from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- adj. Belonging to or written in an uncial cursive alphabet attributed to Saint Cyril, formerly used in the writing of various Slavic languages but now limited to the Catholic liturgical books used by some communities along the Dalmatian coast.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- adj. Of or written with the Glagolitic alphabet.
- adj. Denoting Slavic Roman Catholic rites in Dalmatia.
- n. The oldest known Slavonic alphabet, designed around 862–863 CE by Saint Cyril in order to translate the Bible and other texts into Old Church Slavonic. Mostly replaced by Cyrillic alphabet in Orthodox Christian Slavic countries, but still in use in the Croatian Church along the Dalmatian coast, in Czech and Croatian recensions of Church Slavic.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Of or pertaining to Glagol: as, the Glagolitic alphabet.
The ancient Slavonic when reduced to writing seems to have been originally written with a kind of runic letters, which, when formed into a regular alphabet, were called the Glagolitic, that is the signs which spoke.
This older alphabet, which still survives, is called the Glagolitic (from glagolati, to speak, because the rude tribesmen imagined that the letters spoke to the reader and told him what to say), and was used by the southern Slavic tribes and now exists along the Adriatic highlands.
Throughout Dalmatia, including the adjoining islands, as well as on the Croatian coast, the Old Croatian language called Glagolitic is still in use at church services.
He made as much clear in a letter, dashed off in anger after a critic had dared read his "Glagolitic Mass," first performed at the same concert in Prague as the Sinfonietta, as a sign that Janáček was finally becoming pious in his old age.
This entailed the need for new graphic symbols, closer to the spoken language, and from here arose the Glagolitic alphabet which, subsequently modified, became known as 'Cyrillic' in honour of the person who inspired it .
The Proms usually open with a choral work, and this year, the 117th, began with Janacek's Glagolitic Mass, which formed the second half of a substantial and wide-ranging programme.
Mr. Tritle's wish-list for future projects includes great Romantic canvases like César Franck's "Les Béatitudes" and Charles Gounod's epic oratorio "Mors et Vita," as well as 20th-century landmarks like the Britten "War Requiem" and Janáček's Glagolitic Mass.
Using some Greek letters, and also inventing some new letters they came up with the Glagolitic alphabet, which eventually transformed into the Cyrillic that many countries use today.
In times of old, they also used the Arabic and Glagolitic alphabets.
The Peresopnytsia Gospels, made between 1556 and 1661, are one of the most intricate surviving East Slavonic manuscripts and contains the four Gospels translated from canonical texts into the Old Ukrainian language and illustrated in Glagolitic characters under the influence of the style of the Italian Renaissance.