Type Alphabet Time period 16th–19th centuries | Languages Romanian | |
 | ||
Parent systems Phoenician alphabet
Greek alphabet
Glagolitic alphabet
Cyrillic
Romanian Cyrillic Sister systems Early Cyrillic alphabet | ||
The Romanian Cyrillic alphabet (the Moldavian-Wallachian letter, the alphabet of the Vlado-Moldavian manuscripts) is the Cyrillic alphabet used to write the Romanian language before 1860–1862, when it was officially replaced by a Latin-based Romanian alphabet. The Romanian Cyrillic alphabet was based on Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet. Cyrillic remained in occasional use until the 1920s (mostly in Bessarabia). It is not the same as the Russian-based Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet used in the Moldavian ASSR in 1924-1932 and 1938-1940, and then in the Moldavian SSR between 1940 and 1989 (except 1941-44).
Contents
- Table of correspondence
- Unregulated transitional alphabets
- An example of Romanian Cyrillic text
- References
Between its discarding and the full adoption of the Latin alphabet, a so-called transitional alphabet was in place for a few years (it combined Cyrillic and Latin letters, and included some of the Latin letters with diacritics which came to be used in Romanian spelling). The Romanian Orthodox Church continued using the alphabet in its publications until 1881.
Table of correspondence
The Romanian Cyrillic alphabet was close to the contemporary version of the Early Cyrillic alphabet of the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language.
Unregulated transitional alphabets
Starting with the 1830s and ending with the official adoption of the Latin alphabet, there were no regulations for writing Romanian, and various alphabets using Cyrillic and Latin letters, besides the mid-transitional version in the table above, were used, sometimes two or more of them in a single book. The following table shows some of the many alphabets used in print.
An example of Romanian Cyrillic text
According to a document from the 1850s, this is how the Romanian Lord's Prayer looked in Cyrillic script. Transcriptional values correspond to the above table.