Vedi В

Vedi stands third, writes v, and carries the numeral 2. Its name is the Slavonic verb form meaning I know.

Its shape is Greek beta and its number is the number of Greek beta, and both were taken over without adjustment. The reason it writes v rather than b is that by the ninth century Greek itself had stopped pronouncing beta as b. Byzantine Greek had shifted the sound to v, and a Slav learning to read Greek in Thessalonica or Constantinople would have been taught that this letter says v. When the sound values of the Greek alphabet were mapped onto Slavonic, that teaching came with them.

The consequence for the alphabet is one of the most instructive facts about it. Cyrillic does not record the Greek of the classical grammarians; it records the Greek that was actually being spoken and read aloud in the Byzantine church at the moment the mapping was made. The same shift explains why izhe, whose shape is Greek eta, writes i rather than a long e, and why izhitsa, whose shape is Greek upsilon, is read as i in most positions.

An alphabet borrowed from a living tradition preserves that tradition at a date. Read carefully, the Cyrillic sound values are a small piece of evidence for the pronunciation of Greek in the ninth century, independent of anything the Greek grammarians wrote down.

Because the Slavonic letter names are ordinary words, the opening of the alphabet can be read as connected speech. Azu buky vedi glagol dobro yest gives, word for word, something close to I know letters; the word is a good thing, and readers have been finding sentences in the sequence for a long time. The reading is genuinely available in a way it is not for Greek or Hebrew, where the names carry no meaning in the language of the people using them.

Two cautions belong with it. The first is that no early text presents the names as a composed sentence. The reading is a tradition of interpretation, well attested in the modern period and popular in schoolbooks, rather than a statement about what the ninth century intended. The abecedarian poems, which are early, work the other way round: they take each letter as the first sound of a new line, which is exactly what an author would do if the names were not already a sentence.

The second is that the reading only works for the beginning. Push it past the first six or seven names and it becomes a matter of forcing, because the later names include Greek imports such as ksi and psi and the descriptive labels the Slavists gave to the yus letters. What the exercise really demonstrates is the deliberate character of the naming: someone chose short, common, teachable words, in an order that a beginner could hold in the head, and that choice is a piece of pedagogy rather than a hidden message.