Last week in Sofia, I encountered a shortcoming in my knowledge: I haven’t ever studied the Cyrillic alphabet. Simply having to deal with a foreign language makes ordinary tasks a challenge; a foreign script poses a real usability problem. My visit also corrected a few misconceptions: 1) Even though we often speak about Russian letters, they were originally Bulgarian. The alphabet was developed in the 800s for Old Church Slavonic, the predecessor of modern Bulgarian; “Cyrillic” comes from Saint Cyril who helped create the first alphabet for Slavonic languages. 2) I had thought that the Greek alphabet would be quite close to the Cyrillic. It is not, even though Cyril was from Thessaloniki and the characters were developed from the Greek alphabet. 3) You might assume that signs in the center of the capital would appear in both Cyrillic and Latin characters. You would be mistaken. Next week, my trip to St. Petersburg will provide further study of the Cyrillic alphabet. – Finally, a quick quiz question: You can write a name of a certain Finnish city in the same way with either Latin or Cyrillic letters. What’s thecity?