Komi alphabets

The Komi language, a Uralic language spoken in the north-eastern part of European Russia, has been written in several different alphabets. Currently, Komi writing uses letters from the Cyrillic script. There have been five distinct stages in the history of Komi writing: 14th to 17th centuries — Anbur, the original graphic system; 18th century to 1918 — based on the early Cyrillic alphabet; 1918 to 1932 and 1936 to 1938 — Vasily Molodtsov's alphabet based on the modified Cyrillic alphabet; 1932 to 1936 — Latinization of the alphabet; since 1938 — modern script based on the Cyrillic alphabet. The Komi-Zyryan and Komi-Permyak sub-languages have used the same writing throughout almost all of their written history (except for the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries). Old Permic script The first writing for the Komi language was compiled by the missionary Stefan of Perm around 1372–1375. This writing was created for the needs of the Christianization of the Komi Territory. It is believed that when choosing the type of letters Stefan of Perm was guided by both the Greek and Cyril alphabet, and the traditional Komi tribal characters — ru. This writing was called An-Bur (by the name of the first two letters of the alphabet). To this day, several icons with inscriptions in Anbur have survived (for example, the ru), as well as a number of handwritten lines in books. The total volume of preserved coherent texts on the embankment is 236 words. Starting from the XVIII century, separate publications of Komi texts appear both in the Latin alphabet and in the Cyrillic alphabet. So, in the second edition of Nicolaes Witsen’s book “Noord en Oost Tartarye” (Northern and Eastern Tataria), published in 1705, a translation of the prayer “Our Father” into the Komi language, written in Latin, was published. In 1787–1789, in the book of Peter Simon Pallas “Comparative Dictionary of All Languages and Adverbs”, about 200 words were published in the Komi language in Cyrillic.