The earliest form of manuscript Cyrillic, known as , was based on
Greek uncial script, augmented by
ligatures and by letters from the
Glagolitic alphabet for phonemes not found in Greek. The
Glagolitic script was created by the
Byzantine monk Saint Cyril, possibly with the aid of his brother
Saint Methodius, around 863. At the time, the
Preslav Literary School was the most important early literary and cultural center of the
First Bulgarian Empire and of all
Slavs: and a ceramic vase from Preslav, dating back to 931. The systematization of Cyrillic may have been undertaken at the
Council of Preslav in 893, when the Old Church Slavonic or
Glagolitic Cyrillic liturgy was adopted by the
First Bulgarian Empire.
Unlike the Churchmen in Ohrid, Preslav scholars were much more dependent upon Greek models and quickly abandoned the Glagolitic scripts in favor of an adaptation of the Greek uncial to the needs of Slavic, which is now known as the Cyrillic alphabet.American scholar
Horace Lunt has alternatively suggested that Cyrillics emerged in the border regions of Greek proselytization to the Slavs before it was codified and adapted by some systematizer among the Slavs. The oldest Cyrillic manuscripts look very similar to 9th and 10th century Greek uncial manuscripts, Letters served as
numerals as well as phonetic signs; the values of the numerals were directly borrowed from
their Greek-letter analogues. Letters without Greek equivalents mostly had no numeral values, whereas one letter,
koppa, had only a numeric value with no phonetic value. Since its creation, the Cyrillic script has adapted to changes in spoken language and developed regional variations to suit the features of national languages. It has been the subject of academic reforms and political decrees. Variations of the Cyrillic script are used to write languages throughout
Eastern Europe and
Asia. The form of the Russian alphabet underwent a change when Tsar
Peter the Great introduced the
civil script (, or , ), in contrast to the prevailing church typeface, () in 1708. (The two forms are sometimes distinguished as
paleo-Cyrillic and
neo-Cyrillic.) Some letters and breathing marks which were used only for historical reasons were dropped. Medieval letterforms used in typesetting were harmonized with Latin typesetting practices, exchanging medieval forms for Baroque ones, and skipping the western European Renaissance developments. The reform subsequently influenced
Cyrillic orthographies for most other languages. Today, the early orthography and typesetting standards remain in use only in
Slavonic. A comprehensive repertoire of early Cyrillic characters has been included in the
Unicode standard since version 5.1, published April 4, 2008. These characters and their distinctive letterforms are represented in specialized computer fonts for
Slavistics. == Alphabet ==