Nash Н

Nash stands fifteenth, writes n, and carries the numeral 50 from Greek nu. Its name is the Slavonic possessive meaning ours, the word that opens the Lord's Prayer in Slavonic and therefore one of the first words any learner of the language met.

The shape is not the Greek nu a modern reader would expect. Early Cyrillic writes this letter with the crossbar slanting, as in the Greek uncial, and the horizontal crossbar familiar from the modern printed letter is the result of a slow straightening across the manuscript centuries. It is one of the few Cyrillic letters whose shape can be dated with any confidence from the angle of a single stroke.

As a numeral it is 50, which puts it on the fiftieth psalm, the psalm of repentance and the most frequently recited of all in the Orthodox offices. A Slavonic reader met this letter under a titlo constantly for that reason alone.

Nash survives unchanged in sound and position in every modern Cyrillic alphabet. Its name, like all the others, was replaced in Russian by an invented syllable in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century reforms of the primer, on the argument that a child learning to read should hear the sound of a letter rather than a word beginning with it.

The alphabet was made for scripture, and for most of its history the surviving evidence is scriptural, because parchment books were kept and everything else was not. The exception is Novgorod.

Excavations there, and at other northern sites, have recovered more than a thousand documents written on strips of birch bark, scratched with a stylus rather than inked. They are not literature. They are debts, instructions, complaints, lists, land disputes, marriage negotiations, a boy's school exercises, notes between neighbours. They are written by and to merchants, artisans, women and children as well as clergy, and the earliest of them are close to the beginning of the written tradition in the region.

Their importance for the alphabet is that they show it working outside the church. A script devised for liturgy was, within a few generations, the ordinary tool of people conducting their own affairs, and the level of lay literacy they imply is considerably higher than the book record on its own would suggest.

They also record the language rather than the norm. A scribe copying a Gospel writes what the tradition requires; a man writing to his brother about a debt writes what he says, spelling as he hears it. The birchbark documents therefore preserve the local speech of the period, including sound changes the liturgical books conceal, and they are among the best evidence there is for what was actually happening to the reduced vowels while the books went on writing them.