Soviet Lettering
Soviet Lettering
The writing system dates back to the 9th century AD, when the Bulgarian tsar Simeon I the Great – following the cultural and political course of his father Boris I – commissioned a new script, the
Early Cyrillic alphabet, to be made at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire, which would replace the Glagolitic script, produced earlier by Saints Cyril and Methodius and the
same disciples that created the new Slavic script in Bulgaria. The usage of the Cyrillic script in Bulgaria was made official in 893.[6][7][8] The new script became the basis of alphabets used in
various languages in Orthodox Church dominated Eastern Europe, both Slavic and non-Slavic (such as Romanian). For centuries Cyrillic was also used by Catholic and Muslim Slavs too (see
Bosnian Cyrillic).
Cyrillic is derived from the Greek uncial script, augmented by letters from the older Glagolitic alphabet, including some ligatures. These additional letters were used for Old Church Slavonic
sounds not found in Greek. The script is named in honor of the Saint Cyril, one of the two Byzantine brothers[9] Saints Cyril and Methodius, who created the Glagolitic alphabet earlier on. Modern
scholars believe that Cyrillic was developed and formalized by the early disciples of Cyril and Methodius in the Preslav Literary School, the most important early literary and cultural centre of the
First Bulgarian Empire and of all Slavs:
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. [7]
The earliest datable Cyrillic inscriptions have been found in the area of Preslav. They have been found in the medieval city itself, and at nearby Patleina Monastery, both in present-day
Shumen Province, in the Ravna Monastery and in the Varna Monastery.
With the orthographic reform of Saint Evtimiy of Tarnovo and other prominent representatives of the Tarnovo Literary School (14th and 15th centuries) such as Gregory Tsamblak or
Constantine of Kostenets the school influenced Russian, Serbian, Wallachian and Moldavian medieval culture. That is famous in Russia as the second South-Slavic influence.
In the early 18th century, the Cyrillic script used in Russia was heavily reformed by Peter the Great, who had recently returned from his Grand Embassy in Western Europe. The new letterforms,
called the Civil script, became closer to those of the Latin alphabet; several archaic letters were abolished and several letters were designed by Peter himself. Letters became distinguished
between upper and lower case. West European typography culture was also adopted.[10] The pre-reform forms of letters called 'Полуустав' were notably kept for use in Church Slavonic and are
sometimes used in Russian even today, especially if one wants to give a text a 'Slavic' or 'archaic' feel.
• Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, mandated the use of
westernized letter forms (ru) in the early 18th century. Over time,
these were largely adopted in the other languages that use the
script. Thus, unlike the majority of modern Greek fonts that
retained their own set of design principles for lower-case letters
(such as the placement of serifs, the shapes of stroke ends, and
stroke-thickness rules, although Greek capital letters do use
Latin design principles), modern Cyrillic fonts are much the same
as modern Latin fonts of the same font family. The development
of some Cyrillic computer typefaces from Latin ones has also
contributed to the visual Latinization of Cyrillic type.
Lowercase forms[edit]
Letters Ge, De, I, I kratkoye, Me, Te, Tse, Be and Ve in upright (printed) and cursive (handwritten) variants. (Top is
set in Georgia font, bottom in Odessa Script.)
Cyrillic uppercase and lowercase letter forms are not as differentiated as in Latin typography. Upright Cyrillic
lowercase letters are essentially small capitals (with exceptions: Cyrillic ⟨а⟩, ⟨е⟩, ⟨і⟩, ⟨ј⟩, ⟨р⟩, and ⟨у⟩ adopted
Western lowercase shapes, lowercase ⟨ф⟩ is typically designed under the influence of Latin ⟨p⟩, lowercase ⟨б ⟩, ⟨ђ ⟩
and ⟨ћ⟩ are traditional handwritten forms), although a good-quality Cyrillic typeface will still include separate small-
caps glyphs
Cyrillic
• The Cyrillic writing system is used for the following languages:
• Slavic - Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian,
Ukrainian
• Non-Slavic languages of Russia
– in various states in the Caucasian and other groups in Siberia and the
Russian Far East
• Non-Slavic languages in Central Asia – Kazakh, Kyrgyk, Mongolian,
Tajik, Turkmen, Uzbek
RUSSIA
N
ALPHAB
ET
Russian Cyrillic
The Union of the Soviet Union was a federal union of 15 national republics with its central republic being the Russian SFSR from 1922 – 1991. Russian was one of the official languages of each of these national
republics, becoming a language of interethnic communication, and assumed the role of an official language.