Early Cyrillic alphabet
U 0400- U 04 FF U 0500- U 052 F U 2 GB0 -U 2 DFF U A640 -U A69F
The Altkyrillische alphabet is a writing system that has been developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th or 10th century to modernize the Old Church Slavonic. The modern Cyrillic alphabet is still used mainly for Slavic languages , as well as for Asian languages that were under the cultural influence of Russia during the 20th century.
History
The earliest form of a Cyrillic handwriting, also called of Laws, based on the Greek uncial script, enriched with ligatures and letters from the Glagolitic alphabet for consonants, which are not present in the Greek. There was no graphical difference between uppercase and lowercase letters, the same type of writing was written in case of need just bigger.
According to tradition, the two Slavic writings ( Glagolitic and Cyrillic) of two brothers, the monks of Saint Methodius and Saint Cyril, have been developed which evangelised by 860 AD in Bulgaria. It is assumed that the Glagolitic alphabet is older than the Cyrillic. There is evidence that the Glagolitic alphabet existed before the introduction of Christianity and has only been extended by St. Cyril. Concern was probably to remove non- Greek sounds, possibly on behalf of Boris I, who declared the Orthodox Christianity the official state religion in 864.
Since its creation, the Cyrillic alphabet has always adapted to changes in spoken language and developed regional variations to reflect the peculiarities of national languages graphically. The writing was repeatedly subjected to academic reforms and political decrees. Different variations of the Cyrillic alphabet are thus used to give the languages of eastern Europe and northern Asia, a graphical typeface.
The shape of the Russian alphabet, for example, changed greatly, when Tsar Peter I of Russia in 1708, the Russian spelling reform enacted to create with the intention of a profane writing style, which should be clearly distinguished from the ecclesiastical writing font Zerkownoslawjanski. Some letters and pause signs were removed because they only had a historical significance yet. Medieval letterforms, which is still found as a character using that time were graphically designed so that they had references to Latin types. Thus, the medieval shape of each letter was adapted to modern, baroque writing templates. In this spelling reform, the Western European Renaissance style of the letter was skipped. The reform therefore had far-reaching consequences and influenced below, the Cyrillic spelling and graphology of the letters in virtually all Slavic languages. The original spelling and typesetting standards are only preserved in the Church Slavonic.
An understandable repertoire earlier Cyrillic characters included in Unicode 5.1 standard, released on 4 April 2008. These characters and their distinctive letter shapes are represented in specialized computer character sets of Slavonic Studies.