What is Cyrillic?

Cyrillic is a concept that has several definitions, related mainly to the writing of the Slavic people. Let's take a closer look at each of the meanings of the term Cyrillic.

What does the term "Cyrillic" mean?

First of all, Cyrillic is a systemthe writing of all the Slavic languages ​​- Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, etc. However, the unification of all national Cyrillic alphabets is not entirely true, one should speak about the varieties of Cyrillic in relation to each Slavonic language.

What is Cyrillic as a writing systemknown since ancient times. The founders of the Cyrillic script (about 863 AD) are rightly considered Christian preachers from the Greek city of Thessaloniki - the brothers Cyril and Methodius.

The Cyrillic alphabet is also considered to be the Old Slavonic alphabet. Along with the Glagolitic alphabet Cyrillic is one of the ancient alphabets of the Old Slavonic language. The traditional Cyrillic alphabet consists of 43 elements, 24 of which are entirely Greek and the remaining 19 are originally Slavic. Until the beginning of the XVIII century, namely, before the reform of Peter I, all the Cyrillic text was written in capital letters, there were no lower-case letters. Cyrillic letters are also used to write Greek numbers.

The Cyrillic alphabet is also called the traditional statutory or semi-written font, on which church books are printed.

Files stored on the computer havea certain encoding. One of which is the so-called "Cyrillic alphabet". There are various programs that help you translate the file encoding format from one to another. For more information about the Cyrillic alphabet in the password, see How to change the encoding.