Cyrillic

I would agree that Cyrillic is more functional than the Roman alpahbet for
writing Slavic languages, which comes as no surprise since Cyrillic was
specifically designed for writing Slavic languages and the Roman alphabet
wasn't.  I know that I willl much prefer Cyrillic to Roman translitteration
just as soon as I get a bit more practice with the alphabet and can read
aloud faster.  (From time to time, I still make the very embarassing
mistake of mispronouncing an r as a p.)

On the aesthetic front, however, I think that modern Cyrillic looks
somewhat blocky and unattractive.  Modern Church Slavonic fonts, on the
other hand, are very pretty.  The words look attractive on the page, and
the books are a pleasure to look at.  We have entire books at home written
in nothing but modern Church Slavonic, not even any Russian in them.  A
number of these books have every page numbered in Slavonic numerals rather
than Arabic, and the text is often written in two colors -- black for the
words that are actually said aloud and red for the labels and instructions
for the reader.  It's also a common thing at to find that, when you reach
the end of the page, after the last full line of real text, there will be a
single word on the far right-hand side of the line below it.  This is the
first word on the next page, and its presence there helps keep the reading
smooth.  (My husband loves this feature.)  Church Slavonic does not present
any difficulties to reading.

If you've never seen Church Slavonic before you can see it on the web in
several places.

http://www.librarium.orthodoxy.ru/trebnik

Has image files of pages from the Book of Needs (Slavonic 'trebnik'), one
of the liturgical book.

There is also my husband's Help Me Learn Church Slavonic website.  If you
have any interest in the numbering system (which is directly based on the
Greek numbering system) he has a page explaining Slavonic numbers, and even
a quiz to help you practice the numbers.  There is also a good deal of
grammatical information on his page.

http://justin.zamora.com/slavonic

Isidora

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