Alphabet Letters
Fritu Ⱇ
Glagolitic Letters
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Origin Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius
Fritu is the twenty-third letter of Glagolitic and writes f. It carries the numeral 500, the value of Greek phi, from which the letter is taken. Slavonic had no native f, so the letter exists to write Greek words and names in translation, chiefly the vocabulary of the Gospels and the liturgy, and it is rare in native material. Its name is not a Slavonic word and no agreed sense has been recovered for it, which places it among the letters at which the alphabet's recitation stops reading as a sentence. That boundary between meaningful and opaque names falls almost exactly where the native letters end and the Greek imports begin.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodDevised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius 2 Place of OriginByzantium and Great Moravia; the letters were made in Constantinople or Thessalonica and carried north for the mission 2 Origin of the NameTaken over along with the Greek letter phi, whose numeral value 500 it also carries; Slavonic had no native f, so the sign and its name were both borrowed rather than devised, though no independent sense for the name itself survives. 1 Attributions
Associated SoundThe consonant f 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Open Questions
Sense of the NameNo recovered Slavonic sense. The name belongs to the group of opaque letter names at the tail of the alphabet 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Nobody holds a position on what, if anything, the names of the later letters meant in Slavonic. They are not treated as arguable readings with camps on either side; they are simply not recovered, and the reference literature records them as of uncertain origin. An open question on the Cyrillic counterpart of this letter states what would close the gap. Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1 PositionThe twenty-fourth letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceFritu belongs to a small set of Glagolitic letters that exist purely to write Greek loanwords and numerals: its own numeral value of 500 is taken directly from Greek phi, exactly as its neighbor heru takes 600 from chi. 1 Learn More
Fritu: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 500)
Fritu writes the consonant f and takes the numeral five hundred. It exists because the alphabet had to be able to spell Greek, not because Slavonic needed it: the sound f was not native to Slavonic, and the words in which the letter appears in the earliest texts are almost entirely names and terms taken from Greek along with the scriptures and the liturgy.
That makes the letter a marker. Where it appears in a Slavonic text, a borrowed word is usually being written, and the letter is one of the plainest signs in the alphabet of the fact that the script was made for a translation project. A script devised for the everyday speech of a Slavic people would not have needed it.
Its name is the first in the alphabet that cannot be read as an ordinary Slavonic word. The reference literature records fritu, and the corresponding Cyrillic name fert, as of uncertain or unknown origin, and no etymology has been established for either. The atlas records that as an open question rather than proposing a reading.
The numeral five hundred follows from counting the Glagolitic letters in their own order, this being the twenty third sign, and it agrees with the value Cyrillic inherits from Greek phi.
Fritu and Its Cyrillic Counterpart
Cyrillic fert writes the same consonant and takes the same numeral, five hundred, inherited from Greek phi where Glagolitic counts to it. The pair is one of the letters where the two alphabets agree on the number, the sound and the position and where the name, in both scripts, is a word nobody can explain.
That is not a small point. The names of the first twenty letters are ordinary Slavonic words, and their sense is what makes the recitation memorable and what supports every reading of the recitation as a connected text. From this letter to the end of the alphabet the names stop meaning anything recoverable. The reference works list them without glosses, and no systematic etymology of the whole set has been carried through.
Two explanations are available and neither has been demonstrated. The names may be Slavonic words corrupted past recognition by centuries of recitation, or they may never have carried a sense at all, having been coined or adapted as labels. A third possibility, that they reflect Greek letter names filtered through Slavonic mouths, has been raised for some of them. The atlas records the absence as an open question, since an absence of this kind is worth stating rather than papering over.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Why this is disputed. Glagolitic Fritu was added purely to spell Greek loanwords and liturgical names, inheriting Phi's numeral value directly (500), a borrowing that is not itself disputed. What remains disputed is the letterform Cyril gave it: the mainstream palaeographic school derives its ornamental shape from medieval Greek cursive minuscule, the same source claimed for the alphabet's core letters, while the rival idiographic school holds Glagolitic's letterforms, this one included, were substantially invented rather than borrowed from any existing script.
Originates in Language
Glagolitic was devised in the 860s so that Greek scripture and liturgy could be read in Slavonic, and Fritu belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.
Related To
Cyrillic fert answers to Glagolitic fritu, both writing f with the value 500, and in both scripts the sound occurs only in borrowed words.
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
Did the opaque Glagolitic letter names, fritu, heru, tsi and sha among them, ever carry a sense in Slavonic?
The first twenty letter names of Glagolitic are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. From fritu onwards the names stop meaning anything recoverable, and the reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin without offering a reading. This is an absence rather than a disagreement: no camps hold rival etymologies for these names, and no investigation has settled whether they are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never carried a sense. The same gap stands over the corresponding Cyrillic names, which are the same names.
What would resolve this A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses the plain lists do not. A demonstration that the names never carried a sense would close the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.
Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philologyPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems
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