Relationship of Cyrillic and Glagolitic scripts
As the 9th-century missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius undertook their mission to evangelize to the Slavs of Great Moravia, two writing systems were developed: Glagolitic and Cyrillic. Both scripts were based on the Greek alphabet and share commonalities, but the exact nature of relationship between the Glagolitic alphabet and the Early Cyrillic alphabet, their order of development, and influence on each other has been a matter of great study, controversy, and dispute in Slavic studies. Glagolitic precedence The theory that Glagolitic script was created before Cyrillic was first put forth by G. Dobner in 1785, and since Pavel Jozef Šafárik's 1857 study of Glagolitic monuments, Über den Ursprung und die Heimat des Glagolitismus, there has been a virtual consensus in the academic circles that St. Cyril developed the Glagolitic alphabet, rather than the Cyrillic. This view is supported by numerous linguistic, paleographic, and historical accounts. Points that support this view include: The Greek-derived Cyrillic script spread quickly across the Slavia Orthodoxa lands because it replaced the Glagolitic alphabet, which was designed to fit the sound system of Slavic speech. By comparison, the West Slavic languages, as well as Slovene and Croatian, took a longer time to adapt the Roman alphabet