Lyudiye Л

Lyudiye stands thirteenth, writes l, and carries the numeral 30 from Greek lambda. Its name is the Slavonic plural noun for people, a word that in the liturgy usually means the congregation, the people standing in the church as against the clergy serving in it.

The shape is the uncial lambda, drawn as a pointed arch, and the modern printed form descends from it directly. In the older hands the left stroke often carries a foot and the right does not, which is one of the small asymmetries that distinguish an early Cyrillic page from a Greek one.

As a numeral it is 30, and it is one of the letters a reader of liturgical books meets constantly, because the psalter, the calendar and the eight tone cycle all generate numbers in the thirties.

The word it is named for is worth a moment. Almost every letter name in the set is a word from the shared vocabulary of worship: I, know, word, good, it is, people, ours, rest, say. Set out in order they read less like a list of sounds than like the furniture of a liturgy, and that is not an accident. The alphabet was taught from the books it existed to carry, and a child learning the letters was learning, at the same time, the words those books were made of.

The stroke drawn above a letter to mark it as a number does a second and older job. Written over a contracted word it signals an abbreviation, and the abbreviations it governs are not chosen for convenience.

The practice comes from Greek, where a small set of sacred words, God, Lord, Jesus, Christ, Spirit, Saviour, Mother, were written contracted to their first and last letters under a stroke rather than spelled out. Scholars call them the nomina sacra. The convention is older than any surviving Slavonic book and was already universal in Christian Greek manuscripts, so the Slavonic translators inherited it along with everything else they were copying, and applied it to the Slavonic equivalents of the same words.

The effect on a page is immediate and visual. The sacred names are the shortest words in a line and they are the ones carrying a mark, so the eye finds them before the mind reads them. A word treated this way is not being shortened to save parchment; it is being set apart, in the same spirit that governs how such words are spoken.

For a modern reader the convention is the first real obstacle in a Slavonic manuscript, because the contracted forms are not guessable without knowing the list. For the reader the books were made for it was the opposite: the contraction was the most legible thing on the page, and an expanded spelling of a holy name would have looked wrong.