Glagolitic alphabet: Encyclopedia II - Glagolitic alphabet - Characteristics

Glagolitic alphabet - Characteristics

The alphabet has two variants: round and square. The round variant is dominated by circles and smooth curves, and the square variant features a lot of right angles, and sometimes trapezoids. See an image of both variants (incomplete). Or for more details The square variant lends itself to a more abundant use of ligatures than in the Latin or the Cyrillic script.

The following table lists each letter in order, giving a picture (round variant), its name, its approximate sound in IPA, the presumed origin (if applicable), and the corresponding modern Cyrillic letter. The names Jer to Jus are sometimes written Yer to Yus. There are several letters that have no modern counterpart, such as the nasal vowels Jus.

Note that Jery is simply a digraph of Jer and I. The order of Izhe and I varies from source to source, as does the order of the various forms of Jus.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Characteristics", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki