Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Pokoji and Its Cyrillic Counterpart

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Pokoji and Its Cyrillic Counterpart

Cyrillic pokoy writes the same consonant and takes the numeral eighty, the value of Greek pi, against the ninety that Glagolitic counts. The names agree, both continuing the Slavonic word for peace or rest, and the position agrees.

The interesting divergence here is structural rather than arithmetical. In Cyrillic the value ninety belongs to a different letter altogether, one of the Slavic affricates further down the order, which was fitted into a slot that Greek numeration had left vacant when an old letter dropped out of the language. Glagolitic had no such vacancies to fill, because it was not using Greek numbers at all, and it arrived at ninety simply by counting to eighteen.

Two different design decisions are visible in that. The Cyrillic arrangement is careful work on an existing system, finding places in Greek arithmetic for Slavic letters and leaving unnumbered the ones it could not place. The Glagolitic arrangement dispenses with the problem by not inheriting the system in the first place. Neither is obviously better, and the difference is one of the few pieces of evidence about the alphabets that concerns how they were made rather than how they look.

The names agree closely, pokoji beside pokoy, and both are the Slavonic noun for peace or rest. This is among the last of the letter names in either alphabet that can be glossed with confidence, and the recitation grows harder to construe from about this point onward. Where it does, the atlas says so instead of supplying a reading.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.