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Nashi: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 70)

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Nashi: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 70)

Nashi writes the consonant n and takes the numeral seventy. Its name is the Slavonic possessive our, and it belongs to the sequence of names that readers have taken as a continuous utterance rather than a list of labels.

The sound is a plain nasal and, like m, it is stable throughout the history of Slavic and gives the philologist no leverage on dating or dialect. It is common, appearing in negation, in a great many endings and in the pronouns that hold Slavonic sentences together, so it is one of the letters that fixes the character of a hand.

Old Church Slavonic also had a softened n, distinguished in speech from the plain one, and here the script is again less exact than it might be: the softening is inferred from the following vowel rather than written. That imprecision is not evidence of carelessness in the design. It reflects a decision to write the sounds that distinguish words rather than every audible difference, and the same decision underlies the treatment of the softened l.

The numeral seventy comes from counting the Glagolitic letters in order, this being the sixteenth letter. Seventy is a figure that turns up often in a scriptural manuscript, which means the letter is met as a number more frequently than most.

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