Nah...these people don't know much...:)
I would start with something like this:
http://bgclub.sa.utoronto.ca/cyrillic.htm
And if your attention span allows, this is a good start:
http://www.bulgaria.com/history/bulgaria/conver.html
Which has more academic merrits...:)
But in short, at school it was thought like this:
Both Cyril and Methodius are saints, they both worked on Glagolitsa for King
Boris I, while he had his finger up in the air testing which wind is stronger,
the one that comes from Rome or Constantinopol. It is true that it has some
borrowings from the greek alphabet.
After the Moravian experiment their desciples, the ones that returned to BG
modified it further and named it Kirilitsa or Cyrillic. Last known
modification to it (at least from the ones that I know of) was done sometimes
in the early fifties of the last century.
Then we sent it to Russia and they now claim it as theirs (as they do about so
many other things...:) BTW there was another Bulgaria along Volga river that
survived until 1496, I think and yet another Bulgaria, somewhere in the middle
of today's Italy, but I don' remember how long it lasted...
Boris
I think I know where Boris is coming from, and I consider that he is right,
but all this talk of Bulgarian/Russian alphabets is misplaced. We don't
speak of an English or American alphabet (identical as far as I know), do
we? Nor of a Norwegian or Swedish alphabet (which I suspect are not
identical). Both Bulgarian and Russian use an alphabet which is largely
based on the Greek alphabet with added characters to represent sounds not
present in Greek of the 9th century CE. It may have been developed by St
Cyril, but more likely his invention was what is known as the Glagolitic
alphabet, which is described and illustrated here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_alphabet and amazingly, provided for
in Unicode http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2C00.pdf
There are no characters used in Bulgarian that are not also used in modern
Russian, and in Russian a hard sign is no more than an orthographical relic
of what was once a vowel. A similar relic is the curiosity of the
preposition "B" occasionally taking the form "BO".
For those who want to delve deeper (or, like me, need to refresh their
memory after 30 years!)
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/eieol/ocsol-0-X.html would be a good
place to start.
--
Piers
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