Alphabet Letters
Dobro Ⰴ
Glagolitic Letters
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Origin Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius
Dobro is the fifth letter of Glagolitic and writes d. Its name is the Slavonic word for good, the neuter adjective used as a noun, and it carries the numeral 5. In the recitation of the alphabet its name is the predicate of the second clause, glagoli dobro jestu, in which the letter names of the fourth, fifth and sixth signs say that speech is a good thing. The word survives across the Slavic languages in the ordinary vocabulary of goodness and of doing good, and it is the same word that names the letter, so a reader learning the alphabet is not learning an arbitrary label but hearing a familiar word in a fixed place.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodDevised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius 2 Place of OriginByzantium and Great Moravia; the letters were made in Constantinople or Thessalonica and carried north for the mission 2 Origin of the NameA Slavonic word used as the letter name, shared by both Slavic alphabets 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Sense of the Namedobro is the Slavonic word for good 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1 PositionThe fifth letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attributions
Associated SoundThe consonant d 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceDobro's name is the ordinary Slavonic word for good, and it survives across the modern Slavic languages in that same everyday sense, so a reader learning the alphabet meets a familiar word rather than an arbitrary label. 1 Learn More
Dobro: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 5)
Dobro writes the consonant d and takes the numeral five. Its name is the Slavonic word for good, used as a noun, and it carries the recited sentence forward: after glagoli comes dobro, and the two words with the one that follows make a clause about speech being a good thing.
The letter records a plain dental stop, and Old Church Slavonic uses it heavily. It stands at the head of a large class of verb forms, and it takes part in several of the consonant alternations that the language inherited, so a reader meets it both as a stable consonant and as the sound that changes when a suffix is added. Manuscripts of the canon are consistent in writing it, which makes it one of the letters least useful for dating or placing a text.
Its numeral value follows the Glagolitic system of counting the letters in their own order, and at this point in the alphabet the count is one ahead of the Greek-derived arithmetic that Cyrillic uses. The distance grows as the order continues.
In the angular hand of the Croatian tradition, as in the rounded hand of the earliest codices, the letter is one of the signs a beginner learns early, since it is common and appears in every kind of text, from the gospel books that carry the earliest surviving Glagolitic writing to the legal and notarial documents produced on the Adriatic coast centuries later.
Dobro and Its Cyrillic Counterpart
Cyrillic dobro is the same letter by name, sound and position, and it is numbered four where Glagolitic numbers five. The two alphabets are now running one apart, and they will stay at least that far apart for the rest of the order.
The pair is a good place to see what the two scripts actually share. The name is the same Slavonic word in both. The sound is the same. The place in the sequence is the same, fifth in a list that both traditions recite in the same order and teach with the same mnemonic sentence. What is not shared is the shape, and no argument about the relationship between the scripts has ever turned on shape alone for this letter, because the Cyrillic form is plainly a Greek delta adapted and the Glagolitic form is plainly not a Greek delta.
That asymmetry is the shape of the whole problem. Cyrillic can be accounted for letter by letter: Greek uncial where Greek has the sound, and something else where it does not. Glagolitic cannot, and the something else in Cyrillic is often taken to be Glagolitic itself, which would make the newer script a witness to the older one. The direction of that borrowing is argued rather than demonstrated, and the earliest manuscripts of either script are a century or more younger than the alphabet they use.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Why this is disputed. Glagolitic Dobro is read as Greek Delta's counterpart in an alphabet Cyril modeled on Greek order and numeral values, but which theory explains where its rounded letterform actually came from is a live paleographic dispute. The mainstream palaeographic school, developed since Isaac Taylor's nineteenth century study, derives Glagolitic's ornamental shapes from medieval Greek cursive minuscule redesigned for Slavonic use. A rival idiographic school reads Glagolitic as substantially an original invention, its shapes built from basic forms such as the cross, circle and triangle rather than borrowed from any existing script, so this specific correspondence to Delta is accepted by one camp and denied by the other.
Originates in Language
Glagolitic was devised in the 860s so that Greek scripture and liturgy could be read in Slavonic, and Dobro belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.
Related To
Cyrillic dobro answers to Glagolitic dobro: the same name and the same sound d. The numeral values differ, 4 against 5.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.