The very first written language in the world. The most mysterious letters and encrypted messages. The oldest writing

Ministry of General and Professional

education Russian Federation

RGRTA

Department of "History"

Discipline "Culturology"

Abstract on the topic:

"The history of the development of writing"

Fulfilled :

Art. gr. 070

Ruchkin G.V.

Checked:

Kupreev A.I.

Ryazan 2001

Introduction 3

1. Nodular writing 3

2.Pictogram 4

3. Hieroglyph 6

4.Alphabet 7

Conclusion 9

References 10

WRITING

Introduction

Writing appeared around 3300 BC. in Sumer, by 3000 B.C. in Egypt, by 2000 B.C. in China. In all regions, this process followed the same pattern: a drawing - a pictogram - a hieroglyph - an alphabet (the latter appeared among the Phoenicians in 1,000 BC). Hieroglyphic writing determined the peculiarities of the thinking of the peoples of the East, the ability to think in symbols. A hieroglyph does not convey the sound of a word, but conditionally depicts an object or is an abstract sign - a symbol of a concept. A complex character consists of simpler elements endowed with their own meaning. Moreover, these values ​​can be several.

Inscriptions are found on the walls of the tombs, on potsherds, clay tablets, and parchments. Egyptian papyri sometimes reach 30 - 40 m in length. Entire libraries are found in the ruins of ancient palaces. During the excavations of Nineveh, 25,000 cuneiform tablets were found belonging to the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. These are collections of laws, reports of spies, decisions on judicial issues, medical prescriptions.

Consider each step in the development of writing separately.

1. Nodular pimennost

One of its first types was nodular writing. A certain number of knots tied on a rope conveyed a particular message. Simultaneously with knot writing, picture writing arose, in which notes were made using drawings.

Gradually writing improved. Each - sign drawing acquired new meanings, the number of signs increased, their styles changed, less and less remembering the images of objects.

2. ICON

Pictogram - one of the types of writing, which is a pictorial letter, or painting - an image of objects, events and actions using conventional signs. For example, a sign depicting a leg can mean "walk", "stand", "bring". Pictographic writing with elements of hieroglyphics used by the Aztecs has been known since the 14th century. There was no definite system for the arrangement of pictograms: they could follow both horizontally and vertically, and using the boustrophedon method (opposite direction of adjacent "lines", i.e. series of pictograms). The main systems of Aztec writing: signs to convey the phonetic appearance of the word, for which the so-called rebus method was used (for example, to write the name Itzcoatl, an itz-tli arrow was depicted above the coatl snake); hieroglyphic signs that convey certain concepts; proper phonetic signs, especially to convey the sound of affixes. By the time of the Spanish conquest, which interrupted the development of Aztec writing, all these systems existed in parallel, their use was not streamlined. The material for writing was leather or paper strips, folded in the form of a screen.

Instead of an image, arbitrary graphic symbols were also used. This script was used in household records, where the number of concepts is limited by the content of the letter itself, and in ritual records as an aid. The earliest records date back to 3000 BC. In ancient Egypt, there were verbal-syllabic pictograms that denoted not only concepts, but also purely sound elements of a word or its part. Some types of cuneiform developed from Sumerian writing - small cuneiform signs. Each icon of such a letter consists of wedges in various combinations and denotes a sound, syllable, or word and was written from left to right on clay tablets. The cuneiform script of Mesopotamia has been studied and deciphered the most.

The Sumerian and Babylonian-Assyrian cultures differed in many ways from the ancient Egyptians. It is enough to look at Egyptian hieroglyphic or hieratic texts and compare them with any cuneiform system to feel the depth of the difference between the two cultural worlds.

Writing in the Greek culture of the XXII-XII centuries. played a limited role. Like many peoples of the world, the inhabitants of Hellas first of all began to make pictorial notes, known already in the second half of the 3rd millennium. Each sign of this pictographic letter denoted a whole concept. The Cretans created some signs, though not many, under the influence of Egyptian hierographic writing, which arose as early as the 4th millennium. Gradually, the forms of signs were simplified, and some began to designate only syllables. Such a syllabic (linear) letter, which had already developed by 1700, is called letter A, which still remains unsolved.

After 1500, a more convenient form of writing was developed in Hellas - the syllabic letter B. It included about half of the signs of the syllabic letter A, several dozen new signs, as well as some signs of the oldest picture writing. The counting system, as before, was based on decimal notation. Syllabary records were still made from left to right, however, the writing rules became more strict: words separated by a special sign or space were written along horizontal lines, separate texts were provided with headings and subheadings. Texts were drawn on clay tablets, scratched on stone, written with a brush or paint or ink on vessels.

Achaean writing was accessible only to educated specialists. He was known by ministers in the royal palaces and some layer of wealthy citizens. Sumerian pictograms also gave rise to hieroglyphs.

3. HIEROGLYPHS

The basis of ancient Egyptian writing was hieroglyphs (from the Greek "hieros" - "sacred" and "glyph" - "carved") - figured signs denoting whole concepts or individual syllables and sounds of speech, the name "hieroglyph" originally meant "sacred, vychyachichenye on letters". The main writing material was made from papyrus, a tropical reed-like aquatic plant. From the cut stems of papyrus, the core was isolated, dissected into thin long strips, laid out in two layers - along and across, moistened with Nile water, leveled, compacted with blows of a wooden hammer and polished with an ivory tool. The resulting sheet did not wrinkle when folded and when unfolded, it became smooth again. The sheets were connected into scrolls up to 40 meters long. However, hieroglyphic inscriptions were included in paintings and reliefs. They were written from right to left with a thin reed stick. A new paragraph began with red paint (hence the expression “ Red line”), and the rest of the text was black. The ancient Egyptians considered the god Thoth to be the creator of writing. As the god of the moon, Thoth is the viceroy of Ra; as time - he divided time into days and months, led the chronology and wrote chronicles; as the god of wisdom, he created writing and counting, which he taught people. He is the author of sacred books, the patron of scientists, scribes, archives, libraries. Thoth was usually depicted as a man with the head of an ibis.

During the New Kingdom era, colored drawings appeared on the scrolls, as, for example, in the Book of the Dead.

Initially, the Chinese made their notes on the shells of turtles, animal bones; later on bamboo boards and silk. The bound tablets were the first books.

Hieroglyphic writing has serious drawbacks: the large number of characters in the system (from several hundred to many thousands) and the difficulty in mastering reading. According to Chinese scientists, only in the oldest inscriptions of the 14th - 11th centuries BC. there are about 2000 different hieroglyphs. It was an already developed system of writing.

4. ALPHABET

All the types of writing described above could not stand the competition alphabet.

The Phoenicians, who kept constant trade records, need a different, simple and convenient letter. They came up with an alphabet in which each sign - a letter - means only one specific sound of speech. They are derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Phoenician alphabet consists of 22 simple letters. All of them are consonants, because consonants played the main role in the Phoenician language. To read a word, it was enough for a Phoenician to see its backbone, which consisted of consonants.

The letters in the Phoenician alphabet were arranged in a certain order. This order was also borrowed by the Greeks, but in the Greek language, unlike the Phoenician, vowels played an important role.

Greek writing was the starting point for the development of all Western alphabets, the first of which was Latin.

For a long time there was an opinion that the letter came to Russia along with Christianity, with church books and prayers. A talented linguist, Cyril, creating a Slavic letter, took the Greek alphabet, consisting of 24 letters, as a basis, supplemented it with hissing sounds characteristic of Slavic languages ​​(zh, u , w, h) and several other letters. Some of them are preserved in the modern alphabet - b, b, b, s, others have long gone out of use - yat, yus, izhitsa, fita. So the Slavic alphabet originally consisted of 43 letters, similar in spelling to Greek. Each of them had its own name: A - "az", B - "beeches" (their combination formed the word "alphabet"), C - "lead", G - "verb", D - "good" and so on. The letters on the letter denoted not only sounds, but also numbers. "A" - the number 1, "B" - 2, "P" - 100. In Russia, only in the 18th century. Arabic numerals replaced the "letter" ones.

As is known, the Church Slavonic language was the first to receive literary use among the Slavic languages. For some time, along with the Cyrillic alphabet, another Slavic alphabet, the Glagolitic alphabet, was also in use. She had the same composition of letters, but with a more complex, ornate spelling. Apparently, this feature predetermined the further fate of the Glagolitic alphabet: by the 13th century. she has almost completely disappeared. This is not the place to expand on which Slavic tribe this language belonged to, the Bulgarians or the Pannoians.

The graphics of the Cyrillic alphabet underwent changes as a result of which letters were excluded that were unnecessary for transmitting the sounds of modern Russian speech. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters.

In the middle of the first millennium of our era, the Turkic-speaking peoples already used their own writing system, called runic writing. The first information about runic inscriptions appears in Russia at the end of the 18th century. Russian and foreign scientists copied and published some samples of ancient Turkic runic inscriptions. According to recent studies, runic writing originated before our era, possibly in the Saka time. In the 3rd-5th centuries, AD, there were two versions of the runic writing - Hunnic and Eastern, which existed in the territory of Zhetysu and Mongolia. In the VI-VII centuries. on the basis of the latter, the ancient Turkic writing, called Orkhon-Yenisei, develops. The Hunnic runic writing served as the basis for the development of the Bulgar and Khazar writing, as well as the writing of the Kangars and Kypchaks. The main material for writing among the Turkic-speaking peoples were wooden boards. This is what the Kypchak proverbs say "I wrote, I wrote, I painted five trees", "I wrote a big inscription on the top of a tall tree". These sayings also testify to the widespread use of writing among the Kypchaks and other Turkic-speaking peoples. For example, the riddle "Looking up, I read endlessly", meaning the sky and stars, could come up with a people for whom reading was a normal phenomenon. This riddle was widespread among the Kypchaks. Along with the use of the Sogdian language, the Turks used the Sogdian alphabet to convey their own speech. Later, this alphabet, after some modifications, was called "Uyghur", since the ancient Uyghurs used it especially widely in the 9th-15th centuries.

Conclusion

The basis of any ancient culture is writing. The birthplace of writing is rightfully the Ancient East. Its emergence was associated with the accumulation of knowledge that was no longer possible to keep in memory, the growth of cultural ties between people, and then the needs of states. The invention of writing ensured the accumulation of knowledge and its reliable transmission to descendants. Various peoples of the Ancient East developed and improved writing in different ways, finally creating the first types of alphabetic writing. The alphabetic Phoenician letter, later revised by the Greeks, formed the basis of our modern alphabet.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Cultural studies. uch. allowance. Under the editorship of Yuzhakova L.V. Ryazan 1999;

2. Verzhbitskaya A. Culturology. Cognition. M., 1996;

3. Zvegentsev V.A. History of linguistics 19 - 20 centuries., M., 1965;

4. Reformatsky A.A. Introduction to linguistics. M., 1967;

5. B.S.E. volume 19, pp. 571 - 576;

6. History of Russia from ancient times to the end of the XVII century / Ed. A.N. Sakharov, A.P. Novoseltseva. - M., 1996;

7. Latin America: encyclopedic reference book, vol. I - M., Soviet Encyclopedia, 1979;

Today it is not difficult for a person to send a message to friends or relatives. Almost every one of us can, due to the presence of intelligence, write a message, text or email. It is difficult to imagine that there were times when writing did not exist at all. It would seem that people almost always knew how to read and write. However, this is far from the case.

In the process of researching the issue of the origin of writing, many questions arose, for example: where did writing first appear, when did it appear, how did people invent it? The answers to them still cause a lot of controversy in the scientific community, although scientists have developed specific theories about this. The study of writing should begin with the Middle East. that once existed on this territory are the cradle of world culture of both the West and the East. But before considering the history of writing, you need to figure out what meaning this term carries.

The meaning of the word "writing"

From the point of view of linguistics, writing is a special system of signs that allows you to formalize, transmit and record information for the purpose of its further use and transmission. In other words, writing is data that has acquired a sign form. Writing should not be differentiated from human language, because it is a subspecies of this phenomenon. Such a theory appeared as a result of the study of the human psyche. When we write, we think, thereby producing a sign transfer of our speech. Such a characteristic does not allow us to say exactly where and when writing arose, however, historians nevertheless found some patterns, which made it possible to create certain theories of the origin of this phenomenon.

The writing of the peoples of Mesopotamia

How did Greek writing originate?

The emergence of writing in Greece, the cradle of Western culture, is associated with the fact of the appearance of the Greek alphabet. It should be noted that the Greek alphabet is borrowed. It was created on the basis of the Phoenician, which the Greeks adopted in the 9th century BC. The alphabet consisted only of consonants, which was completely unsuitable for the Greek language. Therefore, the Greeks literally "diluted" it with a few vowels. Already in the 7th century BC, they learned to write, as evidenced by the finds of archaeologists. The oldest text currently known is the Dipylon Inscription. There are also theories that Greek writing originated around the 17th century BC, but there is no real historical evidence for this. So we know how Greek writing came into being, as well as Egyptian and Mesopotamian writing. But there are also historical finds of a completely different, European culture of writing.

Prerequisites for the emergence of Slavic writing

Somewhere in the 5th century AD, a great thing happens. As a result of this large-scale migration process, many different tribes appeared. This period is identified with the time when Slavic writing arose. Insignificant tribes gradually developed, and by the end of the 9th century, the Eastern Slavs created their own state, which they called Kievan Rus. The new state was rapidly gaining military power, and also developing its culture. It was during this period that writing arose, because during the Slavic settlement there was only the Slavic language. Paradoxically, but the laws of writing were formed after the invention of the Slavic alphabet, just as it happened in Greece.

Cyril and Methodius - the progenitors of Old Russian writing

The first books in the Slavic language provide an opportunity to understand how the ancient Russian writing system arose.

The brothers Cyril and Methodius created the alphabet and the first books in the Slavic language for the Moravian prince on behalf of Emperor Michael III. This happened in 863. Writing came to the territory of ancient Russia in the form of an alphabet - Cyrillic or Glagolitic.

But there is a slight inconsistency here. When people arose on the territory of this state, they already knew the Slavic language. Hence the question: did writing and the alphabet really form on the territory of Kievan Rus, or did these irreplaceable attributes of culture come from outside? Scientists cannot answer this question to this day. Most likely, scattered tribes spoke their own, purely local dialects. As for the Slavic writing and language, they were formed in their classical form already during the existence of Kievan Rus on the basis of the alphabet of the brothers Cyril and Methodius.

Conclusion

So, we have analyzed various historical periods that make it possible to understand where and when writing arose. The history of the emergence of this phenomenon contains many secrets that still need to be shed light.

The importance of writing in the history of the development of civilization is difficult to overestimate. Language, like a mirror, reflects the whole world, our whole life. And when reading written or printed texts, we seem to sit in a time machine and can be transported both to recent times and to the distant past.

The possibilities of writing are not limited by time or distance. But people have not always mastered the art of writing. This art has been developing for a long time, over many millennia.

At first, picture writing (pictography) appeared: some event was depicted in the form of a drawing, then they began to depict not an event, but individual objects, first observing the similarity with the depicted, and then in the form of conventional signs (ideography, hieroglyphs), and, finally, they learned not to depict objects, but to convey their names with signs (sound writing). Initially, only consonants were used in the sound letter, and vowels were either not perceived at all, or were indicated by additional signs (syllabary). The syllabary was in use among many Semitic peoples, including the Phoenicians.

The Greeks created their alphabet on the basis of the Phoenician script, but significantly improved it by introducing special signs for vowel sounds. The Greek alphabet formed the basis of the Latin alphabet, and in the 9th century the Slavonic alphabet was created by using the letters of the Greek alphabet.

The great work of creating the Slavic alphabet was accomplished by the brothers Konstantin (who took the name Cyril at baptism) and Methodius. The main merit in this matter belongs to Cyril. Methodius was his faithful assistant. Compiling the Slavic alphabet, Cyril was able to catch in the sound of the Slavic language familiar to him from childhood (and it was probably one of the dialects of the ancient Bulgarian language) the main sounds of this language and find letter designations for each of them. When reading in Old Slavonic, we pronounce the words the way they are written. In the Old Church Slavonic language, we will not find such a discrepancy between the sound of words and their pronunciation, as, for example, in English or French.

The Slavic bookish language (Old Church Slavonic) became widespread as a common language for many Slavic peoples. It was used by the southern Slavs (Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats), Western Slavs (Czechs, Slovaks), Eastern Slavs (Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians).

In memory of the great feat of Cyril and Methodius, on May 24, the Day of Slavic Literature is celebrated all over the world. It is especially solemnly celebrated in Bulgaria. There are festive processions with the Slavic alphabet and icons of the holy brothers. Starting from 1987, in our country, on this day, a holiday of Slavic writing and culture began to be held Gelb I.E. The study of writing systems among the ancient Slavs. M., 2003..

The word "alphabet" comes from the names of the first two letters of the Slavic alphabet: A (az) and B (beeches):

ALPHABET: AZ + BUKI

and the word "alphabet" comes from the name of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet:

ALPHABET: ALPHA + VITA

The alphabet is much older than the alphabet. In the 9th century there was no alphabet, and the Slavs did not have their own letters. And so there was no writing. The Slavs could not write books or even letters to each other in their own language.

In the 9th century in Byzantium, in the city of Solun (now it is the city of Thessaloniki in Greece), there lived two brothers - Constantine and Methodius. They were wise and very educated people and knew the Slavic language well. The Greek Tsar Michael sent these brothers to the Slavs in response to the request of the Slavic prince Rostislav. (Rostislav asked to send teachers who could tell the Slavs about the holy Christian books, unknown to them book words and their meaning).

And so the brothers Constantine and Methodius came to the Slavs to create the Slavic alphabet, which later became known as the Cyrillic alphabet. (In honor of Constantine, who, having taken monasticism, received the name Cyril).

Cyril and Methodius took the Greek alphabet and adapted it to the sounds of the Slavic language. Many of our letters are taken from Greek, which is why they look like them.

Modern has evolved over many centuries. The following stages of its formation can be distinguished:

• subject writing

Initially, people did not have any . Therefore, it was quite difficult to transmit information over long distances. The famous legend (told by Herodotus) about the Persian king Darius I says that once he received a message from the nomadic Scythians. The message included

includes the following four items: a bird, a mouse, a frog and arrows. The messenger who delivered the message said that he was not ordered to tell him anything else, and with that he said goodbye to the king. The question arose of how to interpret this message of the Scythians. King Darius considered that the Scythians surrendered themselves to his power and, as a sign of obedience, brought him earth, water and sky, for a mouse means earth, a frog - water, a bird - sky, and arrows mean that the Scythians refuse to resist. However, one of the wise men objected to Darius. He interpreted the message of the Scythians in a completely different way: “If you Persians do not fly into the sky like birds, or burrow into the ground like mice, or jump into the swamp like frogs, you will not return back, struck by these arrows.” As it turned out later, this sage was right.

The retold legend reveals the fact that initially people tried to transmit information using various objects. Notable historical examples subject writing are also wampum (Iroquois letter, represented by multi-colored shells strung on a rope) and quipu (Peruvian letter, in which information was transmitted by color and the number of knots on the ropes). Certainly, subject writing was not the most convenient means of transmitting information, and over time people came up with more versatile tools.

• Pictographic letter

The next step in the formation writing became a letter based on images (pictograms). It can be recalled that the origin of fine arts took place back in the days of ancient people before the emergence of statehood. The essence of pictographic writing is that a certain concept is expressed with the help of a certain sign. For example, the concept of "man" can be conveyed by the image of a person.

Gradually simplifying, the pictograms are more and more removed from the original images, they begin to acquire multiple meanings. However, pictography could not fulfill all the needs of writing that arise with the development of concepts and abstract thinking, and then ideography (“writing with concepts”) is born. It is used to convey what is not visual. For example, to denote the concept of "vigilance", which is impossible to draw, they depicted the organ through which it manifests itself, that is, the eye. Thus, the drawing of the eye as a pictogram means "eye" and as an ideogram - "vigilance". Therefore, the drawing could have direct and figurative meanings. (Reformatsky A. A. Introduction to linguistics, M .: Aspect Press, 2006. - p. 352 - 353)

Ancient Egyptian writing can serve as an example of ideography. Outwardly, it is very similar to pictography, although from the very beginning these two types of writing differed significantly. If the pictography served to depict the whole message, then each sign of ideographic writing - a hieroglyph - depicted a separate word. The most famous of the ideographic scripts, and almost the only one that has survived to this day, is the Chinese hieroglyphics.

• Hieroglyphic writing

In hieroglyphic writing, it is often difficult to distinguish the original image underlying it. In hieroglyphs, typical structural elements appear, repeated in different characters. Probably, the reason for this was the desire of a person to simplify the recording of a written text, to simplify learning to write.

However, hieroglyphic writing still retained a significant drawback: it had no connection with the pronunciation of the word. As a result, written and oral speech existed, as it were, separately. In addition, in languages ​​that are characterized by a change in the form of a word depending on its syntactic role, it was necessary to supplement hieroglyphs with special designations for word forms. Hieroglyphic writing is still widely used in China. Chinese characters formed the basis of modern Japanese writing. In total, there are 60,000 characters in modern Chinese writing. Usually a Chinese person owns several thousand characters, and this is quite enough for reading newspapers, magazines and fiction.

• syllabary

A significant step towards the convergence of oral and written speech was the formation of syllabic writing. The most famous syllabic scripts are cuneiform (ancient Persian, Akkadian and other heirs of the Sumerian script), West Semitic (Phoenician, Arabic and other heirs of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics) and Japanese syllabic systems (katakana and hiragana). An important role in the history of the formation of the modern alphabet was played by the ancient Phoenicians: they used Egyptian hieroglyphs for writing, but took only those that denoted individual syllables. But the Phoenician language also had sounds that were absent in the Egyptian language. For these sounds, the Phoenicians created new signs.

• Alphabetical letter

The real one, not a syllabic, but an alphabetic alphabet, where there are signs not only for consonants, but also for vowels, appeared for the first time among the ancient Greeks. They faced the problem of fully conveying the sound of words using the Phoenician syllabic system. The fact is that in the Phoenician letter, in essence, there were no letters to designate vowel sounds. For the Greeks, due to the specifics of the formation of word forms, this turned out to be inconvenient. Therefore, special characters appeared to denote vowels. As a result, the letter moved to an even more universal level. Now, using about 30 characters that anyone could easily learn, it was possible to convey almost any word of oral speech. The Greek alphabet turned out to be so simple and convenient that it was used by other peoples of the ancient Mediterranean - Lycians, Lydians, Thracians, Carians, Etruscans.

Subsequently, many scripts, including the Latin alphabet, arose from the Greek script. The Latin alphabet, with various additional signs and double letter designations for sounds that did not exist in the Latin language, is now used by a huge part of humanity. In the Middle Ages, Latin became the international language, and for many centuries it played the role of the language of the learned world. It was composed of theoretical treatises and presented the results of experimental studies. Encyclopedists and educators, naturalists and mathematicians corresponded in Latin, the letters were in the nature of scientific articles and their discussions, because periodic scientific journals did not yet exist.

alphabets

alphabets, they are also called phonemic alphabets, are a set of letters that, as a rule, line up in a certain order. Each of these letters represents one or more phonemes. As a rule, letters are divided into vowels and consonants. This division has its own characteristics in each of the languages, letters, which is quite natural, are used to compose words. Some combinations of letters use such combinations that, when pronounced, are heard as one letter or sound. Such combinations include, for example, in English the following combinations - sh, ch and th.

The word alphabet itself comes from the Latin word alphabetum (alfabetum). This word, in turn, comes from the Greek word (alphabetos), created from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet - alpha (alpha) and beta - (beta). To date, some of the most famous and most common types of alphabet are the Latin and Roman alphabets, as well as the Cyrillic or Slavic alphabet.

Slavic alphabet

The Slavic alphabet (Cyrillic) was developed on the basis of Greek writing by two learned monks from the Byzantine city of Thessalonica (now Thessaloniki in Greece). Their names were Cyril and Methodius. In 1963, all Slavic countries celebrated the anniversary - 1100 years since the creation of the first Slavic alphabet. And in Bulgaria, the Day of Slavic Literature is celebrated every year on May 24th. Strictly speaking, Cyrillic writing, or Cyrillic, is not the only early Slavic writing. At the same time, there was also the so-called Glagolitic alphabet (from the word "verb" - in Old Slavonic "word"). It is more difficult than Cyrillic. Some scholars believe that Cyril invented both Cyrillic and Glagolitic: after all, many letters of both alphabets are very similar. Others think that one of the alphabets existed even before Cyril, but which one, opinions differ.

Cyrillic has 43 letters. By the way, they were also used to indicate numbers: for this, dashes were placed above them. And until now, the Cyrillic alphabet, in its various variants, is used in Russia, Bulgaria and the countries of the former Yugoslavia.

The Russian alphabet acquired its modern style at the beginning of the 18th century, when Peter I introduced a new form of written characters - a civil font instead of Church Slavonic. The development of culture, the growth in demand for books not only religious, but also scientific and educational, the flourishing of fiction required a simpler graphics of letters.

Over time, some of the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet turned out to be superfluous, because the sounds they denoted disappeared from the language. The Petrine reform did not rid the Russian alphabet of all superfluous letters; only some of them were officially excluded. At the same time, in the 18th century, two new letters appeared in our alphabet: “й” - in 1735, and “ё” - in 1797. The letter "ё" was first used by the writer N. M. Karamzin, the author of the story "Poor Lisa".

After 1917, our alphabet was freed from superfluous written characters. The fita, izhitsa, the hard sign at the end of words, and the letter yat, once hated by all schoolchildren, disappeared.
The modern writing systems of the majority of the peoples of Russia are built on the Slavic-Cyrillic basis. The Cyrillic script is used by peoples who speak 60 languages.

***
reference:

Writing- in a broad sense - a set of written means of communication: graphics system, alphabet, spelling.
Writing, in the narrow sense, is the totality of written and literary monuments of a people.
alphabets called phonetic scripts that have a standard, so-called alphabetical order of characters. The characters of the alphabets are called letters.

Types of writing in human languages

• Ideographic (pictographic) - a written sign is tied to a specific meaning
• phonideographic - a written sign is tied to both meaning and sound
  • logographic - a written sign denotes a certain word
  • Morphemic - a written sign denotes a certain morpheme (see "Chinese writing")
• Phonetic - a written sign is tied to a certain sound
  • syllabic (syllabic) - each written sign denotes a certain syllable. Distinguish:
    • proper syllabary - syllables with the same consonant but different vowels are denoted by completely different signs (for example, Japanese kana);
    • abugida - such syllables are indicated by modified forms of one basic character (for example, Ethiopian writing) and / or additional signs (Indian writing)
  • consonant (quasi-alphabetic) - only consonants are indicated on the letter. With their development, such writing systems, as a rule, are enriched with vocalization systems, in which vowels can be denoted with the help of diacritics or additional marks.
  • Consonant vocal writing - letters represent both vowels and consonants; on the letter as a whole, the correspondence “one grapheme (written sign) is one phoneme” is observed.

The above systems in their pure form are rare, usually elements of other systems are mixed into the base system.
Expression "hieroglyphic writing" does not have a clearly defined meaning.

• Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was syllabic with elements from other systems.
• Ancient Chinese hieroglyphic writing was logographic, modern Chinese is morphemic.

The oldest written documents found in the excavations of the ancient city of Uruk date back to 3300 BC. e.

Photo: Vladislav StrekopytovOn the shores of Lake Orestiada in Western Macedonia(Northern Greece) city is located Kastoria, known to Russian tourists primarily for its fur centers, where specialized shopping tours are organized for inexpensive, but very high-quality fur coats made of natural fur. But there is a lot of interesting things in Western Macedonia besides fur coats, which, however, are not always told to participants in shopping tours.

One of these places "for tourist gourmets" is a museum-reconstruction of a prehistoric settlement Dispilio on the shores of Lake Orestiada. This place is known not so much for the modern reconstruction of frame adobe houses on piles, but for the so-called tablet from Dispilio, on which pictographic signs are applied, reminiscent of ancient writing. Possibly the oldest written language in the world!

For a long time, the Sumerian cuneiform was considered to be the oldest written language on Earth. As archeology developed, it became clear that it was preceded by a stage of pictographic writing. In the same Sumer, finds of tablets with pictographic writing (for example, a tablet from Kish), strikingly similar to the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt (which means they had a common source), date back to the middle of the 4th millennium BC.

However, in 1961 in Romania, near the village of Tarteria, three clay tablets with graphic writing of the “Sumerian” type were discovered, dated to the middle of the 6th millennium BC. That is, they are older than the first material evidence of writing in Mesopotamia by at least 1000 years! The time of creation of the tablets was established by an indirect method, by radiocarbon analysis of objects found with them in the same layer. Later it turned out that the writing of Terteria did not arise from scratch, but was an integral part of the widespread in the middle of the 6th - beginning of the 5th millennium BC. pictographic writing of the Balkan culture Vinci (Danubian archetype). Currently, up to a thousand objects of the Vinca culture are known, on which such pictograms are scratched. The geography of the finds covers the territory of Serbia, western Romania and Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldavia, Macedonia and Northern Greece. Despite the hundreds of kilometers separating them, the pictograms show an amazing similarity throughout the area of ​​the Vinca culture.

Similar symbols-signs are also contained in the tablet from Dispilio. Radiocarbon analysis dates the tablet to around 5260 BC.

It turns out that the pictograms of the Danubian proto-writing are the oldest form of writing in the world. In other words, the so-called "Old European writing" existed on the continent not only long before the Minoan, traditionally considered the first writing system in Europe, but also before the Proto-Sumerian and Proto-Chinese writing systems. This system arose in the first half of the VI millennium BC. e., spread between 5300-4300 years and disappeared by 4000 BC. e. Moreover, it is likely that the Sumerian proto-writing directly comes from the Danubian. The set of symbols and totems not only strikingly coincides, but they are also arranged in the same sequence - on sections of the surface separated by lines, the symbols should be read in a circle counterclockwise.

So, the ancient inhabitants of the Balkans wrote "in Sumerian" in the Stone Age - in the 5th millennium BC. e., when there was no mention of Sumer himself! The pictographic writing of ancient Crete also contains distant echoes of Vinci's writing, on the basis of which the most ancient Aegean letter in Europe from the time of the Minoan civilization (end of the 3rd - beginning of the 2nd millennium BC) took shape. Based on this, a number of researchers conclude that primitive writing in the Aegean countries has its roots in the Balkans of the 4th millennium BC, and did not at all arise under the influence of distant Mesopotamia, as previously believed.

And the Sumerian writing itself, most likely, arose under the influence of the Danubian proto-writing. How else to explain that the most ancient writing in Sumer, dating from the end of the 4th millennium BC, appeared quite suddenly and already in a fully developed form. The Sumerians adopted pictographic writing from the Balkan peoples, further developing it into cuneiform.

reference
The Neolithic lake settlement of Dispilio was discovered in the dry winter of 1932, when the lake level dropped and traces of the settlement became visible. A preliminary study was carried out in 1935 by Professor Antonios Keramopoulos. Regular excavations began in 1992. It turned out that this place was inhabited by people from the end of the Middle Neolithic (5600-5000 BC) to the late Neolithic (3000 BC). A number of artifacts were found in the village, including ceramics, wooden structural elements, seeds, bones, figurines, personal jewelry, flutes. All of them belong to the Vinca culture. The tablet with signs was discovered in 1993 by the Greek archaeologist George Urmuziades.
On the shore of the lake, an exact copy of the settlement was created with huts on pile platforms, in natural sizes, made from natural materials. Tree trunks were used for the frame of the houses, and branches and ropes were used for the walls. Each hut was plastered with lake clay, the roofs of which were covered with thatch. Inside the huts are everyday items found during excavations: earthenware vessels, bowls, fruit dishes, as well as tools made of stone or bone - exact copies, the originals of which are in the Dispilio Museum itself.

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The earliest pictographic writing may have originated as early as the Mesolithic period. It is to this time that the so-called "Azilian" churingas belong. These are pebbles, on the surface of which various symbolic figures are painted or engraved. They are called "churings" by analogy with similar objects of the Australian aborigines, in whom churngs are symbolic receptacles of souls. In the Neolithic, ornamental drawings are applied to earthenware vessels. Each group of tribes had its own ornamentation system, very stable for hundreds and even thousands of years. Among the repeated drawings about 3.5 thousand years ago, conventional signs were discovered, indicating, possibly, the appearance of logographic writing. In the East, the systems of this writing were formed no later than the 4th millennium BC. e. (Anterior Asian, Proto-Elamite, Proto-Indian, Ancient Egyptian, Cretan, Chinese).

THE ORIGIN OF WRITING

From the III millennium BC. e. Egyptian writing began to turn into a logographic-consonantal system. The spelling of letters also changed.
The most ancient monuments of logographic writing were Sumerian and Proto-Elamic writing, which arose in the 5th-4th millennium BC. e. They wrote on stone and clay tablets. However, already from the beginning of the III millennium BC. e. writing began to acquire a logographic-syllabic character. The letters lost their pictorial quality, turning into combinations of cuneiform lines. This, apparently, was due to the material on which they wrote in Mesopotamia - clay. On clay, it was easier to extrude wedge-shaped icons than to draw lines. On the basis of the Sumerian, the Urartian writing arose, which was used in the Caucasus in the 9th-4th centuries. BC e.
The writing used on the territory of Central Asia in the 6th-4th centuries had a special syllabic character. BC e. This is the so-called Persian (or Achaemenid) cuneiform. Monuments of such cuneiform writing are found even in the Southern Urals.
At the turn of II and I millennium BC. e. sound writing became widespread. It was simpler than other systems and cost only 20-30 characters-letters. It is assumed that the number of letters in the first alphabets was related to the number of days in the lunar month, with the addition of the number of signs of the zodiac. Most modern writing systems are descended from the first Phoenician sound writing.

Writing, according to archaeological excavations, arose in the period of the primitive communal system, about 15 thousand years ago. Of course, this was a primitive form of information transfer. The earliest period in the development of writing is pictography (transmission of information by drawings). It is interesting that in some tribes such writing was preserved until the end of the 19th century.

In pictography, the verb "to speak" was indicated in the form of a mouth, "to look" - in the form of eyes, etc. It is curious that when illiterate people try to write down their thoughts at the present time, they also denote similar verbs.

But it was quite difficult to convey information using drawings, so they were gradually simplified, turning into diagrams and signs; this is how ideographic writing arose (Greek “idea” - a concept, “grapho” - I write). In the end, the sign that denoted the concept or, later, the word, turned into a letter that was part of the word.

History of writing

Thus, from individual letters it became possible to compose any word. And so the alphabet was born.

The oldest ideographic writings date back to the 4th millennium BC. In Egypt, the walls of magnificent buildings were painted with hieroglyphs (Greek "hieros" - sacred, from "glufo" - I cut out). Each sign denoted a separate word, but over time, hieroglyphs in Egypt began to denote syllables and even sounds, becoming the prototype of alphabetic alphabets.

Egyptian writing was first deciphered at the beginning of the 19th century. This was done by the French scientist Jean-Francois Champollion. Among the trophies of the Egyptian campaign of Napoleon Bonaparte was the famous Rosetta stone with identical inscriptions in three languages. The very first consisted of hieroglyphs, the second was a demotic (public cursive) script, and the last one was a Greek script. Champollion fully deciphered the text and concluded that in the 1st c. BC. Egyptian writing has already acquired a mixed character - ideographic, syllabic and partly phonetic.

In the IV century. The Sumerians, who lived in the interfluve of the Tigris and Euphrates, also acquire their own written language. Sumerian writing was a mixture of pictographic and hieroglyphic characters. Perhaps it is somehow connected with Egyptian writing, but it is impossible to say for sure.

Completely independently from the middle of the III millennium BC. developed hieroglyphic Chinese writing, which exists to this day. While the number of ideographic signs in other languages ​​was declining, in Chinese, with the formation of new words, it grew. Therefore, in modern Chinese there are about 50 thousand ideographic signs, and ancient Chinese writing in the I-II centuries. BC. consisted of only 2,500-3,000 hieroglyphs.

Alphabet - a set of symbols, letters (or other graphemes) arranged in a rigid order and designed to reproduce certain sounds. Modern European alphabets developed from Greek, which was passed to the Greeks by the Phoenicians - the inhabitants of an ancient country on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. In the VI century. BC. Phoenicia was conquered by the Persians, in 332 BC. e. - Alexander the Great. The Phoenician alphabet did not have vowels (this is the so-called consonantal letter - consonants were combined with arbitrary vowels), it had 22 simple characters. The origin of the Phoenician script is still the subject of scientific disputes, but, probably, with minor changes, it goes back to the consonantal Ugaritic script, and the Ugaritic language belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afroasian languages.

The invention of the Slavic alphabet is associated with the names of two enlightening brothers Cyril (c. 827-869) and Methodius (815-885).

They came from the family of a Greek military leader and were born in the city of Thessalonica (modern Thessaloniki in Greece). The elder brother, Methodius, entered the military service in his youth. For ten years he was the manager of one of the Slavic regions of Byzantium, and then left his post and retired to a monastery. In the late 860s, he became abbot of the Greek monastery of Polychron on Mount Olympus in Asia Minor.

Unlike his brother, Cyril from childhood was distinguished by a craving for knowledge and as a boy he was sent to Constantinople to the court of the Byzantine Emperor Michael III. There he received an excellent education, studied not only Slavic, but also Greek, Latin, Hebrew and even Arabic. Subsequently, he refused public service and was tonsured a monk.

In 863, when the Byzantine emperor, at the request of the Moravian prince Rostislav, sent the brothers to Moravia, they had just begun translating the main liturgical books. Naturally, such a grandiose work would have dragged on for many years if a circle of translators had not formed around Cyril and Methodius.

In the summer of 863, Cyril and Methodius arrived in Moravia, already in possession of the first Slavic texts. However, their activities immediately aroused the discontent of the Bavarian Catholic clergy, who did not want to cede their influence over Moravia to anyone.

In addition, the appearance of Slavic translations of the Bible contradicted the establishment of the Catholic Church, according to which the church service had to be held in Latin, and the text of the Holy Scriptures should not be translated into any languages ​​​​except Latin at all.

To this day, the disputes of scientists about what kind of alphabet Cyril created - Cyrillic or Glagolitic - do not subside. The difference between them is that Glagolitic is more archaic in lettering, while Cyrillic turned out to be more convenient for conveying the sound features of the Slavic language. It is known that in the IX century. both alphabets were in use, and only at the turn of the 10th-11th centuries. Glagolitic has practically fallen out of use.

After the death of Cyril, the alphabet invented by him got its current name. Over time, the Cyrillic alphabet became the basis of all Slavic alphabets, including Russian.

Publication date: 2014-10-25; Read: 390 | Page copyright infringement

1 Rock carvings are otherwise called petroglyphs or petroglyphs (from the Greek petros - stone and glyphe - carving). They depict animals, household items. They could also serve to mark the boundaries of the tribe's possessions, hunting grounds, and give an idea of ​​the environment. They also allowed information to be transmitted and stored for centuries.

2 Proper letter. When using it, household items, tools were endowed with a certain meaning, known to the sender and recipient. Elements of real writing have survived to this day.

3 Knot letter is a mnemonic way of storing thoughts, messages. On ropes painted in different colors, knots were tied in predetermined places. Their location and information was transmitted.

4 Pictographic writing or pictography (from Latin pictus - drawn and Greek grapho - I write). Objects began to be replaced by their images. The overall content of the image was displayed as a drawing or a series of drawings. But with the help of primitive drawings it is difficult to depict actions or show the quality of objects. Appeared during the Neolithic.

5 Ideographic writing (from the Greek idea - concept, representation). For this letter, special signs are used - ideograms. With the help of them, whole concepts were designated. Ideograms are numbers, chemical signs, mathematical symbols.

6 Hieroglyphic writing, which used special. signs - hieroglyphs (from the Greek hieroglyphoi - sacred writings). They could denote not only whole concepts, but also individual words, syllables, and even speech sounds. This type of writing was used in ancient Egypt in Sumer.

7 Cuneiform. Appeared around 3000 BC, the signs of this type of writing consisted of groups of wedge-shaped dashes that were extruded on wet clay. Originated in Sumer, then began to be used in Assyria and Babylon.

8 Phonographic letter (from grey.phone - sound). This is a sound writing with the help of signs (letters) meaning certain sound units of the language (sounds, syllables). It has been known since the 13th century BC. arose from the ideographic in Phoenicia. In the IX-VIII centuries. BC.

ancient writing

The Greek alphabet was based on the Phoenician script.

9 Slavic writing. The third written language after Greek and Latin appeared in 863. The brothers (Cyril and Methodius) took Greek as the basis of the Slavic alphabet, adding several signs to indicate hissing and some other sounds that were absent in the Greek language. There were two varieties of the Slavic alphabet - Cyrillic and Glagolitic. On the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian and other writing systems arose.

Publication date: 2015-10-09; Read: 191 | Page copyright infringement

studopedia.org - Studopedia.Org - 2014-2018. (0.001 s) ...

Writing originated among the Sumerians more than five thousand years ago. Later, it became known as cuneiform.

They wrote with a pointed reed stick on clay tablets. Due to the fact that the tablets were dried and fired, they became very strong, which allowed them to survive to our times. And this is very important, because thanks to them, the history of the emergence of writing can be traced.

There are two assumptions for its appearance - this is monogenesis (origin in one place) and polygenesis (in several places).

There are three primary centers for the emergence of writing:

1. Egyptian

2. Mesopotamian

3. Far East (China)

Everywhere the development of writing took one path: first a drawing, and then written signs.

Sometimes, instead of letters, people sent different objects to each other. True, such “letters” were not always correctly interpreted. A striking example is the war between the Scythians and Darius, king of Persia.

Drawing was the first step towards writing. And the image that denoted one or another object was called a pictogram. They painted, as a rule, people, animals, household utensils, etc. And if at first they depicted a reliable number of objects, that is, as much as they saw, they drew as much, then they gradually switched to a simplified version. They began to draw an object, and next to it, with dashes, they specified its quantity.

The next step was the selection of characters from the drawings. They denoted the sounds that made up the name of the objects.

A very important step was the image, not only in a concrete form, but also in an abstract one. Over time, it became necessary to write down long texts, so the drawings began to be simplified, conventional signs appeared, called hieroglyphs (from the Greek “sacred writings”).

In the XII-XIII centuries. Sinai inscriptions appeared. Due to this, the number of written characters has rapidly decreased. And syllabic writing arose. And after it came the alphabet.

Each nation created its own alphabetic letter. The Phoenicians, for example, attributed an indifferent vowel to each sign. Jews and Arabs did not use vowels.

The oldest written language.

But the Greeks, based on the Phoenician script, introduced signs for vowels, began to depict stress, and even introduced an analogue of modern notes.

Thus, writing was not invented by any particular person, it appeared as a result of a vital need. And during our era, it is actively developing. So, Cyril and Methodius created a letter for the Slavs, and Mesrop Mashtots for the Armenians. download dle 12.1
The legend of voluntary slavery

Rock paintings, known in science as petroglyphs, are found in different parts of the world and belong to different historical eras from the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages. Ancient people applied them to the walls and ceilings of caves, to open rock surfaces and individual stones. The oldest Paleolithic rock paintings have been found in caves and grottoes in southern France and northern Spain. The petroglyphs are characterized by figures of animals, primarily objects of hunting of an ancient person: bison, horses, mammoths, rhinoceroses, predators are less common - bears, lions. In Russia, petroglyphs were called petroglyphs. Here, Paleolithic drawings have been discovered in the Kapova Cave in the Urals and on the rocks near the village of Shishkino on the Lena River. Already in ancient times, the style and technique of rock carvings were diverse - from contour drawing scratched on stone to polychrome bas-relief painting, for which mineral paints were used. Rock carvings had a magical meaning for ancient people.

Wampum (from the Indian wampumpeag - threads with shells strung on them), a means of memorizing and transmitting messages among the Indian tribes of the North. America. The content of the message was expressed by the color, quantity, and relative position of the shells. Wampum could also be used in place of money.

Kipu means to tie a knot or just a knot; this word is also understood as count (cuenta), because the knots contained the count of any objects. The Indians made threads of different colors: some were only of one color, others of two colors, others of three, and others of more, because the color simple and the color mixed each had its own special meaning; the thread was tightly twisted from three or four thin coils, and it was as thick as an iron spindle and about three-quarters of a vara long; each of them was attached in a special order to another thread - the base, forming, as it were, a fringe. By color, they determined what exactly such a thread contained, somehow: yellow meant gold, white meant silver, and red meant warriors.

Pictographic letter

(from Latin pictus - drawn and Greek grapho - I write, picture writing, pictography), displaying the general content of the message in the form of pictures, usually for memorization purposes. Known since the Neolithic. Pictographic writing is not a means of fixing any language, that is, writing in the proper sense. However, it is very important - people drew drawings on the surface of rocks, stones, etc. This was the starting point for the development of descriptive writing.

Conclusion. All of the above methods of recording speech were very limited in their application. Not every thought could be transmitted over long distances or “stopped in time” with their help. The main drawback of these methods is the lack of clarity, unambiguity in their reading.

The oldest writing on earth

A lot depends on the skill of the one who draws, as well as on the ingenuity of the one who reads.

Although, for example, pictography is also used in the modern world: road signs, street signs. The use of pictograms as an aid is very convenient. The meaning can be conveyed very quickly, the image is understandable to everyone: both children who cannot read, and foreigners who do not have an interpreter. Icons are very common in modern computers. By pressing the button with the image of the corresponding icon on the computer screen, you can call up your favorite game or other program you need to work.

pre-letter

Ideographic writing (from the Greek idea - an idea, an image and grapho - I write) is a writing principle that uses ideograms. To a large extent, the ancient Egyptian, Sumerian and other ancient writing systems had an ideographic character. It reached its greatest development in Chinese hieroglyphics.

Many signs of ideography - ideograms - came from drawings. Moreover, among many peoples, some signs were used as pictograms (and then they depicted a specific object) and as ideograms (and then they denoted an abstract concept). The drawing in these cases appears in a figurative, i.e., in a conditional meaning.

Hieroglyphic writing. The most ancient of the varieties of ideographic writing were hieroglyphs, consisting of phonograms and ideograms. Most of the hieroglyphs were phonograms, that is, they denoted a combination of two or three consonants. Ideograms denoted individual words and concepts. The Egyptians did not designate vowels in writing. The most common were 700 hieroglyphs. The oldest hieroglyphic texts date back to the 32nd century BC. e.

"Sacred Signs"

There is a legend in Egypt about how the idea of ​​phonogram writing came about.

“About 5 thousand years ago Pharaoh Narmer ruled in Egypt. He won many victories and wanted these victories to be forever imprinted on stone. Skilled craftsmen worked day and night. They depicted the pharaoh, and the killed enemies, and captives, even showed with the help of drawings that there were 6 thousand captives. But not a single artist could convey the name of Narmer himself. And for him, that was the most important thing. This is how the Egyptian artists recorded the name of the pharaoh. They depicted a fish, because the word "nar" in Egyptian is "fish". "Mer" in the same language means "chisel". The image of a fish above the image of a chisel - this is how the artists solved the task assigned to them.

Hieroglyphic writing was not only among the Egyptians, but also among the Babylonians, Sumerians, Maya Indians, and the ancient inhabitants of the island of Crete. And in our time, the peoples of China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan write with hieroglyphs.

Conclusion. Compared with the types of written language, hieroglyphic writing has a number of advantages: an unambiguous reading of the message, the ability to convey not only everyday, but also scientific information, abstract concepts. And phonideograms (hieroglyphs containing an indication of the sound) even give an idea of ​​the sounding word.

But imagine how much you need to memorize signs with their meanings, if, for example, there are about 50 thousand of them in the Chinese language! Such a huge number is almost impossible to remember for one person, even if you learn only the actively used 4-7 thousand hieroglyphs.

Letter writing

Sound-alphabetic writing originated in the depths of ideographic writing. The idea to convey the sound of words in writing, which originated among the Sumerians, was embodied in different versions by other peoples. All methods were based on the use of simple signs denoting monosyllabic words in writing complex signs for other words. One such option is Chinese phonideograms. However, this is still very far from the designation by signs (letters) of individual speech sounds, which forms the basis of phonographic (sound-letter) writing.

Phoenician and Greek scripts. The Phoenicians, who lived about 2000 years ago, invented signs for sounds. This is how letters and the alphabet appeared. And they all agreed! Just imagine that instead of "Mom washed the frame" we would write "Mm ml rm." Fortunately, after 200 years, the Phoenician alphabet ended up in Ancient Greece. “It is not very convenient to read words from consonants alone,” the Greeks reasoned and remade some of the consonants into vowels. The Greek scientist Pelamed managed to create 16 letters. For many years, scientists of the next generations added two, some three, and one even 6 letters. Huge efforts were spent to improve the letter, to make it more understandable and convenient for people. This is how the Greek alphabet was formed. It consisted of letters that denoted both consonants and vowels. The Greek letter became the source for all European alphabets, including the Cyrillic alphabet.

Slavic alphabet. In ancient times, more than 1000 years ago, the Slavic peoples did not have their own written language. And in the second half of the 10th century, two scientists from Greece, the brothers Cyril and Methodius, arrived in Great Moravia (the territory of modern Czechoslovakia) and began to work on the creation of Slavic writing. They knew the Slavic languages ​​well, and this gave them the opportunity to compose the Slavic alphabet. Having developed this alphabet, they translated the most important Greek books into the then ancient, according to our concepts, Slavic language (it is called Old Slavonic). Their work gave the Slavic peoples the opportunity to write and read in their own language.

The Slavic alphabet existed in two versions: Glagolitic - from verb - "speech" and Cyrillic. Until now, scientists have no consensus on which of these options was created by Cyril. Most modern researchers believe that he created the Glagolitic alphabet. Later (apparently, at the cathedral in Preslav, in the capital of the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon in 893), the Cyrillic alphabet appeared, which eventually replaced the Glagolitic.

Russian alphabet. With the adoption of Christianity in Russia, the Cyrillic alphabet was also borrowed, which laid the foundation for the Russian alphabet. It originally had 43 letters. Over time, some of them turned out to be superfluous because the sounds they denoted disappeared, and some were superfluous from the very beginning. The Russian alphabet in its modern form was introduced by the reforms of Peter I, as a result of which the style of the letters was changed (it approached the printed Latin alphabet) and the obsolete letters "omega", "ot", "yus big", iotated "a", "e" were excluded , "xi", "psi". During the second half of the 17th century, "e", "th", "e" were introduced. And after the October Revolution in 1918, “yat”, “fita”, “and decimal”, “Izhitsa” were excluded from the Russian alphabet. Thus, the modern alphabet has 33 letters.

Conclusion. Letter writing has given people a number of possibilities.

Above all, freedom from time and distance has become a universal means of expressing thoughts and feelings. It became possible to convey a sounding word in a letter, to fix all the words of a particular language (including abstract concepts) using the least number of characters. But the whole matter is now complicated by the need to know and be able to apply spelling and punctuation rules.

In conclusion

In the Russian alphabet, the letters of the Slavic alphabet not only changed over time, but their names also became simpler. If at the beginning of the twentieth century your great-grandmother had difficulty memorizing the beautiful “names” of letters: “az”, “beeches”, “lead”, “verb”, “good”, now you easily blurt out: “a”, “be”, "we", "ge", "de"!

So, sitting down for lessons, do not forget to mentally thank everyone who took part in creating a simple and convenient letter.

Conclusion: For many millennia, people have sought to ensure that the letter:

1) could transmit various types of information;

2) was understandable;

3) was simple and convenient.