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Sacred Correspondences
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Ljudije and Its Cyrillic Counterpart

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Ljudije and Its Cyrillic Counterpart

Cyrillic lyudiye writes the same consonant and takes the numeral thirty, the value of Greek lambda, against the fifty that Glagolitic reaches by its own counting. The names differ only in their endings, which the abecedaria record inconsistently in both scripts.

This letter is one of the clearest cases of the two alphabets agreeing on everything except appearance and arithmetic. The sound is the same, the position is the same, the name is the same word, and the mnemonic sentence runs through it identically in both traditions. What separates them is a Greek letterform in one script and something else in the other, and a number inherited in one and counted in the other.

The two systems of arithmetic are also a reminder that the Slavonic alphabets were used for counting far more than a modern reader expects. Manuscripts number their chapters, their gatherings, their psalms and their liturgical readings in letters, and dates in colophons are written the same way. A letter therefore appears on a page in two capacities, and a scribe indicated which was meant by setting the numeral off with points and a stroke above. Where that marking is faint or lost, an editor has to decide from context.

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