Why is there so much confusion around the Cyrillic breve (and other diacritics)?

John Hudson said:

The Latin breve and Cyrillic kratka evolved separately for most of their histories, and the various forms that are appropriate or inappropriate for one or the other reflect styles of lettering and type from those histories. The forms are related to the styles of the letters, and to the writing tools on which these are modeled. The higher the stroke contrast in the type style, and the more traditional the design, the more likely the kratka is to have a distinctively Cyrillic form, but even in low contrast, sans serif types the kratka may differ in size and sometimes vertical alignment (the kratka is often larger, and more prominent than the Latin breve).

[W]hat purpose does it serve today?

The same purpose it has always served: to represent the cultural evolution of writing systems and typography in contemporary technology.

Wow, great to see you in this thread. Yours were exactly the comments I kept running into while researching this — the Unicode list in 2005 and the TypeDrawers thread on extended Cyrillic in 2017. It's wonderful that someone of your standing just drops into a discussion like this.

Thank you, this is really valuable. But let me push back a little: could this tradition be, at least in part, a historical accident specific to the Russian alphabet? One could imagine a path-dependent story: where a new punch had to be cut, a distinct shape appeared; where an existing accent could be reused, it stayed. If something like that happened, we may now be treating as a mark of quality what began as someone improvising a missing sort.

The material I could find doesn't give a clear answer about where the kratka's form comes from. Accounts are usually vague: some trace it to the Greek breve, some to a Byzantine tradition. My own hunch is that the modern form settled in the post-Petrine reforms of the Russian alphabet in the mid-18th century — the Academy of Sciences introduced й into the civil type in 1735, and that seems like the moment when its shape could have been fixed.

There are also sources showing that the same inconsistency we see today already existed 150 years ago. In the 1870 specimen book of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences press, the Russian types I looked at draw the kratka over й as two drops joined by a thin arc. But on the sheet of additional sorts, cut mainly for Lepsius's linguistic alphabet and Sjögren's alphabet, other Cyrillic letters carry an ordinary Latin cup-shaped breve. So one and the same academic press was drawing these marks differently: a canonical form for the Russian alphabet, but no consensus about Cyrillic as a whole. The sheet is here: https://archive.org/details/obraztsyshriftov00iaka/page/n342/mode/1up

John Hudson said:

I always try to find contemporary professional (scribal) writing, engraving, and/or lithographic lettering when looking at historical type, especially in periods of transition where new styles are emerging. That 1735 date for the introduction of the kratka is significant, because it is in the period where writing masters and engravers are producing lettering that features lachrymal or ball terminals and very fine hairlines, so exactly the context in which one would expect this kind of form to emerge.

Possibly, the cursive form with the ball on the left and a thin tail comes first, in written and engraved copy books, and the shape shown here is a formal derivative to fit in the context of the more static upright letters.

Typography, prior to the 20th Century, exists within a broader culture of text production that includes a huge amount of scribal writing, and other means of reproduction. So I wouldn’t presume that a shape like this necessarily originates in a punch-cutting process, or something like ‘improvising a missing sort’.

But on the sheet of additional sorts, cut mainly for Lepsius's linguistic alphabet and Sjögren's alphabet, other Cyrillic letters carry an ordinary Latin cup-shaped breve. So one and the same academic press was drawing these marks differently: a canonical form for the Russian alphabet, but no consensus about Cyrillic as a whole.

The Lepsius and Sjögren alphabets are predominantly Latin, aren’t they? and only supplemented with some Cyrillic characters for Slavic languages? So in that context is makes sense that the Latin form of breve is used.

I went back to the sources properly, and I owe the thread a correction and a fuller picture.

1. What the 1870 specimen actually shows. Three different marks over Cyrillic letters in one book: two drops on a hairline over й in the Russian text types and in the Chuvash setting; a Latin cup over ў in Ossetian and over ы̆ on the linguistic sorts sheet, identical to the ă beside it; and a heavy hook in the Church Slavonic type. So my "no consensus" was right, but for a different reason than I gave: the shape followed the fount the sort came from. The й was cast as one piece with its own mark; letters for other languages were cast in the linguistic founts and inherited whatever breve those founts had.

2. Lepsius and Sjögren. You're right about Lepsius: the Standard Alphabet is Latin, he warns against borrowing Russian letters because it "surrenders the homogeneity of writing" (p. 167), and he defines the short mark as the sign of Latin prosody (p. 59) — which is exactly the cup over ы̆. Sjögren is the opposite case: his 1844 Ossetian grammar sets out to show how the Russian alphabet can be applied to other languages within Russia (p. XII); the 46-letter table is Cyrillic with five borrowings (Æ, Ö, J, Q, Ω), and he dropped й deliberately in favour of Latin j. So the Latin cup over Cyrillic letters there isn't a Latin-alphabet effect; it's the transcription fount's mark.

3. The kratka before the canon. Dated images, all of which I or my collaborators looked at:

• 15th-c. manuscript: an angular check with a heavier right arm (RSL Horologion); the same in a 17th-c. one.
• Fedorov's Apostol, 1564: a tiny apostrophe-like hook (p. 22).
• Smotrytsky, 1619: the prosodic kratkaya printed as a symmetric U (leaf 24).
• Moscow Psalter, 1649: a single oblique stroke, indistinguishable from the acute (p. 100).
• Moscow Horologion, 1652: a hook with a drop on the left and a thin tail to the right (p. 30).
• 1669 primer: an angular check again (leaf 12).

Five shapes in two centuries, in both orientations, with no sign that anyone thought it mattered.

4. Civil type. Petrine printing has no kratka at all (Kniga Marsova, 1713). When й comes back in 1735 it gets a plain symmetric bracket: the Academy's 1748 specimen and Lomonosov's 1755 grammar, where he literally calls it a skobka, a bracket (§ 85). Meanwhile — and this is a point for your hypothesis — the Academy's 1749 italic already has the drop-on-the-left form (reproduced in Yuri Gordon's Book about Letters, p. 180). Drops on the upright й appear only later: faintly in the 1789 Academy dictionary, clearly in the 1802 grammar's italic, and as the canonical form in the Didone specimens of 1826 — Semen, Selivanovsky, Moscow University (Shitsgal's reproductions).

So the cursive drop form does predate the upright drops, and your sequence is possible. What I can't tell from this is whether the upright drops derive from the italic or simply from the ball terminals of the Didone idiom, because the upright type kept its plain bracket for forty years and acquired drops exactly when Russian type went Didone. Either way, 1735 gives us the letter, not the form.

5. When the difference became a rule. Nowhere before the digital era. The Soviet GOST 3489 series has no Latin accents at all, so the question couldn't arise. Adobe's Cyrillic spec added a cyrbreve glyph in 1993 without a word of explanation (TN 5013). The first written rule I can find is Vladimir Efimov, 1996: the Cyrillic breve "as a rule has reverse contrast" to the Latin one, justified by the reader stumbling on unfamiliar forms (ParaType, archived). In English it surfaces on Typophile in March 2007 — your own post there says they are "clearly the same character" — then the ParaType glossary (Dec 2007), Wikipedia in 2011–13, and Glyphs in 2014, each citing the previous one.

And here Gordon is worth quoting in paraphrase: in the 18th century, he found, the kratka was either a bracket like the Latin breve or a single drop on the left; the two-drop form he traced to Semen's 1826 specimen; and he sees no great sin in replacing it with a Latin-like one — we are simply used to Й with Mickey Mouse ears (Книга про буквы, pp. 177–178).

6. Where this leaves my question. Nobody ever decided to make the kratka unlike the breve. The two marks lived in different founts and never had to agree; the drops are a Didone fashion that happened to be on the й sort when the style froze; and once multi-script digital fonts put both marks in one file, the inherited difference was written down as a rule and justified by habit. Extended-Cyrillic letters cut in the 20th century mostly copied the й pattern — Chuvash ӑ in a 1918 primer and a 1989 book, Belarusian ў everywhere — with lapses like a 1982 Moldovan magazine that has a Latin cup over ӂ and drops over й in the same face (Steluța).

Your account explains where the drops came from, and I accept it. What it doesn't show is that the difference from the breve was ever a design decision or serves a function. "Appropriate for the script" is a judgment of taste about a style that was fashionable in 1826 — a legitimate taste, but a taste. That's all I was trying to say.

Christian Thalmann said:

I feel the Cyrillic mark needs to be flatter than the breve...

More kratkas for the kratka god

Seriously though — the numbers back you up. Among fonts that distinguish the two, the kratka is wider (median 1.07) but shorter (0.985). Flatter, not bigger.