The Old Permic script (, , ''Važ Perym gižöm''), sometimes known by its initial two characters as Abur or Anbur, is a "highly idiosyncratic adaptation" of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...

once used to write medieval Komi (a member of the Permic branch of

Finno-Ugric Finno-Ugric () is a traditional linguistic grouping of all languages in the Uralic languages, Uralic language family except for the Samoyedic languages. Its once commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is based on criteria formulated in ...

languages).

History

The script was introduced by a Russian missionary, Stephen of Perm, in 1372. The name ''Abur'' is derived from the names of the first two characters: ''An'' and ''Bur''. The script derived from

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

and

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

, with Komi "Rödvužpas" Tamga" signs, the latter being similar in the appearance to

rune Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets, known as runic rows, runic alphabets or futharks (also, see '' futhark'' vs ''runic alphabet''), native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were primarily used to represent a sound value (a ...

s or

siglas poveiras The (, ) or () are a proto-writing system used by the local community of Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, for many generations. The siglas poveiras were primarily used as signatures for family coat of arms to mark family belongings. The symbols w ...

because they were created by incisions rather than by usual writing. The inclusion of the latter aided the script to greater acceptance among the medieval Permic speakers of the time. The script was in use until the 17th century, when it was superseded by the

. Abur was also used as cryptographic writing for the

Russian language Russian is an East Slavic languages, East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic languages, Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is ...

. April 26, which is the feast day of Stephen of Perm, is celebrated as Old Permic Alphabet Day.

Significance

The Abur inscriptions are among the oldest relics of the

Uralic languages The Uralic languages ( ), sometimes called the Uralian languages ( ), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers ab ...

. Only one of them has earlier documents: Hungarian, which had been written using the

Old Hungarian script The Old Hungarian script or Hungarian runes (, 'székely-magyar runiform', or ) is an alphabetic writing system used for writing the Hungarian language. Modern Hungarian is written using the Latin-based Hungarian alphabet. The term "old" refers ...

first before the Latin script was used after 1000. For comparison, an isolated birch bark letter, found in

Novgorod Veliky Novgorod ( ; , ; ), also known simply as Novgorod (), is the largest city and administrative centre of Novgorod Oblast, Russia. It is one of the oldest cities in Russia, being first mentioned in the 9th century. The city lies along the V ...

and written in

in a Finnic language, has been dated to the beginning of the 13th century and Finnish as a written language appeared only after the

Reformation The Reformation, also known as the Protestant Reformation or the European Reformation, was a time of major Theology, theological movement in Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the p ...

in 1543.

Characters

Lytkin's 1952 work is often considered the authoritative source of documentation for this script.Лыткин, В. И. 1952. Древнепермский язык: чтение текстов, грамматика, словарь. Москва There are 24 primary characters, along with 10 secondary characters that are subordinate to the primary characters. There are also some combining marks that may have been used for phonological purposes, in addition to some combining letters from Latin and Cyrillic that have been found as well. Spaces, middle dots, and semi-apostrophes have also been seen as punctuation in documents. A Cyrillic combining

titlo Titlo is an extended diacritic symbol initially used in early Cyrillic and Glagolitic manuscripts, e.g., in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic language, Old East Slavic languages. The word is a borrowing from the , and is a cognate of t ...

is used to indicate numerals.

Unicode

Old Permic (U+10350–1037F) was added to the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0.

References

External links

* * {{list of writing systems Permic script, Old 14th-century introductions Obsolete writing systems Komi alphabet Writing systems introduced in the 2nd millennium 1372 in Europe