Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/652

Rh 614 ALPHABET probably a tachygraphy of the 24th. The 25th and 2Gth denoted respectively the breathings / and German ch. We may recall here the different treatment of &amp;lt; by Ulfilas; it seems a fair inference that the sound of &amp;lt; had changed from an aspirate to a breathing between the times of Ulfilas and Cyril. The 27th and 28th are the Greek Omega in the simple and in a modified form: they de noted the sounds heard in note and not respectively; these have been dropped in all the derived alphabets, in which the 17th letter does work for both. We now come to a series of letters (29-44) which are not Greek, and denote sounds which were probably unknown, or at least had no separate exponents, in the Greek system. The first four are sibilants, simple or compound. It will be remem bered how the Greek dropped the large Phoenician stock of sibilants, through their own disinclination to such sounds. Cyril, however, did not go back to the original types, but had recourse to the inartistic expedient of using two or three upright strokes, with small modifiers below. Letter 29 is the compound ts, 30 denotes the fuller compound tsch (English ch in &quot; church&quot;), 31 is the simple sh, 32 is skt, which in Kussian is said to be expressible only by schtsch, unquestionably a very strong sibilant; the newer form of Wallachian used 29 to express dj. The letters 33-36 were attempts to express the neutral vowel (heard in English in fir, sun, &c.), the first two in its aspect nearest to u, the last two nearer to i. The first and last are important in Russian: they are written, but not pronounced; but the first hardens a preceding letter, or, if it be a continuous consonant, makes it be sounded as though it were double. The 36th, on the contrary, softens a preceding letter, giving it the ?nouille sound. The 34th letter has been dropped in Russian; the 35th has a pecu liar kind of i sound. The 37th letter has an e sound; it was apparently introduced into the alphabet in consequence of the ^polyphony of the original e, which in Russian does the work of e, o, and ce, and also of each of these preceded by the semi-vowel y; but as the new letter has three of these sounds, there is not much gain of clearness. A third symbol, however, has been introduced an inverted e, 3, which did not belong to the Cyrillic alphabet : it is used at the begin ning of words where the pure e sound is heard not ye, and also in foreign words beginning with ce. Letters 38-40 are compounds expressing the u, a, and e sounds, preceded by y. The combinations seem to us needless, but the Greek had no symbol for y; therefore Cyril probably thought it necessary to connect the I-symbol with the following vowel, in order to show that it was only the semi-vowel, not a full vowel, which would have caused another syllable. The first of these symbols has been retained in Russian unchanged; the second is now written rather like an inverted r JI; the third was suffered to drop whence arose the confusion respecting e which we have just mentioned. Nos. 41 and 42 denote nasalised vowels, e and o, as heard in the French en and on: these sounds seem to have fallen out of all Sclavonic languages, except the Polish. 43 and 44 denote the same vowels &quot; pre-iotised,&quot; like the three 38-40 : these also are now unknown. Then came the Greek Ksi and Psi, the char acters being very slightly altered : they have fallen out of use altogether. No. 47, Thita, is retained in Russian, but sounded as an/, which has thus two exponents, and &amp;lt;. Lastly came the equivalent of the Greek Upsilon called ijica: this is employed in Russian in words borrowed from the Greek. Fourteen of these letters have been expelled from the Russian alphabet, namely 8, 11, 22, 23, 27, 28, 34, 40-4ff; their list of 35 letters is made up by the addition of the inverted e, which stands in the 31st place of the alphabet. The forms of the letters are more rounded than those of Cyril, as will be seen by a comparison of the two. This reform, among others, was due to Peter the Great, who printed the first Russian periodical at Moscow in 1704. (Max M tiller, Survey, p. 49.) The Servian alphabet differs from the Russian chiefly by the insertion of symbols to denote modification of sound caused by a following y. Thus we find a character to express dy (equivalent to the Hungarian gy heard in &quot;Magyar&quot;); another for ly, denoting the sound of the Italian gli ; another for ny, the Italian and French gn; and one for ty, a softer sound than the tsch, the symbol for which is common to Russian and Servian. The Wallachian adopted nearly all the Cyrillic charac ters, except the superfluous vowel-symbols and the nasalised vowels. The list was soon considerably shortened, as was natural in a language originally non-Sclavonic, though in the course of tune it has naturally borrowed many words from its neighbours. Since it has been used for literary purposes, it has been further diminished to 27 symbols by the loss of the short sibilant (32), the second e, and the iotised a; the other iotised vowels had gone before. The forms of the characters have also been much assimilated to the Latin types: instead of the peculiar symbol for sch, which the Russian retains, the new Wallachian has a J with a wavy stroke through the middle; n is written as N, not as H; and Cyril s combinations of perpendicular lines are more rounded than the Russian. The Wallachian has T to denote the sound un. one special symbol We have thus described the alphabets used in modern Europe. The only others which have any special interest for Englishmen are the different Indian alphabets ; but these are too numerous and complicated to be fully described here. ( J. p. ) CYRILLIC AND RUSSIAN ALPHABETS. CYR. j RUSS. CYR. i RUSS. CYR. j RUSS. CYR. RUSS. CYR. RUSS. CYR. RUSS. fl a 1 A a H Hill II II 11 P (&amp;gt; IP P S S Jta Ik JD t&amp;gt; 3 * K EJE &amp;lt;5 8 ij C c JC c U i) I( .11 3 3 5JO % K E ! B B 1 lilil T T IT T in Y y T I TL K) K) 10 B) 60-00 r rir r K K|K K ti 1i j uj iu in in Fl flT 1C la Jl JL V v Yr .A Ai4 4 n JL JL 0^ ovi ijj ijj m m ie ie e e !E e IA Mi M 31 ^ -L L i&amp;gt; A A ffi sni/K a 11 n II H $ 4&amp;gt; 1^ ^ &quot;El 1,1 S s ! o o X N JX x bl hi LI M IA IA ? ?;3 s fl n II n (0 (o ! b b L j&amp;gt; 1^ l,Tv
 * y y
 * Yi ,Y,