Glagoli: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 4)

Glagoli writes the velar stop g and carries the numeral four. Its name is an imperative, speak, and of all the letter names it is the one that reached furthest, because the script itself is named from it: glagolitsa, the alphabet of the spoken word committed to writing. That naming is late rather than original. The earliest Slavonic sources describe the letters without giving the script a name of its own, and the term became standard only after Cyrillic had taken over most of the territory, at which point a word was needed to distinguish the older script from the newer one.

The sound has a more interesting history than most. Old Church Slavonic pronounced the letter as a full stop, and several later Slavic languages weakened it to a fricative, so that the descendant letter is read as h in Czech and Slovak and as a fricative in Ukrainian and in southern Russian speech. Standard Russian and Polish kept the stop. None of that is a change in the letter, which continued to be written in the same place in the same words; it is a change in the languages that inherited it, and the spelling preserves a pronunciation that many Slavic speakers no longer use.

In the numeral system the letter is the figure four, on the Glagolitic principle of counting the letters of the alphabet in their own sequence.