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 During the 9th Century, when Saints Cyril and Methodius were spreading the old Bulgarian language (Old Slavonic) and culture throughout Eastern Europe, including Russia and Rumania, they developed an earlier version of the Slavic script called Glagolitsa to write the language. Saint Clement of Ohrid built upon their work and developed the Cyrillic Script (Kirilitsa) into a form very close to the one still in use today. Generally resembling the Greek alphabet in both structure and form, Cyrillic is used to write not only Russian and other Slavic languages, but many of the more than sixty other languages of the former Soviet Union that belong to the Ural-Altaic, Caucasian and Paleo-Altaic languages, including Mongolian.
Like the Latin alphabet, when Cyrillic is used to write Russian and other Slavic and minority languages, it includes many additional characters not found in the original alphabet. The Russian language uses a Cyrillic alphabet of 33 characters: 21 consonants, 10 vowels (5 hard vowels and 5 soft vowels), and two letters without sound that mark either a "hard" or "soft" pronunciation.
Russian words are transliterated according to their pronunciation, not their spelling. One notable difference between Russian and other East Asian languages is that all Russian words are read just as they are written. There are no letter combinations that make any other sound but that defined by their own sequence. The
hard and and soft signs are transliterated by a single apostrophe, since they never occur at the same place in a word. Opening quotation marks in Russian are set below the word while closing quotation marks are set is above the word.
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