24 May | Day of Slavonic Alphabet, Bulgarian Enlightenment and Culture

Stefan Peev
Stefan Peev Posts: 103
edited May 2021 in Events
Congratulations to all colleagues on the holiday!

The Day of Bulgarian Alphabet, Bulgarian Enlightenment and Culture (Bulgarian: Ден на българската просвета и култура и на славянската писменост) has been celebrated in Bulgaria since 11 May 1851 (old style). Today, this holiday is celebrated every year on May 24th (new style) and is an official holiday of Bulgaria since 1990. In 2020, the name was changed to “Day of the holy brothers Cyril and Methodius, of the Bulgarian alphabet, education and culture and of Slavic literature”.
Cyril and Methodius had been saints since the 9th century, and the commemoration of their saint's day had been celebrated in Bulgaria since the 12th century.
Similar days celebrating Slavic writing and culture are observed in North Macedonia, Russia and Serbia.
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Comments

  • Bogdan Oancea
    Bogdan Oancea Posts: 22
    edited May 2021
    Post inspirational Slavonic alphabet pics or it didn't happen. 🙂
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,188
    Here is a portion of a page from a Glagolitic manuscript of which I found on the Internet Archive (Ewa Knige Liesjube).
    Now do you believe that the people of Eastern Europe and Russia have been taught to read and write, as well as being converted to Christianity?
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,188
    And, speaking of an "inspirational Slavonic alphabet pic", this painting commissioned by Vasil Stanev which appeared in another thread surely fits the bill...

  • Vasil Stanev
    Vasil Stanev Posts: 785
    Great minds think alike :)
  • Claudio Piccinini
    Claudio Piccinini Posts: 686
    John Savard said:
    And, speaking of an "inspirational Slavonic alphabet pic", this painting commissioned by Vasil Stanev which appeared in another thread surely fits the bill...

    Who is the character looking at Cyril and Metodius?
  • Dusan Jelesijevic
    Dusan Jelesijevic Posts: 69
    Putin.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,188
    Claudio Piccinini said:
    Who is the character looking at Cyril and Metodius?

    Sequoyah, who devised a writing system for the Cherokee language.
  • Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian
    Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian Posts: 2,044
    @Dusan Jelesijevic It's certainly not Peter the Great Latinizer.  :-)
  • Vasil Stanev
    Vasil Stanev Posts: 785
    edited May 2021
    John Savard said:
    Claudio Piccinini said:
    Who is the character looking at Cyril and Metodius?

    Sequoyah, who devised a writing system for the Cherokee language.

  • adamwhite
    adamwhite Posts: 45
    edited August 20
    John Savard said:
    Here is a portion of a page from a Glagolitic manuscript of which I found on the Internet Archive (Ewa Knige Liesjube).
    Now do you believe that the people of Eastern Europe and Russia have been taught to read and write, as well as being converted to Christianity?
    They just standardized the Slavic Cyrillic script, and what is ironic today, instead of all Slavic languages kept the same orthography, they devided in so much variations that makes your head hurt.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,188
    edited August 24
    adamwhite said:
    They just standardized the Slavic Cyrillic script, and what is ironic today, instead of all Slavic languages kept the same orthography, they devided in so much variations that makes your head hurt.

    Well, there are many different Slavic languages. So each of those languages that kept the Cyrillic alphabet (as opposed to the Poles and the Slovaks, who, being Roman Catholics instead of Orthodox, used the Latin alphabet - the Czechs, of course, being Protestants) adapted it to their own language. Thus, there's an "oo kratkoye" for Belarusian, so that it has a letter W, for example.
    Language evolves over time. I'm not going to tell Portuguese, Spaniards, Frenchmen and Italians that they should give up their own languages and start speaking Latin - and so I don't think telling Bulgarians, Serbs, Belarusians and Ukrainians to give up their languages and speak Old Slavonic would be reasonable either. And if they don't speak Old Slavonic, they need to be able to easily record in writing the languages that they do speak.
    Of course, though, prior to certain recent unpleasantness, Russian was very widely spoken in Ukraine, and in the case of Belarus, apparently Russian has nearly displaced Belarusian into oblivion for daily use, even if most ethnic Belarusians in Belarus do still remember how to speak it if they choose. Because of that unpleasantness, of course, I would not wish to even appear to be suggesting that Russian should displace any of its neighboring languages so as to make our lives simpler.

    Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian said:
    It's certainly not Peter the Great Latinizer.  :-)

    I know you've expressed this opinion of what Peter the Great did to the Russian script before.
    The Slavic letterforms as they existed prior to Peter the Great's innovations, though, were so closely related to those of the Latin script, I think, that if Peter the Great stuck to trimming the number of letters down to 36 without creating the Civil Type, people would still have realized that the Cyrillic script could be easily adapted to any typeface used for the Latin alphabet.
    Even if Russia stubbornly clung to Poluustav right up until 1917, the same way Germany clung to Fraktur for a long time, I think that after the Revolution the typographic manifestation of the Russian script would have ended up looking not much different than it actually was, even if Poluustav was still used to a slightly greater extent.
    So I don't think that by introducing the Civil Type, Peter the Great did any great cultural damage to the Cyrillic-using world; he just accelerated what would have happened naturally in any case. After all, it's not as if Bulgaria and Serbia were inside the Russian Empire, were they?


  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,500
    the Czechs, of course, being Protestants
    ?????

    You say the darndest things.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,188
    I thought that was why Czechoslovakia split, the Czech part being subject to more historical influence from Germany. But this was a mistaken conclusion I formed from my general impressions, I now see, when I try to look up the religious situation in the Czech Republic directly.

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