Old Church Slavonic, Revisited

After a circuitous route of reading, I decided to revisit Old Church Slavonic. It started when I was looking at some of the contested inscriptions in the Basarabi Cave Complex, where I saw the following sequence:

With the bar over it, it looks like either an abbreviation or a nomen sacrum. It made me think of the Rohonc word I tentatively read as "Christ":

From there, I started reading about Glagolitic, and I realized that I should probably look at letter frequencies in Old Church Slavonic as it was written in both Glagolitic and and Cyrillic, so I reanalyzed OCS using the Codex Marianus (Glagolitic) and Codex Suprasliensis (Cyrillic).

Codex Marianus

	Initial	Final	All
izhe	9.1%	14.8%	8.3%
jest	5.0%	16.1%	8.0%
big jer	0.0%	23.4%	7.7%
on	5.3%	8.1%	6.5%
az	2.1%	7.9%	6.2%
tverdo	3.4%	0.0%	5.9%

Codex Suprasliensis

	Initial	Final	All
izhe	11.3%	18.1%	8.7%
az	2.4%	10.6%	7.4%
on	4.1%	9.1%	7.3%
jest	1.2%	11.4%	6.3%
big jer	0.1%	15.4%	5.8%
tverdo	4.1%	1.0%	6.8%

One of the interesting things about Glagolitic is that some of the forms of these letters resemble the forms of the most common Rohonc letters. But I can only steal 10 minutes away today, so I'll have to get back to that in another post.