Passwords to Paradise: How Languages Have Re-invented World Religions by Nicholas Ostler

Author:Nicholas Ostler [Ostler, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781620405178
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-02-23T07:00:00+00:00

to kto mojetĭ na vodou besědou pisati ili Eretičĭsko imă sebě obrěsti

So who can write speech upon water, or find for himself the name of a heretic?6

Nonetheless, he does seem to have received inspiration.

There is no direct evidence linking Constantine-Cyril to the Glagolitic script (still in ecclesiastical use in Croatia until the early twentieth century), but it seems that this is what he came up with. Glagolitic script was built up from a selection of Byzantine cryptographic alphabets and alchemical symbols.3 The point is made that it needed to look un-Greek, in order not to be associated with recent or contemporary Greek theology, particularly iconoclasm.4 Glagolitic is quite unlike the much better-known Cyrillic script. Yet Cyrillic is based on the same phonetic analysis of Slavonic made by Cyril, and for that reason alone (as well as sentiment), this name is fitting. Since it was based on the forms of the Greek alphabet, this new Cyrillic had the advantage of being much easier than Glagolitic to learn, for someone already literate in Greek or Latin.

In the spring of 863, the party of missionaries set off, bearing with them a letter from the emperor which is eloquent of the way the initiation of a new script was then seen—not as a solution to an engineering problem, but rather as a kind of miracle, or revelation from God.

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