Glagol Г

Glagol stands fourth, writes g, and carries the numeral 3 from Greek gamma. Its name is the Slavonic noun for word, speech or utterance, from the verb meaning to speak. In modern Russian the same word has narrowed to a grammatical term and means simply verb, which is a small record of how much technical vocabulary the Slavonic grammatical tradition built out of ordinary speech.

The letterform is the Greek gamma of the uncial books, a plain right angle, and it kept that shape through the manuscript centuries and into the first printed types. The sound it writes is the stop g, and the fricative pronunciation heard in the southern East Slavic area and in much church reading is a later regional development rather than a property of the letter.

In the numeral series it does ordinary work as 3. Where it becomes conspicuous is in the numbering of the Gospels, the psalms and the odes of the canon, where the third of anything carries this letter with a titlo above it.

It survives in every modern Cyrillic alphabet. Its name did not: the modern Russian alphabet calls its letters by invented syllables rather than by words, a reform of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that traded a memorable name for a phonetically transparent one and, in the process, ended the possibility of reading the alphabet as a sentence.

The letter glagol and the alphabet called Glagolitic share a root, and the relationship between them is regularly stated backwards.

Glagolitic takes its name from glagolati, the Slavonic verb to speak, through a noun meaning speech or word. It is a descriptive label, and it is a late one. The people who devised and used the script in the ninth and tenth centuries did not call it that. Their own word for what they had was simply letters or writing, and the modern name was applied by scholars and by later tradition looking back at a script that had by then become strange.

The letter glagol is named from the same root for an unrelated reason: it is a Slavonic word beginning with the sound the letter writes, chosen like every other letter name in the set. The letter is not named after the script and the script is not named after the letter. They are two independent uses of one very common word.

The confusion is worth clearing because it feeds a larger one. The two Slavonic alphabets are often presented as a simple sequence in which Glagolitic was made first and Cyrillic replaced it, with Cyril responsible for the second. The record supports the first half and contradicts the second: Cyril devised Glagolitic, and the alphabet that carries his name was assembled after his death by people working in his tradition. Names in this field are unreliable guides to origins, and this pair is where that lesson is cheapest to learn.