Crazy moon language

Like anybody’s, my day is mostly filled with routine and sometimes with outright drudgery, but every once in a while I remember why I slogged through grad school and took this crazy job. Here’s an excerpt from something I’m editing:

That’s part of a text in Glagolitic, an alphabet used in the Slavic-speaking world before the more familiar Cyrillic was used. (They were used contemporaneously, though—the exact chronology is a little fuzzy on which one was invented first. At any rate, we’re talking ninth century AD.) I’ve always thought it was the coolest looking script, all loops and impractical forms that look like they’d take a while to draw. But then again, monks spent their entire lives copying books out by hand, so maybe those curlicues kept them from getting bored.

I can’t read Glagolitic freely by any means—one of my professors in grad school actually could, which makes her pretty much a god in my view. And when I had to retype this particular Glagolitic passage using a Unicode-compliant font, it took a good while before I could get any speed going. Here’s a picture that shows the Cyrillic equivalent, just to give you an idea:
Working with Glagolitic is cool, and it definitely keeps me from getting bored when I get to do it.