Ryan, your interests always appreciated.
But this is a discussion forum rather than a chat room.
The more focused you tune your question, the more likely is it to get useful answers.
Cheers,
A. St.

I think this is a highly focused and relevant question.
(It just needs a better title.)

hhp

In fact, Cyrillic writing derived from Greek, just like many other alphabets, e.g. Armenian, Caucasian Albanian, Coptic, Georgian, Glagolitic, Gothic, Etruscan, and… Latin. No wonder they share many characters. Below is a beautiful rendering (by Vadim Lazurski, 1941) of ustav, an early Cyrillic formal style used in Ostromir Gospels (1056–7).

And a highly calligraphic sample it is -- I see some similarities with Chinese :-)
I guess this particular style could be translated into a Latin typeface without any problems!

Cyrillic writing derived from Greek

Specifically from Byzantine Greek. The connections between some Cyrillic and Greek letters isn't immediately apparent to people who are only familiar with the classical and modern Greek alphabet norms. I didn't come to understand all of the relationships until just last year when I was working on a typeface for Byzantine sigillography and numismatics, containing many variant forms tracing more than 1,000 years of Byzantine letterforms. A light went on for me when I saw that H sometimes occurs as a variant form of N in Byzantine uncial, explaining how it came to represent that phoneme in Cyrillic.

forgive my ignorance, but isn't there a backwards '3' ?

The example of Ustav gives the Old Slavonic alphabet rather than the modern Russian alphabet, so hard E is absent.

As to the original question, though, I am perplexed. Cyrillic is what it always was, it hasn't had additional Latin letters introduced, although it is true some national alphabets of the Cyrillic type have added letters from Latin, but not recently - such as I and J.

I guess this particular style could be translated into a Latin typeface without any problems!

No problem whatsoever:
AK Ustav, by Anatoliy Kudryavtsev, 2008.

only for informational purposes, I will say as a westerner that both the B and R look too muck like the Latin K, other than that, that it is fan f**kingtastic!

I can see that the K in the pic differentiates itself from the R and B, but I don't understand it until my eye thinks about it awhile...

And the uppercase E is just a bit foreign.

As to the original question, though, I am perplexed. Cyrillic is what it always was, it hasn't had additional Latin letters introduced, although it is true some national alphabets of the Cyrillic type have added letters from Latin, but not recently - such as I and J.

Don’t be perplexed… The I is actually the Greek iota. It was part of the Cyrillic alphabet from the beginning, not an afterthought. As to the J, the Romans did quite well without it for centuries, and those were not the users of Cyrillic who came up with it first (in the 16th century?). In fact, Karadžić’s adding the Ј to the Serbian alphabet in 1818 did a lot of good.

This is the '3' I was talking about.

Forgive my ignorance, but isn’t there a backwards ‘3’ ?

What’s so ‘backwards’ about it? Its shape is turned to the left, just like the Д’s, the И’s, the Й’s, the Л’s, the У’s, the Ч’s, the Э’s, and the Я’s, and also the Ζ’s (the zeta’s), its Greek counterpart.

I feel incredibly stupid right now. Oh so incredibly stupid. That 3 isnt backward at all,.

I remember the old ikons in the Greek Orthodox Church that I attended as a child. The lettering on them was inherited from the Greek Byzantine forms John mentioned. Saint Paul brought the precursor of the Orthodox version of Christianity to Russia with most of the writings being in Greek. Russians had centuries of familiarity with the Greek letterforms through the Orthodox church. It was an easy way to get started with a new script when most of the people were already familiar with 24 glyphs. St Cyril was a logical choice :-)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_UOJjUH2o_wM/TEBo6q4kEgI/AAAAAAAADw8/FmSYwb5_u4...

Oh, and titile might better read, "Two brothers from Thessaloniki walk in with a barred cross"

If someone didn't know the birch bark letters...

So, the bartender looks at the Czar and says, "Funny: you don't look Jewish…"

And the Czar says, "It's Greek to me."