Djervi Ⰼ

Djervi writes a palatal consonant and carries the numeral thirty. It is one of the Glagolitic letters that has no counterpart in the early Cyrillic alphabet at all, and its presence is often cited as evidence about where the script was actually put to use, since the sound it records is not one that the Slavonic of the canon needs frequently.

The letter appears in the earliest manuscripts chiefly in foreign words and names, where it renders a sound the surrounding language did not have a plain sign for, and in a small number of native words in which a consonant had been softened. Its rarity means that a manuscript may go many folios without using it, and that its form is less standardised across the tradition than the forms of the common letters.

In the numeral system it is the figure thirty, on the Glagolitic principle of counting the alphabet through in its own order.

The sound the letter records became important later and further west. The South Slavic languages developed palatal consonants of their own, and when Cyrillic was adapted to write Serbian in the nineteenth century, signs had to be devised for them. That is a separate development nine hundred years after the fact, and the Glagolitic letter is its ancestor only in the loose sense that both answer to a similar need.

Djervi belongs to a small group of Glagolitic letters that fit the Slavonic of the surviving canon awkwardly, and that group is one of the arguments in the long discussion about where the alphabet was designed to be used. The mission Constantine and Methodius led went to Moravia, in the west of the Slavic world, at the invitation of its ruler and with the backing of the Byzantine emperor. The manuscripts that survive were copied in the south, in Bulgaria and Macedonia and later on the Adriatic coast, after the Moravian mission had ended and the disciples had been driven out.

So the alphabet was made for one Slavic region and is preserved almost entirely from another, and a letter that suits the first better than the second is exactly what that history would predict. The oldest surviving Glagolitic text, a small liturgical book, is usually said to carry western Slavic features for the same reason.

This is a matter of weighing evidence rather than of a settled result. The features can be read as survivals from the Moravian original, or as the work of later scribes in contact with the west. The atlas records the letter, records that its distribution is uneven, and does not present either reading as the answer.