Alphabet Letters
Nashi Ⱀ
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
Nashi is the sixteenth letter of Glagolitic and writes n. Its name is the Slavonic possessive adjective meaning our, and it carries the numeral 70. In the traditional recitation the names nashi onu pokoji are read together, and the reading usually offered is that ours is that peace, or our rest is in that; the clause is less transparent than the earlier ones and translations of it differ. The letter itself is unremarkable in the orthography and stable across the manuscript tradition, which makes it a useful control when a palaeographer is dating a hand by the letters that did change. Its Cyrillic counterpart carries 50, taken from Greek nu, so the two systems disagree here as they do through most of the count.
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 NameA Slavonic word used as the letter name, shared by both Slavic alphabets 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Sense of the Namenashi is the Slavonic possessive meaning our 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1 PositionThe seventeenth letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attributions
Associated SoundThe consonant n 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceNashi is stable in shape across the manuscript tradition, which makes it a useful control letter for a palaeographer dating a hand by the letters that did change; the clause it opens with onu and pokoji is read less certainly than the alphabet's opening lines. 1 Learn More
Nashi: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 70)
Nashi writes the consonant n and takes the numeral seventy. Its name is the Slavonic possessive our, and it belongs to the sequence of names that readers have taken as a continuous utterance rather than a list of labels.
The sound is a plain nasal and, like m, it is stable throughout the history of Slavic and gives the philologist no leverage on dating or dialect. It is common, appearing in negation, in a great many endings and in the pronouns that hold Slavonic sentences together, so it is one of the letters that fixes the character of a hand.
Old Church Slavonic also had a softened n, distinguished in speech from the plain one, and here the script is again less exact than it might be: the softening is inferred from the following vowel rather than written. That imprecision is not evidence of carelessness in the design. It reflects a decision to write the sounds that distinguish words rather than every audible difference, and the same decision underlies the treatment of the softened l.
The numeral seventy comes from counting the Glagolitic letters in order, this being the sixteenth letter. Seventy is a figure that turns up often in a scriptural manuscript, which means the letter is met as a number more frequently than most.
Nashi and Its Cyrillic Counterpart
Cyrillic nash writes the same consonant from the same position and takes the numeral fifty, the value of Greek nu. Glagolitic counts seventy. The names differ only in the ending, and both continue the Slavonic word for our.
At this letter the two alphabets are running twenty apart, and the offset will change again shortly, because the letters that follow include signs that one system numbers and the other does not. Anyone converting a numeral between the scripts has to work letter by letter through the order rather than apply a constant.
The two nash letters are also a good place to observe how the alphabets were taught. The order was learned by reciting the names, not by reciting the sounds, and the mnemonic value of names that are ordinary words is obvious: a learner who forgets a shape can still recover the sequence. That the same names served both scripts means the teaching tradition was continuous across the change from one alphabet to the other, whichever direction that change ran in. The names are, in that sense, older evidence than either set of letterforms, and they are what the two scripts most clearly hold in common.
They are also unevenly informative. The names at this end of the alphabet are ordinary Slavonic words whose sense anyone can read, while the names further down are opaque, and no etymology for them has been established. The atlas records that gap as an open question rather than filling it with a guess.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Why this is disputed. Glagolitic Nashi is read as Greek Nu's counterpart in an alphabet Cyril modeled on Greek order and numeral values, but which theory explains where its rounded letterform actually came from is a live paleographic dispute. The mainstream palaeographic school, developed since Isaac Taylor's nineteenth century study, derives Glagolitic's ornamental shapes from medieval Greek cursive minuscule redesigned for Slavonic use. A rival idiographic school reads Glagolitic as substantially an original invention, its shapes built from basic forms such as the cross, circle and triangle rather than borrowed from any existing script, so this specific correspondence to Nu is accepted by one camp and denied by the other.
Originates in Language
Glagolitic was devised in the 860s so that Greek scripture and liturgy could be read in Slavonic, and Nashi belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.
Related To
Cyrillic nash answers to Glagolitic nashi: the same name and the same sound n.
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