User:Mzajac/Slavic letter names

English-language citations of Cyrillic and Glagolitic letter names

1. • 1848, “Mithridates Minor”, in Church of England Quarterly Review, v 24, London: William Edward Painter, p 439:

     The other letters, though still retaining the same order, fixed by their retaining the same values as numerals, are studiously varied from the Greek letters, and far more complicated in their forms: the numerals in both being thrown back one letter after 2, by the introduction of the additional letter Buki.

   • 1859, George Ripley and Charles A. Dana eds, sv “E”, in The New American Cyclopædia: a Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, v 6, New York: D. Appleton and Co., p 705:

     In the Slavonic it occupies, as jest, the 6th place of the Bukvitsa as well as of the Cyrillic scheme, and has two softening forms as finals (-er, -eri) toward the close of the alphabet.

   • 1961, Alfred Kallir, Sign and Design: the Psychogenetic Source of the Alphabet, J. Clark:

     [p 71] Some are: Adam, Anthropos, Anēr; also Sanskrit aham, Hebrew > anij, Arabic > anoh, Slavic az—all meaning ‘I’; Sanskrit aik-ya, oneness, and aupanâyan, initiation; Greek (h)apax, once, and (h)aploos, [. . .]

     [p 75] Thus the Russians, too, render the ‘self’ by one sound; also by one letter. The letter for ia (ja) is one of those added for frequent Slavic sounds at the end of the Russian alphabet.

     [p 336] Glagolithic script, developed from the Greek, has for the d-sound a letter which resembles Ω (Fig.243): a large bow that dominates and connects two small circles, self-explanatory as regards its maternal signification which the name of the letter, dobro, good, corroborates. The Glagolithic end-letter, ijitsa, (Fig. 426), is formed by three contiguous circles, clearly an intensification of the design of letter i in the same script-system (Fig. 427) which consists of only two such circles (sometimes flattened on one side, almost half-circles, or ovals).

   • 1984, George Y. Shevelov, “A Tendency in Language Development: A Remark on the Erosion of the Feminine i-Stem Substantives in the Ukrainian Language”, in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, v 7, p 594:

     U azbuka has no v because its second component goes back to the name of the letter buky, a petrified form of the ū-stem nom sg [. . .]

   • 1998, Francis J. Thomson, “The Slavonic Translation of the Old Testament”, in Jože Krašovec, The Interpretation of the Bible: The International Symposium in Slovenia, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, p 639:

     Since March to October inclusive is eight, not six, months it has been suggested that the vita was originally written in Glagolitic script, in which the letter dzelo indicates eight, and that when it was transliterated into Cyrillic the scribe forgot to alter this to iže, which in Cyrillic indicates eight, and later the dzelo was written out in full as six, šestiju. It has also been suggested that since two priests, dva popy, is not in the dual, the same thing occurred with regard to the letter vede, three in Glagolitic but two in Cyrillic.

   • 2001, Henry Leeming, Historical and Comparative Lexicology of the Slavonic Languages, Wydawnictwo oddzialu Polskiej akademii nauk, p 76:

     If we compare the letter buky of the Cyrillic alphabet with its counterpart in the Gothic alphabet we can see that it differs from Classical Greek beta (Β) called vita in Byzantine and Modern Greek in the same respect.