Serbian Cyrillic alphabet

The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (Serbian: српска ћирилица, srpska ćirilica, pronounced [sr̩̂pskaː t͡ɕirǐlit͡sa]) is an adaptation of the Cyrillic script for the Serbian language, developed in 1818 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić. It is one of the two standard modern alphabets used to write the Serbian language, the other being Latin. Since 2006, Cyrillic is the official script in Serbia.

Karadžić based his alphabet on the Cyrillic script, faithfully following Johann Adelung's principle of "write as you speak and read as it is written". Serbian Cyrillic and Latin alphabets have a complete one-to-one congruence, with the Latin digraphs Lj, Nj, and Dž counting as single letters.

The Cyrillic alphabet is seen as being more traditional, and has official status in Serbia (designated in the Constitution as the "official script", compared to Serbian Latin's status of "script in official use" designated by a lower-level act), Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro (besides Latin script). During the course of the 20th century the Latin alphabet has become more frequently used, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro.

The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, together with the works of Krste Misirkov and Venko Markovski, was used as a basis for the Macedonian alphabet.

Modern alphabet

The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, along with the equivalent forms in the Serbian Latin alphabet and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) value for each letter:

History

The two Slavic scripts, Glagolitic and Cyrillic, in tradition, were invented by the Byzantine Christian missionairies and brothers Cyril and Methodius in the 860s, amid the christianization of the Slavs. Glagolitic appears to be older, predating the introduction of Christianity, only formalized by Cyril and expanded to cover non-Greek sounds. Cyrillic may have been a creation of Cyril's disciples, perhaps at the Preslav Literary School in the 890s.^[1]

The earliest form of Cyrillic was the ustav, based on Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and letters from the Glagolitic alphabet for consonants not found in Greek. There was no distinction of capital and lowercase letters. The literary Slavic language was based on the Old Slavic dialect of Thessaloniki.^[1]

Major medieval works written in various Cyrillic alphabets include:

• Karyes Typicon, 1199 typicon by Saint Sava
• Studenica Typikon, 1208 typicon by Saint Sava
• Bratko Menaion, 1234 menaion
• Dragolj Code, 1259 Illuminated manuscript
• Belgrade Prophetologion, 13th century lectionary
• Vukan Gospels, 13th century Illuminated manuscript
• St. Sava's Nomocanon, 13th century civil law and canon law by Saint Sava
• Hagiography, 13th century work by Saint Sava
• Dušan's Code, 1349 legal code by Emperor Dušan
• Nikola Gospels, 1350 work
• Radoslav Gospels, 1429 illuminated manuscript
• Oktoih, 1494 psalter

Karadžić's reform

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (l. 1787–1864) fled Serbia during the Serbian Revolution in 1813, to Vienna. There he met Jernej Kopitar, a linguist with interest in slavistics. Kopitar and Sava Mrkalj helped Vuk to reform the Serbian language and its orthography. He finalized the alphabet in 1818, with the Serbian Dictionary.

Karadžić reformed the Serbian literary language and standardised the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet by following strict phonemic principles on the German model and Jan Hus' Czech alphabet. Karadžić's reforms of the Serbian literary language modernised it and distanced it from Serbian and Russian Church Slavonic, instead bringing it closer to common folk speech, specifically, to the dialect of Eastern Herzegovina which he spoke. Karadžić was, together with Đuro Daničić, the main Serbian signatory to the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850 which, encouraged by Austrian authorities, laid the foundation for the Serbian language, various forms of which are used by Serbs in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia today. Karadžić also translated the New Testament into Serbian, which was published in 1868.

He wrote several books; Mala prostonarodna slaveno-serbska pesnarica and Pismenica serbskoga jezika in 1814, and two more in 1815 and 1818, all with the alphabet still in progress. In his letters from 1815-1818 he used: Ю, я, Ы and Ѳ. In his 1815 song book he reverted the Ѣ.^[2]

The alphabet was officially adopted in 1868, four years after his death. The corresponding Latin script (latinica) is also used to write in the language.

From the Old Slavic script he retained these 24 letters:

He added one Latin letter:

And 5 new ones:

He removed:

In Austria-Hungary

Orders issued on the 3 and 13 October 1914 banned the use of Serbian Cyrillic in Croatia, limiting it for use in religious instruction. A decree was passed on January 3, 1915, that abolished the rights to address the authorities in Cyrillic. An imperial order in October 25, 1915, banned the use of Serbian Cyrillic in Bosnia-Herzegovina, except "within the scope of Serb Orthodox Church authorities".^[3]

In Yugoslavia

The Serbian Cyrillic script was one of the two official scripts used to write the Serbo-Croatian language in Yugoslavia since its establishment in 1918.

With the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbo-Croatian was divided into its variants on ethnic lines (as it was pre-Yugoslavia) and Cyrillic is no longer used officially in Croatia, while in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro the Serbian Cyrillic stayed the official constitutional script,^[4] Slovenia and Macedonia had never officially used the Serbo-Croatian language.

Under the Constitution of Serbia of 2006, Cyrillic script is the only one in official use.^[5]

Special letters

The ligatures ⟨Љ⟩ and ⟨Њ⟩, together with ⟨Џ⟩, ⟨Ђ⟩ and ⟨Ћ⟩ were developed specially for the Serbian alphabet.

• Karadžić based the letters ⟨Љ⟩ and ⟨Њ⟩ on a design by Sava Mrkalj, combining the letters ⟨Л⟩ (L) and ⟨Н⟩ (N) with the soft sign (Ь).

• Karadžić based ⟨Џ⟩ on letter "Gea" in the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet.

• ⟨Ћ⟩ was adopted by Karadžić to represent the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate (IPA: /tɕ/). The letter was based on and adapted from the letter Djerv, which is the 12th letter of the Glagolitic alphabet; that letter had been used in written Serbian since the 12th century, to represent /ɡʲ/, dʲ/ and /dʑ/.

• Karadžić adopted a design by Lukijan Mušicki for the letter ⟨Ђ⟩. It was based on the letter ⟨Ћ⟩, as adapted by Karadžić.

• ⟨Ј⟩ was adopted from the Latin alphabet.

⟨Љ⟩, ⟨Њ⟩ and ⟨Џ⟩ were later adopted for use in the Macedonian alphabet.

Differences from other Cyrillic alphabets

Serbian Cyrillic does not use several letters encountered in other Slavic Cyrillic alphabets. It does not use hard sign (ъ) and soft sign (ь), but the aforementioned soft-sign ligatures instead. It does not have Russian/Belorussian Э, the semi-vowels Й or ў, nor the iotated letters Я (Russian/Bulgarian ya), Є (Ukrainian ye), Ї (yi), Ё (Russian yo) or Ю (yu), and are instead written as two separate letters: Ja, Je, Jи, Jo, Jy. J can also be used as a semi-vowel. The letter Щ is not used. When necessary, it is transliterated as either ШЧ or ШT.

Serbian and Macedonian italic and cursive forms of lowercase letters б, п, г, д, and т, differ from those used in other Cyrillic alphabets (in Serbian ш is optionally underlined, whereas in Macedonian is not). That presents an obstacle in Unicode modeling, as the glyphs differ only in italic versions, and historically non-italic letters have been used in the same code positions. Serbian professional typography uses fonts specially crafted for the language to overcome the problem, but texts printed from common computers contain East Slavic rather than Serbian italic glyphs.^[6] Adobe Cyrillic fonts^[7] and the new Microsoft Windows Vista font family include the Serbian variations (both regular and italic) as well as a few other font houses. The letters can easily be implemented using Adobe Illustrator, for example.

See also

• South Slavic languages
  • Serbo-Croatian language group;
  • Bosnian language
  • Croatian language
  • Serbian language
  • Montenegrin language
  • Slavic Macedonian language
• Serbian literature
  • List of medieval Serbian literature

References