#palaeography #cyrillic #ukrainian #scripts
So you probably been seeing teh slogan Victory to Ukraine a lot lately and in Cyrillic or Romanized.
You may know Slava Ukraini looks like this is in Cyrillic
both the Russian or Ukrainian versions of Cyrillic
ϹЛАВА УКРАЇНІ
The C comes from the Byzantine lunate sigma the next letter is an L derived from Greek Lambda in upper case and Beta is a V / W and so forth
So why does N look like a H
The simplest explanation without going into the full history of Cyrillic and how Greek letters were adapted from Slavic languages ( and I will go into that in a future post ) is that the modern H form has been edited and "reformed" and an N that had a slanting cross bar connecting nearer to the top had the cross bar lowered and why ?
Because Cyril and his brother developed the letters using forms not just from the upper case uncials we see in inscriptions but also hand written Greek Cursive forms.
So thats the shortest explanation I could come up with.
I promise to do a full comparision for those curious about the relationship of Greek and Cyrillic including why Cyril had to add extra letters.
