Otu Ⱉ

Otu is the second Glagolitic sign for a rounded back vowel and it takes the numeral seven hundred. It answers to Greek omega, and like the second i letter earlier in the alphabet it exists because the order was built on Greek rather than because Slavonic needed two signs for one sound.

The letter is used chiefly in Greek words and names and in certain fixed spellings, and its distribution in a manuscript is a matter of scribal convention. A text that uses it freely and a text that restricts it to loanwords are following different norms, and the difference is one of the small habits by which manuscript families are told apart.

Its name is among the opaque ones, and the reference literature records it without an etymology.

The numeral seven hundred is where the two Slavonic numeral systems part for the last time. Glagolitic counts to twenty five and assigns seven hundred. Cyrillic assigns eight hundred, the value of Greek omega, to the same letter, and gives seven hundred to a Greek letter that Glagolitic does not have at all. From here Glagolitic numbers nothing further, while Cyrillic has three more numbered letters to go.

That is the end of the counted series in this script, and it falls where it does for a reason worth stating. Everything after this point in the Glagolitic order is a Slavic sign: the affricates, the reduced vowels, the nasal vowels and the letters for the glide sequences. Greek had none of them, and Glagolitic, having counted straight through the alphabet to reach seven hundred, simply stops rather than continuing into the thousands. The alphabet therefore has a numbered half and an unnumbered half, and the join between them is where the Greek order runs out and the Slavonic material begins.

Otu is one of a small group of Glagolitic letters whose reason for existing is Greek rather than Slavonic. The group also contains the letter for f, which writes a sound Slavonic did not have; the letter answering to Greek theta, used to spell Greek names correctly; and the letter answering to Greek upsilon at the very end of the order. Between them these signs are the clearest evidence in the alphabet of what it was made for.

The mission that produced it was a translation project. Constantine and Methodius were sent from Constantinople to Moravia in the 860s to make the scriptures and the liturgy available in Slavonic, and a script for that purpose has to be able to write Greek proper names, Greek theological vocabulary and the numbers of chapters and psalms as the Greek books gave them. Letters that no Slavic word needs are therefore not a flaw in the design; they are part of the specification.

The same group of letters is the part of the alphabet where a derivation from Greek is least controversial, since these signs correspond to Greek letters by function whatever is decided about their shapes. The atlas records the correspondence for this letter as attested and marks the shape question separately, where it belongs.

The distinction is worth holding on to, because the two questions get run together easily. That a Glagolitic letter answers to a particular Greek letter, occupying its place in the order and doing its work in loanwords, is a matter of observation. Where the Glagolitic letterform came from is a matter of argument, and the same letter can be certain on the first count and unsettled on the second.