Courtesy: Russian exemption letter
Cyrillic script spread throughout the East Slavic and some South Slavic territories, being adopted for writing local languages, such as Old East Slavic. Its adaptation to local languages produced a number of Cyrillic alphabets, discussed below.
Capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts.
A page from the Church Slavonic Grammar of Meletius Smotrytsky (1619)
Yeri (Ы) was originally a ligature of Yer and I (Ъ + І = Ы). Iotation was indicated by ligatures formed with the letter І: Ꙗ (not an ancestor of modern Ya, Я, which is derived from Ѧ), Ѥ, Ю (ligature of І and ОУ), Ѩ, Ѭ. Sometimes different letters were used interchangeably, for example И = І = Ї, as were typographical variants like О = Ѻ. There were also commonly used ligatures like ѠТ = Ѿ.
The letters also had numeric values, based not on Cyrillic alphabetical order, but inherited from the letters’ Greek ancestors.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| А | В | Г | Д | Є (Е) | Ѕ (Ꙃ, Ꙅ) | З (Ꙁ) | И | Ѳ |
| 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 | 60 | 70 | 80 | 90 |
| І (Ї) | К | Л | М | Н | Ѯ (Ч) | Ѻ (О) | П | Ч (Ҁ) |
| 100 | 200 | 300 | 400 | 500 | 600 | 700 | 800 | 900 |
| Р | С | Т | Ѵ (Ѵ, Оу, Ꙋ) | Ф | Х | Ѱ | Ѡ (Ѿ, Ꙍ) | Ц (Ѧ) |
The early Cyrillic alphabet is difficult to represent on computers. Many of the letterforms differed from those of modern Cyrillic, varied a great deal in manuscripts, and changed over time. Few fonts include glyphs sufficient to reproduce the alphabet. In accordance with Unicode policy, the standard does not include letterform variations or ligatures found in manuscript sources unless they can be shown to conform to the Unicode definition of a character.
The Unicode 5.1 standard, released on 4 April 2008, greatly improves computer support for the early Cyrillic and the modern Church Slavonic language. In Microsoft Windows, the Segoe UI user interface font is notable for having complete support for the archaic Cyrillic letters since Windows 8.
Currency signs
Some currency signs have derived from Cyrillic letters:
- The Ukrainian hryvnia sign (₴) is from the cursive minuscule Ukrainian Cyrillic letter He (г).
- The Russian ruble sign (₽) from the majuscule Р.
- The Kyrgyzstani som sign (с) from the majuscule С (es)
- The Kazakhstani tenge sign (₸) from Т
- The Mongolian tögrög sign (₮) from Т
Letterforms and typography
The development of Cyrillic typography passed directly from the medieval stage to the late Baroque, without a Renaissance phase as in Western Europe. Late Medieval Cyrillic letters (categorized as vyaz’ and still found on many icon inscriptions today) show a marked tendency to be very tall and narrow, with strokes often shared between adjacent letters.
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
Letters Ge, De, I, Short I, Em, 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 fonts, as well as Latin ones, have roman and italic types (practically all popular modern fonts include parallel sets of Latin and Cyrillic letters, where many glyphs, uppercase as well as lowercase, are shared by both). However, the native font terminology in most Slavic languages (for example, in Russian) does not use the words “roman” and “italic” in this sense. Instead, the nomenclature follows German naming patterns:
Alternate variants of lowercase (cursive) Cyrillic letters: Б/б, Д/д, Г/г, И/и, П/п, Т/т, Ш/ш.
Default Russian (Eastern) forms on the left.
Alternate Bulgarian (Western) upright forms in the middle.
Alternate Serbian/Macedonian (Southern) italic forms on the right.
- Roman type is called pryamoy shrift (“upright type”) – compare with Normalschrift (“regular type”) in German
- Italic type is called kursiv (“cursive”) or kursivniy shrift (“cursive type”) – from the German word Kursive, meaning italic typefaces and not cursive writing
- Cursive handwriting is rukopisniy shrift (“handwritten type”) – in German: Kurrentschrift or Laufschrift, both meaning literally ‘running type’
- A (mechanically) sloped oblique type of sans-serif faces is naklonniy shrift (“sloped” or “slanted type”).
- A boldfaced type is called poluzhirniy shrift (“semi-bold type”), because there existed fully boldfaced shapes that have been out of use since the beginning of the 20th century.
Italic and cursive forms
Similarly to Latin fonts, italic and cursive types of many Cyrillic letters (typically lowercase; uppercase only for handwritten or stylish types) are very different from their upright roman types. In certain cases, the correspondence between uppercase and lowercase glyphs does not coincide in Latin and Cyrillic fonts: for example, italic Cyrillic ⟨т⟩ is the lowercase counterpart of ⟨Т⟩ not of ⟨М⟩.