Azu А

Azu stands first, writes the vowel a, and carries the numeral 1. Its name is the Old Church Slavonic word for I, the first person pronoun, which is the plainest possible demonstration of a habit that runs through the whole set: Slavonic letter names are ordinary words of the language, where Greek and Hebrew letter names are opaque to their own speakers. A Byzantine reader could not say what alpha meant. A Slavonic reader knew exactly what azu meant, and so did every child learning to read from a primer.

That transparency shaped how the alphabet was taught and how it was named. The Slavonic word for the alphabet, azbuka, is built from the names of the first two letters, azu and buky, in exactly the way the Greek word alphabet is built from alpha and beta. The construction is a translation of the idea rather than a borrowing of the word, which is characteristic of the whole translating enterprise the script was made for.

On a manuscript page azu is one of the letters most often enlarged and decorated, because it opens so many liturgical formulas and because an initial is where a scribe puts ornament. Used as a number it takes a titlo, a horizontal stroke drawn above it, which is what tells a reader that the letter is standing for a quantity rather than a sound. As the numeral 1 it appears constantly in the numbering of psalms, chapters, quires and years.

It survives unchanged in every modern Cyrillic alphabet, in shape, in sound and in position. Few letters of the original set can be said to have come through the last eleven centuries so completely untouched.

The Slavonic tradition produced abecedarian poems, compositions in which each successive line opens with the next letter of the alphabet in order. The best known is the Alphabet Prayer, a verse preface written to stand in front of a Gospel translation, whose first line begins with azu. Its authorship is argued. The attribution most often made is to Constantine of Preslav, a pupil of the Thessalonican brothers working in the Bulgarian capital, but an older tradition assigns it to Cyril himself, and the poem survives only in copies made long after either man was dead. Nothing in the surviving manuscripts settles the question.

The form matters for a reason beyond its literary interest. An acrostic is a lock on a sequence. If a poem has one line per letter and the lines are in order, then the poem records what its author believed the order of the alphabet to be, and it records how many letters there were. Where the manuscript tradition of the alphabet itself is thin, and for the earliest period it is very thin indeed, an abecedarian poem is a witness that cannot be quietly reordered by a later copyist without the damage showing.

Acrostics of this kind are not a Slavonic invention. They run through the Hebrew psalms and through Byzantine hymnography, and a translator trained in Constantinople would have known them as a standard device. Writing one in a new alphabet is a way of declaring that the new letters are a complete and ordered set, fit to carry scripture, which is precisely the claim the mission needed to make.