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Ljudije: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 50)

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Ljudije: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 50)

Ljudije writes the consonant l and takes the numeral fifty. Its name is the Slavonic word for people, a plural noun, and it is among the last of the letter names whose sense is beyond argument.

The sound is a lateral, and Old Church Slavonic distinguishes a plain l from a softened one in speech without giving the softened variety a separate letter. The softening is shown, where it is shown at all, by the vowel that follows, which means the writing system is less precise here than it is elsewhere and that a modern reader has to supply information the manuscript does not carry. That is a normal condition of reading an early alphabetic text, and it is worth noticing in a script that is otherwise very well fitted to its language.

The numeral fifty follows from counting the Glagolitic alphabet through in order, this being the fourteenth letter.

The name has a second life in the recitation. Read as a continuous text, the sequence of letter names in this part of the alphabet includes the word for people, and readings of the whole recitation as a connected sentence turn on how this stretch is construed. Those readings are discussed in the atlas as a scholarly position rather than as a settled fact, because the sources that transmit the names do not transmit a text along with them.

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