Old Church Slavonic

Thanks to Maurice Reed for his technical and testing assistance.

Old Church Slavonic

Old Church Slavonic (OCS), dates from around the 9th century and is the earliest attested Slavic language, but it is not necessarily the same as Proto Slavic as once thought by linguists. A modified version called Church Slavonic is still used in some sects of the Orthodox church as a liturgical language much as Latin (with modern words) does in the Catholic Church.

Old Church Slavonic

• University of Texas course
• Britannica.com Old Church Slavonic
• Old Church Slavonic (Languages of the World)

Writing Systems of OCS

Glagolitic Script

The Glagolitic script was first attested in the 9th century and was primarily used to write Christian texts. Although based on earlier Greek and Roman alphabets, the letter forms are distinct from either the Western or Cyrillic alphabet

• Glagolitic vs. Cyrillic
• Wikipedia Glagolitic Script

Cyrillic Script

The Cyrillic script, which is more clearly modeled on the Greek alphabet, was also developed and used in this time period. The version the script developed for OCS includes archaic letters which not used in the later languages in the area.

Transliterated OCS

Old Church Slavonic is also transliterated to the Western Latin alphabet. In those cases, special symbols including long vowels, short vowels, hachecks, Cyrillic vowels and the ogonek may be used depending on the standard.

• Podolak Transliteration Tool
• Library of Congress Church Slavonic Transliteration Table
• Oxford Libraries Guide

Font Recomendations

Glagolitic Fonts

Neither Windows or Microsoft provide fonts with Glagolitic characters. The following sites list fonts for Glagolitic and medieval Cyrillic:

• The AATSEEL Medieval Slavic Fonts Page
• Ponomar Church Slavonic Fonts in Unicode
• Kodeks BukyVede and other fonts (scroll to bottom for list)
• lists
• Google Noto Sans Glagolitic

Cyrillic Fonts

A complete list of recommended Cyrillic fonts is on the Cyrillic page. A few medieval Slavic fonts may include both the Cyrillic and Glagolitic characters.

Transiteration Fonts

Many common fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, Comic Sans, Calibri, Cambria, Palatinto and many more do include include characters needed to transliterate Old Church Slavonic.

Many fonts designed to include phonetic characters or Greek and Western letters may include the transliteration characters.

Typing Old Church Slavonic

Glagolitic Keyboard

A keyboard utility will allow you to type characters from different scripts on either Windows or Macintosh

Keyboard Utilities

• Virtual Glagolitic Keyboard
• Imega Glagolitic Keyboard (Windows and Linux/Phonetic Layout)
• Kodeks Glagolitic and Cyrillic Keyboards (Macintosh/Phonetic Layout)

Enter Individual Characters

These utilities allow you to enter individual characters from any script.

• Windows Character Map
• Mac Character Viewer/Palette

Medieval Cyrillic Keyboards

The following keyboard utilities are available for medieval Cyrillic

• Ponamar Church Slavonic Keyboards (Windows/Macintosh)
  Note: Characters are mapped in a pattern following the native Russian keyboard and not the QWERTY keyboard.
• Kodeks Glagolitic and Cyrillic Keyboards (Macintosh/Phonetic Layout)

Transliterated OCS

Transliteration Software

The following software options allow users to transliterate between Cyrillic and Latin Church Slavonic

• Padolak (Beta)
• ConvertCyrillic.com

Windows Character Map

The Windows Character Map also includes the ability to insert characters with the appropriate diacritics.

Macintosh Extended Keyboard Codes

You can switch to or the US/ABC Extended keyboard and use these additional accent codes. See the Extended Accent Codes for specific codes.

Macintosh Character Viewer

The Mac Character Viewer also includes the ability to insert characters with the appropriate diacritics.

Entity Codes

Entity codes can also be used to enter characters in some situations. See the Unicode Entity code section for details.

Web Development

Unicode Encoding

Unicode (utf-8) is the required encoding for Web sites using medieval characters. Encodings originally designed for modern Slavic languages may not contain sufficient support for Old Church Slavonic.

Language Tags

Language Tags allow browsers and other software to process text more efficiently.

Language Codes

• cu (Church Slavonic)

Script Codes

Because these languages can be written in multiple scripts, these ISO-15924 script tags which can be used to identify which script is being used.

• cu-Glag (Glagoltic)
• cu-Cyrs (Old Church Slavonic Cyrillic)
• cu-Latn (Latin/Western script)

Unicode Entity Codes

Entity codes can be used used in a number of ways. The entity codes can be used in HTML to manually enter characters into a Web page. The hex code can also be used with the Mac Hex Input Keyboard, and the decimal code can also be used in Word for Windows as ALT codes to input characters.

Examples how each are used are given below in the section on yers.

Entity Codes for Yers

Uses of the Code

1. In Word for Windows, the decimal entity code can be used as ALT codes. Thus the Hard Sign (Ъ) is ALT+1066 and the Soft Sign (Ь) is ALT+1068.
   Note: These ALT codes only works in Word for Windows.
2. On the Macintosh, if the Hex Input Keyboard is activated, then you can use Option+the Hex Entity code to input characters. Thus hus the Hard Sign (Ъ) is Option+042a and the Soft Sign (Ь) is ALT+042c.
3. In HTML, either the decimal code (e.g. &‌#1066;) or the hex code (e.g. &‌#x042A;) can be used to generate a character such as the Hard Sign (Ъ).

Glagolitic Entity Codes

See the Cyrillic Entity Code chart for the specific codes.

Cyrillic Entity Codes

See the Cyrillic Entity Code chart for the specific codes.

Accented Letters

Below are codes for transliterated Old Church Slavonic. There are multiple transliteration schemes so not all characters may be covered.

Ogonek

Long Mark

Yat/Hacheks

Other Characters

Combined Double Inverted Breve

For a sequence like i͡e add &#865; or &#x0361; between the two letters. For instance i͡e would be i͡ or i͡e in the HTML code.

For t͡s, the codes would be t͡s or t͡s.

For ō͡t the codes would include the code for long o and be ō͡t or ō͡t.

Links

Old Church Slavonic

• University of Texas course
• Britannica.com Old Church Slavonic
• Old Church Slavonic (Languages of the World)

Writing Systems

• Glagolitic vs. Cyrillic
• Wikipedia Glagolitic Script

Transliteration

• Podolak Transliteration Tool
• Library of Congress Church Slavonic Transliteration Table
• Oxford Libraries Guide

Glagolitic/Cyrillic Fonts

These pages provide information on fonts for the different scripts of Old Church Slavonic.

• The AATSEEL Medieval Slavic Fonts Page
• Ponomar Church Slavonic Fonts in Unicode
• Kodeks BukyVede and other fonts (scroll to bottom for list)
• Google Noto Sans Glagolitic (& Noto Sans Cyrillic)

Keyboard Utilities

Gglagolitic

• Virtual Glagolitic Keyboard
• Imega Glagolitic Keyboard (Windows and Linux/Phonetic Layout)
• Kodeks Glagolitic and Cyrillic Keyboards (Macintosh/Phonetic Layout)

Cyrillic Information

• Cyrillic Page

Top of Page