Pre-Cyrillic Slavic writing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
No extant evidence of pre-Christian (i.e. pre-Glagolithic and pre-Cyrillic) Slavic writing exists, but early Slavic forms of writing or proto-writing have been mentioned by the 9th century Bulgarian monk, Chernorizets Hrabar (Hrabry) in his О писменех (An Account of Letters) briefly mentioned that before the introduction of Christianity Slavs used a system he had dubbed "strokes and incisions" (Old Church Slavonic: чръты и рѣзы). He defends the alphabet against its Greek critics and proves not only its right to existence but also its superiority to the Greek alphabet arguing that the Greek letters are neither the oldest known to man, nor divine. At the same time Chernorizets Hrabar opposes Glagolitic dogmatists and makes several suggestions as to how the alphabet can be further improved. He also provided information critical to Slavonic palaeography with his book.
- Being still pagans, the Slavs did not have their own letters, but read and communicated by means of tallies and sketches. After their baptism they were forced to use Roman and Greek letters in the transcription of their Slavic words but these were not suitable.[1]
A few other, more dubious, accounts roughly contemporary to Chernorizets Hrabar's can be adduced: A German missionary visiting the island of Rügen, a Slavic pagan stronghold that in Eastern European folklore went by the name of Island Ruyan and the place where god Sventovit was worshipped, remarked that the inner walls of the temple of Sventovit were decorated with "runes not like ours".[citation needed] In "The Life of Constantine", a 9th century book concerning the life of Constantine, later proclaimed Saint Cyril, it is mentioned that while on a mission to the Khazars, Constantine met with gospels and psalms written in "Russian letters".[2] It is however disputed whether this refers to the Slavic tribes or the Volga Vikings called Rus.
It is interesting to note that the Slavic word for "to write", pьsati derives[dubious ] from a Common Balto-Slavic word for "to paint, smear", found in Lithuanian piẽšti "paint, write", paĩšas "smudge", puišinas "sooty, dirty", from the same root as Old Slavic pьstrъ (also pěgъ) "coloured" (Greek πικρός), ultimately from a PIE root *peik- "speckled, coloured" (Latin pingō "paint", Tocharian pik-, pink- "paint, write"). This indicates that the Slavs named the new art of writing in ink as a new concept, as "smearing, painting", unlike English which, with Old English *(w)rîtan English write, transferred the term for "incising (runes)" to manuscript writing. The other Germanic languages uses terms derived from Latin scribere. A Slavic term for "to incise" survives in OCS žrěbъ "lot" originally the incision on a wooden chip used for divination (Old Prussian gīrbin "number, tally mark", from the same root as Greek γράφω).
