Yestu and Its Cyrillic Counterpart

Cyrillic yest writes the same vowel from the same place in the order and takes the numeral five, one behind the six that Glagolitic gives it. Both names come from the same Slavonic verb form, and both alphabets recite them in the same mnemonic sentence.

The letters diverge over the sounds around them rather than over the vowel itself. Cyrillic developed a separate sign for the sequence of glide plus e, written as a compound of two letters, and Glagolitic handled the same sequence with a sign of its own in a different part of the order. Neither system is more economical than the other; they are different solutions to the same problem, and comparing them across a pair of manuscripts that carry the same gospel text is one way of watching two scribal traditions handle one language.

The numeral divergence has a practical consequence for anyone reading an early Slavonic text. Where a manuscript in one script preserves the numbers of the other, the usual reading is that it was copied from an exemplar in the other script and the figures were carried across without conversion. Such crossings are part of the evidence in the argument over which alphabet came first, and they are read differently by the scholars who make Glagolitic the older script and by those who reverse the order.