Chernorizets Hrabar

Chernorizets Hrabar (, Črĭnorizĭcĭ Hrabrŭ, Черноризец Храбър) was a Bulgarian monk, scholar and writer who worked at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire at the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century. He is credited as the author of On the Letters.

Name and historicity
His appellation is correctly translated as "Hrabar, the Black Robe Wearer" (i.e., Hrabar The Monk), chernorizets being the lowest rank in the monastic hierarchy (translatable as "black robe-wearer", see wikt:Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/čьrnъ and riza), "Hrabar" ("Hrabr") supposed to be his given name. However, sometimes he is referred to as "Chernorizets the Brave", "the Brave One" or "Brave" which is the translation of Hrabar assumed to be a nickname.

The authorship of his work and his identity have been a matter of scholarly debate. His name has been theorized as a pseudonym used by some of the other famous men of letters such as Constantine, John the Exarch, Clement of Ohrid or even by Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria himself.

On the Letters
Chernorizets Hrabar is the credited author of only one literary work, "On the Letters" (О писмєньхъ, O pismenĭhŭ, За буквите), a popular medieval treatise written in Old Church Slavonic. The work was written in the late ninth or early tenth century. It was partly based on Greek scholia and grammar treatises and expounded on the origin of the Glagolitic alphabet and Slavic Bible translation.

He also provided information critical to Slavonic paleography with his mention that the pre-Christian Slavs employed "strokes and incisions" (чръты и рѣзы, črŭty i rězy, translated as "tallies and sketches" below) writing that was, apparently, insufficient properly to reflect the spoken language. It is thought that this may have been a form of runic script but no authentic examples are known to have survived. The dominant view among scholars is that Hrabar was defending Slavonic in response to Greek criticism, while others have argued that his text was a defense of Glagolithic against Cyrillic.

Manuscript copies
The manuscript of On the Letters has been preserved in 79 copies in seven families of texts, including five contaminated manuscripts, plus four abridgements independent of the seven families. All of these families probably ultimately share a common protograph. Not one of the textual families contains an optimal text, and none of them can be established to be the source of any other. None of the text families can be shown to have dialectal features, albeit some of the individual manuscripts in the families do have them. The protograph was written in Glagolitic, and it underwent significant change or corruption in the course of its successive transcription into seven families of Cyrillic texts. Today only Cyrillic manuscripts survive. The hyparchetypes of all seven families give the number of the letters in the alphabet as 38, but the original Glagolitic alphabet had only 36, as attested in the acrostic of Constantine of Preslav; however, one of the abridgements instead gives the number as 37 and another gives it as 42.

The oldest surviving manuscript copy dates back to 1348 and was made by the monk Laurentius for Tsar Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria. The work has also been printed in Vilnius (1575–1580), Moscow (1637), Saint Petersburg (1776), Supraśl (1781). It is the earliest printed work of an early Bulgarian author, included as part of the 1578 version of Ivan Fеdorov's East Slav primer.

Excerpt

 * Being still pagans, the Slavs did not have their own letters, but read and communicated by means of tallies and sketches. After their baptism they were forced to use Roman and Greek letters in the transcription of their Slavic words but these were not suitable ... At last, God, in his love for mankind, sent them St. Constantine the Philosopher, called Cyril, a learned and upright man, who composed for them thirty-eight letters, some (24 of them) similar to the Greek, but some (14 of them) different, suitable to express Slavic sounds.

Legacy
Hrabar Nunatak on Greenwich Island in the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica is named for Chernorizets Hrabar.