This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Glagolitic Letters gathers the forty four signs of the older of the two Slavic alphabets, made for the Slavonic mission a generation before Cyrillic replaced it almost everywhere, and still legible today as a system built for the language rather than borrowed wholesale from Greek.
Its first letter, azu, is a cross and means I, and the alphabet's names read on as a sentence, azu buky vede, I know letters, then glagoli dobro jestu, speaking is a good thing, the same recitation Cyrillic inherited word for word while giving the letters different shapes and, crucially, different numbers. Glagolitic numbers its letters by its own sequence, one through the alphabet in order, rather than by borrowing the Greek series the way Cyrillic does, so the two Slavic scripts share their letter names and mostly disagree on the numeral each one carries.
Sounds Greek had no letter for, zhivete, dzelo, shta and the affricates tsi and chrivi among them, were devised rather than borrowed, and several are compared, without final agreement, to Hebrew and Samaritan shapes in the long argument over where Glagolitic's forms came from. A handful of rare or regional signs, djervi, pe and spidery ha among them, belong chiefly to the Croatian angular tradition, which kept Glagolitic in liturgical use for centuries after Cyrillic had displaced it elsewhere, and their inconsistent attestation is why different reference works give different totals for the alphabet.