Chrivi Ⱍ

Chrivi writes the affricate ch and carries no numeral value in Glagolitic, standing beyond the end of the counted series. Like the other letters in this stretch it exists for a Slavic sound that Greek had no sign for.

The affricate is another product of the softening of an original velar, and it stands in a regular relationship with the plain velar stop earlier in the alphabet. The same root will show the stop in one form and this affricate in another, and that alternation runs through the whole of Slavic to the present day, so a modern speaker of any Slavic language uses it without thinking about it.

The name is opaque. The reference works record it without a gloss, and the atlas carries an open question about the whole set of names at this end of the alphabet rather than proposing an etymology for any one of them.

In the manuscripts the letter is common enough to be well attested in both the rounded and the angular hands. It is one of the signs where the two hands differ enough that a reader has to learn the form twice, which is true of a good many letters in the second half of the alphabet where the shapes are more elaborate than the plain Greek-answering signs at the start.

Its position in the order is one of the details on which the sources are not quite uniform. The letters for the affricates and the sibilants are listed in slightly different sequences by different abecedaria, and the atlas follows the arrangement of the Unicode Standard, which is a decision among attested possibilities rather than a reading of a single authoritative list.

Cyrillic cherv writes the same affricate and, unlike its Glagolitic counterpart, carries a numeral value: ninety. That value is one of the more revealing details in the whole comparison of the two systems. Ninety in Greek arithmetic belonged to a sign that had dropped out of the Greek alphabet as a letter while remaining in the counting, and Cyrillic put a Slavic letter into the vacant slot.

Glagolitic did nothing of the kind, because it was not using Greek arithmetic and had no vacancies. It counted its own letters through to seven hundred and stopped, leaving every Slavic sign at the end of the order unnumbered, this one included.

So the same letter is numbered in one script and unnumbered in the other, and the difference is not an oversight in either. It follows from two different decisions about what a numeral system is for. Cyrillic treats the Greek series as the thing to be preserved and fits Slavic letters into it where it can. Glagolitic treats its own alphabet as the thing to be counted and ignores Greek entirely.

Both names are opaque, and the atlas records that gap rather than filling it.

The pairing itself is secure. Both letters write the same affricate, both stand among the Slavic signs at the end of the order, and both alphabets recite them in the same place. What the atlas does not assert is that either sign descends from the other, because the direction of descent between the two scripts is exactly the question that Slavic palaeography has never closed.