On the Countable Meaning of the Glagolitic script

Abstract

Previous attempts to discover any links of the Glagolitic symbols with the Germanic runes, the Ethiopian, Coptic, Gothic, Arabic scripts, or with the Greek minuscule writing have not lead to any results. But at the same time, it is obvious that Glagolitic signs did not appear accidentally. There must be a certain initial meaning behind their schematic representation, and this meaning had a profound figurative cognitive and structural symbolic meaning for speakers. The author claims that the visual images of Glagolitic letters are directly related to the principles that guided the primitive artists when depicting reality. The article provides evidence that Glagolitic letters followed the logic of the development of social consciousness of that time, they reflected and transmitted the idea of Genus hominum. Primitive thinking was based on the associative connections between a sign, its meaning, and an associative representation of the role that this meaning played in the life of their tribe. The main task of these associative representations was to facilitate the process of perception and memorization of signs through their compliance with traditional cultural values of native speakers. The alphabet order of Glagolitic signs was interpreted in strict accordance with their numerical meaning. This order makes it possible to draw analogy between the form of the letters and the images of some ancient artifacts which had a special spiritual significance for the primitive man. The article claims that the first five Glagolitic signs contain figurative and cognitive ideas of the primitive man about himself, his family and ancestors: a man (1), a woman (2), their union (3), their house (4), and protection of the tribe (5). Structural and arithmetic correspondences of symbols played a significant role in the Glagolitic script as well. Unlike the Cyrillic alphabet, numerical values of the Glagolitic letters follow each other without any omission. This suggests that these letters were used first as numbers. There are also structural and schematic correspondences between Glagolitic symbols. Using various structural elements that the system assigned to them, it is possible to transform their graphic images into numbers “one”, “ten”, etc. This highlights the idea that initially the Glagolitic alphabet arose as a counting system and was adapted to write the sounds of speech later. For this reason Glagolitic letters received the same names as these in the Cyrillic alphabet, but they preserved the straight-through order of their numerical values.

Keywords: origin of the Glagolitic alphabet, cognitive approach, form and content of letters.