Excerpt from Practical Russian Grammar, Vol. 1 I. The Russian alphabet is called the Cyrillic, as its creation is rightly or wrongly ascribed to St. Cyril, a Greek missionary. Of the ninth century who carried Christianity to the Slavs of Macedonia. This alphabet is based on the Greek capitals. It includes a few letters corresponding to Latin characters of similar form, a few more that have the form but not the value of Latin symbols, and several entirely new symbols that must have been invented. As applied to modern Russian the alphabet is, for various historical reasons, by no means perfect in its approximation to the phonetic ideal. It is, however, for the purpose of representing a Slav tongue far better adapted than the Latin character, for, once the Cyrillic alphabet is mastered, it is seen that the words are neither so long nor so barbarous in appearance in their native dress as when transliterated for English readers. The Czechs, Poles, and other Northern Slavs (exclusive of the Russians) use the Latin character, while the Russians, Bulgars, Serbs, and most other Southern Slavs use the Cyrillic. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.