Alphabet Letters
Ljudije Ⰾ
Glagolitic Letters
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Origin Devised about 863 CE for the Moravian mission of Constantine the Philosopher, later Saint Cyril, and his brother Methodius
Ljudije is the fourteenth letter of Glagolitic and writes l. Its name is the Slavonic plural noun for people, and it carries the numeral 50. It stands in the middle of the best known stretch of the alphabet recitation, kako ljudije myslite, how people think, and it is one of the letter names that survives unchanged as an ordinary word in the modern Slavic languages, so a Russian or Croatian speaker learning the old alphabet meets a word already known. Its Cyrillic counterpart carries the value 30, taken from Greek lambda, which is a plain instance of the two systems counting the same letter differently.
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 Nameljudije is the Slavonic word for people 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceLjudije survives unchanged as an ordinary word for people in the modern Slavic languages, so a reader learning the historical alphabet meets a word already known; its Cyrillic counterpart carries the Greek numeral 30 from lambda, a plain case of the two systems counting the same letter differently. 1 Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, with no inherent vowel and no vowel diacritics 1 PositionThe fifteenth letter of the Glagolitic alphabet in the traditional order 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Attributions
Associated SoundThe consonant l 1Tradition: The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic Learn More
Ljudije: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 50)
Ljudije writes the consonant l and takes the numeral fifty. Its name is the Slavonic word for people, a plural noun, and it is among the last of the letter names whose sense is beyond argument.
The sound is a lateral, and Old Church Slavonic distinguishes a plain l from a softened one in speech without giving the softened variety a separate letter. The softening is shown, where it is shown at all, by the vowel that follows, which means the writing system is less precise here than it is elsewhere and that a modern reader has to supply information the manuscript does not carry. That is a normal condition of reading an early alphabetic text, and it is worth noticing in a script that is otherwise very well fitted to its language.
The numeral fifty follows from counting the Glagolitic alphabet through in order, this being the fourteenth letter.
The name has a second life in the recitation. Read as a continuous text, the sequence of letter names in this part of the alphabet includes the word for people, and readings of the whole recitation as a connected sentence turn on how this stretch is construed. Those readings are discussed in the atlas as a scholarly position rather than as a settled fact, because the sources that transmit the names do not transmit a text along with them.
Ljudije and Its Cyrillic Counterpart
Cyrillic lyudiye writes the same consonant and takes the numeral thirty, the value of Greek lambda, against the fifty that Glagolitic reaches by its own counting. The names differ only in their endings, which the abecedaria record inconsistently in both scripts.
This letter is one of the clearest cases of the two alphabets agreeing on everything except appearance and arithmetic. The sound is the same, the position is the same, the name is the same word, and the mnemonic sentence runs through it identically in both traditions. What separates them is a Greek letterform in one script and something else in the other, and a number inherited in one and counted in the other.
The two systems of arithmetic are also a reminder that the Slavonic alphabets were used for counting far more than a modern reader expects. Manuscripts number their chapters, their gatherings, their psalms and their liturgical readings in letters, and dates in colophons are written the same way. A letter therefore appears on a page in two capacities, and a scribe indicated which was meant by setting the numeral off with points and a stroke above. Where that marking is faint or lost, an editor has to decide from context.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived From
Why this is disputed. Glagolitic Ljudije is read as Greek Lambda'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 Lambda 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 Ljudije belongs to the alphabet of Old Church Slavonic, the language of that translation and of the earliest Slavonic books.
Related To
Cyrillic lyudiye answers to Glagolitic ljudije: the same name and the same sound l.
Sources
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