Tvrido Ⱅ

Tvrido writes the consonant t and takes the numeral three hundred. Its name is an adverb, firmly or hard, and it closes the clause that the preceding two names begin.

The sound is a plain dental stop. Like the other stops it is stable across Slavic and offers no evidence for dating a text, but it is very common, and its treatment in a hand is one of the features by which a scribe is recognised.

The numeral three hundred comes from counting the Glagolitic letters in their own sequence, this being the twenty first letter. It coincides with the Cyrillic value, as the neighbouring numbers do, for reasons of arithmetic rather than of design.

The name is also the point at which the recitation of the alphabet, read as a text, reaches something like a conclusion. Whatever is made of the names that follow, the first twenty produce Slavonic clauses that most readers accept, and they end here. That the first twenty do so and the rest do not is itself an observation that any account of the names has to deal with, and the two obvious explanations, that the composer ran out of suitable words and that the later names were inherited from elsewhere, are both available and neither is demonstrated.

Cyrillic tverdo writes the same consonant from the same place and takes the same numeral, three hundred, which it inherits from Greek tau while Glagolitic reaches it by counting. The names are the same adverb with different vowels, and both recitations put it in the same position.

The pair sits at the boundary of the two halves of the Slavonic alphabet, and the halves behave differently. Before this point the names are ordinary words and the letters mostly answer to Greek letters. After it the names become opaque, the letters are increasingly Slavic signs with no Greek counterpart, and the numeral systems begin to come apart again after their brief agreement.

That structure is one of the strongest indications that both alphabets were arranged deliberately rather than accumulating. Someone laid the Greek order down first and then dealt with what Slavonic needed that Greek did not supply, and the second half of the alphabet is where the second job was done. It is also where the evidence is thinnest, because the letters there are rarer, their forms vary more between manuscripts, and their names cannot be etymologised. The atlas records the letters of that stretch with the same care as the rest and marks the gaps as gaps.