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Russian-Cyrillic alphabet
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А | Б | В | Г | Д | Е | Ж | Ѕ | З | И | І |
К | Л | М | Н | О | П | Ҁ | Р | С | Т | Ѹ |
Ф | Х | Ѡ | Ц | Ч | Ш | Щ | Ъ | Ꙑ | Ь | Ѣ |
Ꙗ | Ѥ | Ю | Ѧ | Ѫ | Ѩ | Ѭ | Ѯ | Ѱ | Ѳ | Ѵ |
Capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts.
Yeri (Ы) was originally a ligature of Yer and I (Ꙑ). Iotation was indicated by ligatures formed with the letter I: Ꙗ (ancestor of modern ya, я), Ѥ, Ю (ligature of I and ОУ), Ѩ, Ѭ. Many letters had variant forms and commonly used ligatures, for example И=І=Ї, Ѡ=Ѻ, Оу ⁄ ОУ=Ѹ, ѠТ=Ѿ.
The letters also had numeric values, based not on the native Cyrillic alphabetical order, but inherited from the letters' Greek ancestors.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
А | В | Г | Д | Е | Ѕ | З | И | Ѳ |
10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 60 | 70 | 80 | 90 |
І | К | Л | М | Н | Ѯ | О | П | Ч |
100 | 200 | 300 | 400 | 500 | 600 | 700 | 800 | 900 |
Р | С | Т | Ѵ | Ф | Х | Ѱ | Ѡ | Ц |
The early Cyrillic alphabet is difficult to represent on computers. Many of the letterforms differed from modern Cyrillic, varied a great deal in manuscripts, and changed over time. Few fonts include adequate glyphs to reproduce the alphabet. In accordance with Unicode policy, the standard does not include letterform variations or ligatures found in manuscript sources unless they can be shown to conform to the Unicode definition of a character.
The Unicode 5.1 standard, released on 4 April 2008, greatly improves computer support for the early Cyrillic and the modern Church Slavonic language.
The development of Cyrillic typography passed directly from the medieval stage to the late Baroque, without a Renaissance phase as inWestern Europe. Late Medieval Cyrillic letters (still found on many icon inscriptions even today) show a marked tendency to be very tall and narrow; strokes are often shared between adjacent letters.
Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, mandated the use of westernized letter forms in the early eighteenth century. Over time, these were largely adopted in the other languages that use the alphabet. Thus, unlike the majority of modern Greek fonts that retained their own set of design principles for their lower case letters (such as the placement of serifs, the shapes of stroke ends, and stroke-thickness rules, although Greek capital letters do use Latin design principles), modern Cyrillic fonts are much the same as modern Latin fonts of the same font family. The development of some Cyrillic computer typefaces from Latin ones has also contributed to the visual Latinization of Cyrillic type.
Cyrillic uppercase and lowercase letterforms are not as differentiated as in Latin typography. Upright Cyrillic lowercase letters are essentiallysmall capitals (with exceptions: Cyrillic а, е, p, and y adopted Western lowercase shapes, lowercase ф is typically designed under the influence of Latin p, lowercase б is a traditional handwritten form), although a good-quality Cyrillic typeface will still include separate small-caps glyphs.
Cyrillic fonts, as well as Latin ones, have roman and italic type (practically all popular modern fonts include parallel sets of Latin and Cyrillic letters, where many glyphs, uppercase as well as lowercase, are simply shared by both). However, the native font terminology in Slavic languages (for example, in Russian) does not use the words "roman" and "italic" in this sense. Instead, the nomenclature follows German naming patterns:
Similarly to Latin fonts, italic and cursive types of many Cyrillic letters (typically lowercase; uppercase only for hand-written or stylish types) are very different from their upright roman types. In certain cases, the correspondence between uppercase and lowercase glyphs does not coincide in Latin and Cyrillic fonts: for example, italic Cyrillic m is the lowercase counterpart of T rather than M.
As in Latin typography, a sans-serif face may have a mechanically sloped oblique type (naklonniy shrift—"sloped," or "slanted type") instead of italic.
A boldfaced type is called poluzhirniy shrift ("semi-bold type"), because there existed fully boldfaced shapes which are out of use since the beginning of the twentieth century.
A bold italic combination (bold slanted) does not exist for all font families.
In Serbian, as well as in Macedonian and Bulgarian, some italic and cursive letters are different from those used in other languages. These letter shapes are often used in upright fonts as well, especially for advertisements, road signs, inscriptions, posters and the like, less so in newspapers or books. The Cyrillic lowercase б has a slightly different design both in the roman and italic types, which is similar to the lowercase Greek letter Delta, δ.
The following table shows the differences between the upright and italic Cyrillic letters as used in Russian. Italic forms significantly different from their roman analogues, or especially confusing to users of the Latin alphabet, are highlighted.
а | б | в | г | д | е | ё | ж | з | и | й | к | л | м | н | о | п | р | с | т | у | ф | х | ц | ч | ш | щ | ъ | ы | ь | э | ю | я |
а | б | в | г | д | е | ё | ж | з | и | й | к | л | м | н | о | п | р | с | т | у | ф | х | ц | ч | ш | щ | ъ | ы | ь | э | ю | я |
Note: in some fonts or styles small cursive Cyrillic д (д) may look like Latin g and small cursive Cyrillic т (т) may look exactly like a capital cursive T (T), only small.
Sounds are indicated using the IPA. These are only approximate indicators. While these languages by and large have phonemic orthographies, there are occasional exceptions-for example, Russian его (yego, 'him/his'), which is pronounced [jɪˈvo] instead of *[jɪˈɡo].
Note that transliterated spellings of names may vary, especially y/j/i, but also gh/g/h and zh/j.
The first alphabet partly derived from Cyrillic is Abur, applied to the Komi language. Other writing systems derived from Cyrillic were applied to Caucasian languages and the Molodtsov alphabet for Komi language.
A number of languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet have also been written in the Latin alphabet, such as Serbo-Croatian, Azerbaijani,Uzbek and Moldavian. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, official status shifted in some of the former republics from Cyrillic to Latin. The transition is complete in most of Moldova (except Transnistria, where Cyrillic is official) and Azerbaijan, but Uzbekistan still uses both systems. Russia mandated that Cyrillic be used for all public communications to try to bring them closer to Russia's statehood. This act was controversial for speakers of many Slavic languages; with many, such as Chechen and Ingush, the law had political ramifications. For example, the separatist Chechen government mandated a Latin script (which, in fact, is noted by many observers such as Johanna Nicholsto be a much better representation of the language), and is still used by many Chechens. Those in the diaspora especially refuse to adopt the Cyrillic alphabet, which they associate with Russian imperialism.
Serbia also uses both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, but by Article 10 of the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia, the Cyrillic alphabet was made official.
There are various systems for Romanization of Cyrillic text, including transliteration to convey Cyrillic spelling in Latin characters, andtranscription to convey pronunciation.
Standard Cyrillic-to-Latin transliteration systems include:
See also Romanization of Belarusian, Bulgarian, Kyrgyz, Russian, Macedonian and Ukrainian.
Representing other writing systems with Cyrillic letters is called Cyrillization.
In Unicode 5.1, letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, including national and historical varieties, are represented by four blocks:
The characters in the range U+0400 to U+045F are basically the characters from ISO 8859-5 moved upward by 864 positions. The characters in the range U+0460 to U+0489 are historic letters, not used now. The characters in the range U+048A to U+052F are additional letters for various languages that are written with Cyrillic script.
Unicode as a general rule does not include accented Cyrillic letters. Few exceptions are:
To indicate stressed or long vowels, combining diacritical marks can be used after respective letter (for example, "combining acute accent" U+0301: ы́ э́ ю́ я́ etc.).
Some languages, including Church Slavonic, are still not fully supported.
Unicode 5.1, released on 4 April 2008, introduces major changes to the Cyrillic blocks. Revisions to the existing Cyrillic blocks, and the addition of Cyrillic Extended A (2DE0...2DFF) and Cyrillic Extended B (A640...A69F), significantly improve support for the early Cyrillic alphabet, Abkhaz, Aleut, Chuvash, Kurdish, and Mordvin.
Punctuation for Cyrillic text is similar to that used in European Latin-alphabet languages.
Other character encoding systems for Cyrillic:
Each language has its own standard keyboard layout, adopted from typewriters. With the flexibility of computer input methods, there are also transliterating or phonetic/homophonic keyboard layouts made for typists who are more familiar with other layouts, like the common English qwerty keyboard. When practical Cyrillic keyboard layouts or fonts are not available, computer users sometimes use transliteration or look-alike "volapuk" encoding to type languages which are normally written with the Cyrillic alphabet.
See Keyboard layouts for non-Roman alphabetic scripts.
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