Cyrillic

Last night I memorized the Cyrillic alphabet. 33 characters which made me wonder more than once exactly what must have comprised St. Cyril's (that's him in the icon above) diet while he was inventing these letters. Emmelia was really funny when I kept repeating the alphabet - she would say "I like that!" and I'd say "It's the Cyrillic alphabet!" and then, invariably, she'd launch into the singing of the English alphabet song. I need to find some music to sing the Cyrillic alphabet so that the girls pick it up while their brains are tender.

Since I can get extra credit for giving a short presentation in my Russian class, I looked up the origin of the Cyrillic alphabet on Google. It was pretty interesting. Apparently some folks question whether St. Cyril wrote it at all. I think in general not a lot of history was being written down in the 10th century, especially among a people that didn't have an alphabet. I'm going to have to assume holy tradition is right about this one, but I'm not sure I'll actually do a presentation on this topic now. Instead, I'm going to continue giggling everytime I get to "tvordy znak" and wonder why a character which has no sound has to have two words to describe it.