Ukrainian orthography was accepted , then it was taken over by the USSR and declared a Soviet Republic. A standardized Ukrainian orthography and method for transliterating foreign words were established, a compromise between Galician and Soviet proposals, called the Kharkiv Orthography, or Skrypnykivka , after Ukrainian Commissar of Education Mykola Skrypnyk.

It was the first universally-adopted native Ukrainian orthography. However, in , the orthographic reforms were abolished, decrees were passed to bring the orthography steadily closer to Russian. An official orthography was published in Ki e v in , with revisions in and This orthography is sometimes called Postyshivka , after Pavel Postyshev, Stalin's Russian official who oversaw the dismantling of Ukrainization.

In the meantime, the Skrypnykivka continued to be used by Ukrainians in Galicia and the diaspora worldwide. A revised orthography was published in Ukraine declared independence in Some linguists treat it as a distinct language; others treat it as a dialect of Ukrainian. During the early 20th century, many Belarusian publications were printed in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.

After the Soviet invasion of eastern Belorussia in , the Cyrillic alphabet became the only alphabet used in official writings. Meanwhile, in western Belorusssia, the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets continued to coexist, though after the majority of publications were printed in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Belorussian Classical Orthography or Tarashkievitsa is a variant of the orthography of the Belorussian language, based on the literary norm of the modern Belorusian language, the first normalization of which was made by B.

Since , Tarashkievica has been used only informally in Belorussia and by Belorussian diaspora abroad since the legitimacy of the reform of grammar in was adopted neither by certain political groups in West Belorussia, nor by the emigrants, who left thecountry after During the Perestroika period of the late s, the movement for the return of Tarashkievica in Belorussia was initiated.

Belorussia gained independence in In , with the publishing of the Belorussian Classical Orthography, the modern normalization of Tarashkievica was made. This proposal was adopted by some media, including the Belorussian Wikipedia. In fact, two Belorussian orthographies are used today. In the s, attempts were made for standardizing the West Polesian micro language — a transitional form between Belorussian and Ukrainian.

The historical Romanian Cyrillic alphabet was used in Moldova until A version of the Cyrillic alphabet was used in the Soviet Republic of Moldova from , and from until except The standard alphabet now is Latin. However, the Cyrillic alphabet is still used [update] in Transnistria.

The official languages there are Russian , Ukrainian , and Moldavian with Cyrillic alphabet. In the 10th century, the Arabs called the Caucasus The mountain of the languages due to the numerous languages spoken there in some cases, it is difficult to differentiate between a language and a dialect.

Some of the peoples in the region, such as the Avars, used the Arabic letters as early as the 11th century AD; others, such as the Abkhaz, made attempts to write with Georgian letters. Excluding Georgian and Armenian, most languages in the Caucasus use or have used the Cyrillic alphabet in the 20 t h century. For instance, u ntil , Kumyk also was written with the Arabic alphabet. Between and , it was written with the Latin alphabet, and with the Cyrillic alphabet since then.

However, a Cyrillic Catechism was printed in Ossetic much earlier — in In this Indo-Iranian people used the Latin script. Later, since , the Northern Ossetians have been using the Cyrillic, and the South Ossetians used the Georgian script up to , and then changed to Cyrillic, too. Alongside with major languages, like Azeri, and to less extent, Chechen or Ossetic, there are languages spoken in only one village. For example, Archi is a Northeast Caucasian language with about speakers in the village of Archi in the Dagestan.

Some of the languages even have no standard written form — the Dagestanian Akhvakh. It is used mainly in homes, while Avar and Russian are used elsewhere. Since the s a number of linguistics studies of Akhvakh have been undertaken, and a few texts in Akhvakh have been published including a collection of stories in In the 20 th century, the Caucasian Ubykh language and the Indo-European Kilit became extinct, the latter being similar to Talysh, which is still spoken by a small population.

Although the creation of Cyryllic based alphabets for the native Caucasian and Asian peoples wa s a great achievement for Russian linguists, these alphabets are not quite successful, and in many cases the creators deliberately designated one sound by different signs in different variants of the same language Kabardian and Adyghe, for instance. Almost all native languages in Siberia use the Cyrillic alphabet although for some of them it was invented after the s, and most of them are close to extinction excluding widespread languages like Yakut or Even.

Ket is the last surviving member of the Yenisei family of languages, and is spoken by about people along the Yenisei River and its tributaries in Central Siberia.

Its Cyrillic-based system was developed in the s by G. In Russia, the first reformer of the Cyrillic was printer and publisher Ivan Fyodorov. Most reforms saw the number of letters decrease and the simplicity of their inscription increase.

The Cyrillic alphabet achieved its current form in during the reign of Peter the Great. He introduced lower case characters before all letters were written with capital letters and mandated the use of westernized letter forms, making the modern Cyrillic similar to the modern Latin font. The very existence of the Cyrillic alphabet in Russia was once under threat. It is still used by the Church. The introduction of the civil Russian alphabet made it possible for Russian books to look like European ones.

It became much easier to get new booked printed using printing machines from Western Europe. The Geometry text book issued in was the first book printed in the civil Russian alphabet. In Russia they also started to use Arabic numerals after the reform. Before that, the letters from the Cyrillic alphabet were used instead of numerals.

The next significant reform happened only in the beginning of the 20 th century, in , although the preparation for it started much earlier. After this reform the Russian alphabet got rid of several letters, and it started to look like it looks now. In the 20 th century linguists created written languages for numerous indigenous ethnic groups residing on the USSR territory on the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet. Therefore, the Cyrillic alphabet is used by quite a few languages.

As the official alphabet the Cyrillic is used in a lot of Slavic and non-Slavic states, for example, Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Kazakhstan, etc.

If you have any questions while reading the article, you are welcome to leave them in the comments. Travel Guides.

Videos Beyond Hollywood Hungerlust Pioneers of love. Maria Angelova. Why was the Cyrillic script invented? Who created the Cyrillic script? Who writes in Cyrillic letters today? Give us feedback. Read Next View. Orpheus Apartments. No13 Boutique House.