Croatian alphabet
Encyclopedia
Gaj's Latin alphabet is a variant of the Latin script used for Croatian language
. It was devised by Croatia
n linguist Ljudevit Gaj
in 1835, based on Jan Hus
's Czech alphabet
.
Today, this letter is used for Bosnian language
, unofficially used for Serbian language
in which the official letter to Serbian Cyrillic, is used for Serbian. A slightly reduced version is used as the script of the Slovene language and Montenegrin
. A modified version of the alphabet is used for romanization of the Macedonian language
.
The original Croatian or Gaj's alphabet contained a digraph ⟨dj⟩, which was later replaced by the letter ⟨đ⟩.
The letters do not have names, and consonants are normally pronounced as such when spelling is necessary (or followed by a short schwa
, e.g. /fə/). When clarity is needed, they are pronounced similar to the German alphabet
: a, be, ce, če, će, de, dže, đe, e, ef, ge, ha, i, je, ka, el, elj, em, en, enj, o, pe, er, es, eš, te, u, ve, ze, že. These rules for pronunciation of individual letters are common as far as the 22 letters that match the basic modern Latin alphabet
are concerned. The use of others is mostly limited to the context of linguistics, while in mathematics, ⟨j⟩ is commonly pronounced jot, as in German. The missing four letters are pronounced as follows: ⟨q⟩ as ku or kju, ⟨w⟩ as dublve or duplo ve, ⟨x⟩ as iks, ⟨y⟩ as ipsilon.
⟨dž
⟩, ⟨lj⟩, and ⟨nj⟩ are considered to be single letters. This means that:
, who modelled it after Czech
and Polish
, and invented ⟨lj⟩, ⟨nj⟩ and ⟨dž⟩. In 1830 in Buda he printed the book Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja ("Brief basics of the Croatian-Slavonic orthography"), which was the first common Croatian orthography
book. It was not the first ever Croatian orthography work, as it was preceded by works of Rajmund Đamanjić (1639), Ignjat Đurđević and Pavao Ritter Vitezović
. Croats had previously used the Latin script, but some of the specific sounds were not uniformly represented. Versions of the Hungarian alphabet
were most commonly used, but others were too, in an often confused, inconsistent fashion.
Gaj followed the example of Pavao Ritter Vitezović and the Czech orthography
, making one letter of the Latin script for each sound in the language. His alphabet mapped completely on Serbian Cyrillic which was standardized by Vuk Karadžić a few years before.
Đuro Daničić suggested in his Rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika ("Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian language") published in 1880 that Gaj's digraphs ⟨dž⟩, ⟨dj⟩, ⟨lj⟩ and ⟨nj⟩ should be replaced by single letters : ⟨ģ⟩, ⟨đ⟩, ⟨ļ⟩ and ⟨ń⟩ respectively. The original Gaj alphabet was eventually revised, but only the digraph ⟨dj⟩ has been replaced with Daničić's ⟨đ⟩, while ⟨dž⟩, ⟨lj⟩ and ⟨nj⟩ have been kept.
to use to write text in Latin Croatian on computers.
The preferred character encoding
for Croatian today is either the ISO 8859-2, or the Unicode
encoding UTF-8
(with two bytes or 16 bits necessary to use the letters with diacritics). However, , one can still find programs as well as databases that use CP1250, CP852
or even CROSCII.
) who most commonly used it, but it was later accepted by a large spectrum of Slovene-writing authors. The breakthrough came when the Slovene conservative leader Janez Bleiweis
started using Gaj's script in his journal Kmetijske in rokodelske novice
("Agricultural and Artisan News)"), which was read by a wide public in the countryside. By 1850, Gaj's alphabet (known as gajica in Slovene) became the only official Slovene alphabet, replacing three other writing systems which circulated in the Slovene Lands
since the 1830s: the traditional bohoričica (after its inventor Adam Bohorič
) and the two innovative proposals by the Peter Dajnko
(the dajnčica) and Franc Serafin Metelko
(the metelčica).
The Slovene version of Gaj's alphabet differs from the Croatian one in the following traits:
Slovene orthography is comparatively less phonetic than Croatian. For instance, letter ⟨e⟩ can be pronounced in three ways (/e/, /ɛ/ and /ə/), and letter ⟨v⟩ in two (/ʋ/ and /w/). Also, it does not record consonant voicing assimilation: compare e.g. Slovene ⟨odpad⟩ and Croatian ⟨otpad⟩ ('junkyard', 'waste').
Croatian language
Croatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...
. It was devised by Croatia
Croatia
Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
n linguist Ljudevit Gaj
Ljudevit Gaj
Ljudevit Gaj was a Croatian linguist, politician, journalist and writer. He was one of the central figures of the Croatian national reformation, also known as the Illyrian Movement.-Origin:...
in 1835, based on Jan Hus
Jan Hus
Jan Hus , often referred to in English as John Hus or John Huss, was a Czech priest, philosopher, reformer, and master at Charles University in Prague...
's Czech alphabet
Czech alphabet
The Czech alphabet is a version of the Latin script, used when writing Czech. Its basic principles are "one sound, one letter" and the addition of diacritical marks above letters to represent sounds alien to Latin...
.
Today, this letter is used for Bosnian language
Bosnian language
Bosnian is a South Slavic language, spoken by Bosniaks. As a standardized form of the Shtokavian dialect, it is one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina....
, unofficially used for Serbian language
Serbian language
Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
in which the official letter to Serbian Cyrillic, is used for Serbian. A slightly reduced version is used as the script of the Slovene language and Montenegrin
Montenegrin language
Montenegrin is a name used for the Serbo-Croatian language as spoken by Montenegrins; it also refers to an incipient standardized form of the Shtokavian dialect of Serbo-Croatian used as the official language of Montenegro...
. A modified version of the alphabet is used for romanization of the Macedonian language
Macedonian language
Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora...
.
Letters
The Croatian alphabet consists of thirty upper and lowercase letters:| Letter | IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic... |
Letter | IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic... |
Letter | IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic... |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A A A is the first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.- Origins :... , a |
/a/ | G G G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,... , g |
/ɡ/ | O O O is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a... , o |
/o/ |
| B B B is the second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is used to represent a variety of bilabial sounds , most commonly a voiced bilabial plosive.-History:... , b |
/b/ | H H H .) is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The Semitic letter ⟨ח⟩ most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative . The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts.... , h |
/x/ | P P P is the sixteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Usage:In English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final Ps can be combined with many other discrete consonants in English words... , p |
/p/ |
| C C Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing the sound .Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets... , c |
/ts/ | I I I is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound... , i |
/i/ | R R R is the eighteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The original Semitic letter may have been inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp, "head". It was used for by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was rêš . It developed into Greek Ρ and Latin R... , r |
/r/ |
| Č C Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing the sound .Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets... , č |
/tʃ/ | J J Ĵ or ĵ is a letter in Esperanto orthography representing the sound .While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic... , j |
/j/ | S S S is the nineteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.-History: Semitic Šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative . Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma came to represent... , s |
/s/ |
| Ć C Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing the sound .Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets... , ć |
/tɕ/ | K K K is the eleventh letter of the English and basic modern Latin alphabet.-History and usage:In English, the letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive; this sound is also transcribed by in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA.... , k |
/k/ | Š Š The grapheme Š, š is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiceless postalveolar fricative. In the International Phonetic Alphabet this sound is denoted with , but the lowercase š is used in the Americanist phonetic notation, as well as in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.For use in computer... , š |
/ʃ/ |
| D D D is the fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History :The Semitic letter Dâlet may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter represented ; in the... , d |
/d/ | L L Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Łatynka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet... , l |
/l/ | T T T is the 20th letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language.- History :Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets... , t |
/t/ |
| Dž Dž Dž is the seventh letter of the Croatian and Bosnian alphabets, and the Latin forms of Serbian, Montenegrin and Macedonian, after D and before Đ. It is pronounced . Dž is a digraph that corresponds to the letter Dzhe of the Cyrillic alphabet used for writing the Serbian, Montenegrin and... , dž |
/dʒ/ | Lj LJ LJ may refer to:*Sierra National Airlines' IATA code*LJ, the sequent calculus of Gentzen's for intuitionist logic*LiveJournal*Linux Journal*La Jolla, California*Library Journal*Lightweight Java*Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia*LaserJet... , lj |
/ʎ/ | U U U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details.... , u |
/u/ |
| Đ D with stroke Đ , formed from D with the addition of a bar or stroke through the letter. This is the same modification that was used to create eth , but eth is based on an insular variant of d while đ is based on its usual upright shape... , đ |
/dʑ/ | M M M is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu . Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water... , m |
/m/ | V V V is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Letter:The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details.... , v |
/ʋ/ |
| E E E is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.-History:... , e |
/e/ | N N N is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History of the forms :One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet... , n |
/n/ | Z Z Z is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta but in American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal... , z |
/z/ |
| F F F is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The origin of ⟨f⟩ is the Semitic letter vâv that represented a sound like or . Graphically, it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club... , f |
/f/ | Nj Nj Nj or NJ may stand for:*New Jersey*Nanojoule , an International System of Units unit of energy equal to 10−9 joules*Nj *Narva-Jõesuu, Estonia*Nordjyske Jernbaner, a Danish railway... , nj |
/ɲ/ | Ž Ž The grapheme Ž is formed from Latin Z with the addition of caron . It is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiced postalveolar fricative, a sound similar to English g in mirage, or Portuguese and French j... , ž |
/ʒ/ |
The original Croatian or Gaj's alphabet contained a digraph ⟨dj⟩, which was later replaced by the letter ⟨đ⟩.
The letters do not have names, and consonants are normally pronounced as such when spelling is necessary (or followed by a short schwa
Schwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...
, e.g. /fə/). When clarity is needed, they are pronounced similar to the German alphabet
German alphabet
The modern German alphabet is an extended Latin alphabet consisting of 30 letters – the same letters that are found in the Basic modern Latin alphabet plus four extra letters.In German, the individual letters have neuter gender: das A, das B etc....
: a, be, ce, če, će, de, dže, đe, e, ef, ge, ha, i, je, ka, el, elj, em, en, enj, o, pe, er, es, eš, te, u, ve, ze, že. These rules for pronunciation of individual letters are common as far as the 22 letters that match the basic modern Latin alphabet
Basic modern Latin alphabet
The International Organization for Standardization basic Latin alphabet consists of the following 26 letters:By the 1960s it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed...
are concerned. The use of others is mostly limited to the context of linguistics, while in mathematics, ⟨j⟩ is commonly pronounced jot, as in German. The missing four letters are pronounced as follows: ⟨q⟩ as ku or kju, ⟨w⟩ as dublve or duplo ve, ⟨x⟩ as iks, ⟨y⟩ as ipsilon.
Digraphs
Note that the digraphsDigraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
⟨dž
Dž
Dž is the seventh letter of the Croatian and Bosnian alphabets, and the Latin forms of Serbian, Montenegrin and Macedonian, after D and before Đ. It is pronounced . Dž is a digraph that corresponds to the letter Dzhe of the Cyrillic alphabet used for writing the Serbian, Montenegrin and...
⟩, ⟨lj⟩, and ⟨nj⟩ are considered to be single letters. This means that:
- In dictionaries, njegov comes after novine, in a separate ⟨nj⟩ section after the end of the ⟨n⟩ section, and bolje comes after bolnica, and so forth.
M J E NJ A Č N I C A - In vertical writing (such as on signs), ⟨dž⟩, ⟨lj⟩, ⟨nj⟩ are nevertheless written horizontally, as a unit. For instance, if mjenjačnica ('Bureau de ChangeBureau de ChangeA bureau de change or currency exchange is a business whose customers exchange one currency for another. Although originally French, the term bureau de change is widely used throughout Europe, and European travellers can usually easily identify these facilities when in other European countries...
') is written vertically, ⟨nj⟩ appears on the fourth line (but note ⟨m⟩ and ⟨j⟩ appear separately on the first and second lines, respectively, because ⟨mj⟩ contains two letters, not one). In crosswordCrosswordA crossword is a word puzzle that normally takes the form of a square or rectangular grid of white and shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to the answers. In languages that are written left-to-right, the answer...
puzzles, ⟨dž⟩, ⟨lj⟩, ⟨nj⟩ each occupy a single square. - In cases where words are written with a space between each letter (such as on signs), each of these letters is written together. For instance: M J E NJ A Č N I C A.
- In cases where only the initial letter of a word is capitalized, only the first of the two component letters is capitalized: Njemačka and not NJemačka. In UnicodeUnicodeUnicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
, the form ⟨Nj⟩ is referred to as titlecase, as opposed to the uppercase form ⟨NJ⟩, representing one of the few cases where titlecase and uppercase differ. Uppercase would be used if the entire word was capitalized: NJEMAČKA.
Origins
The Croatian Latin was mostly designed by Ljudevit GajLjudevit Gaj
Ljudevit Gaj was a Croatian linguist, politician, journalist and writer. He was one of the central figures of the Croatian national reformation, also known as the Illyrian Movement.-Origin:...
, who modelled it after Czech
Czech language
Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...
and Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
, and invented ⟨lj⟩, ⟨nj⟩ and ⟨dž⟩. In 1830 in Buda he printed the book Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja ("Brief basics of the Croatian-Slavonic orthography"), which was the first common Croatian orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
book. It was not the first ever Croatian orthography work, as it was preceded by works of Rajmund Đamanjić (1639), Ignjat Đurđević and Pavao Ritter Vitezović
Pavao Ritter Vitezovic
Pavao Ritter Vitezović was a noted Croatian writer, historian, linguist and publisher.-Early life:Pavao Ritter Vitezović was born in Senj to a family of a frontier soldier. His father was descended from a German immigrant from Alsace, and his mother was Croatian...
. Croats had previously used the Latin script, but some of the specific sounds were not uniformly represented. Versions of the Hungarian alphabet
Hungarian alphabet
The Hungarian alphabet is an extension of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Hungarian language.One sometimes speaks of the smaller and greater Hungarian alphabets, depending on whether or not the letters Q, W, X, Y are listed, which can only be found in foreign words and traditional...
were most commonly used, but others were too, in an often confused, inconsistent fashion.
Gaj followed the example of Pavao Ritter Vitezović and the Czech orthography
Czech alphabet
The Czech alphabet is a version of the Latin script, used when writing Czech. Its basic principles are "one sound, one letter" and the addition of diacritical marks above letters to represent sounds alien to Latin...
, making one letter of the Latin script for each sound in the language. His alphabet mapped completely on Serbian Cyrillic which was standardized by Vuk Karadžić a few years before.
Đuro Daničić suggested in his Rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika ("Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian language") published in 1880 that Gaj's digraphs ⟨dž⟩, ⟨dj⟩, ⟨lj⟩ and ⟨nj⟩ should be replaced by single letters : ⟨ģ⟩, ⟨đ⟩, ⟨ļ⟩ and ⟨ń⟩ respectively. The original Gaj alphabet was eventually revised, but only the digraph ⟨dj⟩ has been replaced with Daničić's ⟨đ⟩, while ⟨dž⟩, ⟨lj⟩ and ⟨nj⟩ have been kept.
Computing
In the 1990s, there was a general confusion about the proper character encodingCharacter encoding
A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...
to use to write text in Latin Croatian on computers.
- An attempt was made to apply the 7-bit "YUSCIIYUSCIIYUSCII was an informal name for JUS I.B1.002 and JUS I.B1.003 , national variant of ISO 646, 7-bit Latinic character encoding standard, and used in Yugoslavia before widespread use of later ISO-8859-2, Microsoft and Unicode standards...
", later "CROSCII", which included the five letters with diacritics at the expense of five non-letter characters ([, ], {, }, @), but it was ultimately unsuccessful. Because the ASCII character @ sorts before A, but encodes Ž, this led to jokes calling it žabeceda (žaba=frog, abeceda=alphabet). - Other short-lived vendor-specific efforts were also undertaken.
- The 8-bit8-bitThe first widely adopted 8-bit microprocessor was the Intel 8080, being used in many hobbyist computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s, often running the CP/M operating system. The Zilog Z80 and the Motorola 6800 were also used in similar computers...
ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2) standard was developed by ISO. - MS-DOSMS-DOSMS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...
introduced 8-bit encoding CP852Code page 852Code page 852 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Central European languages that use Latin script ....
for Central European languages, disregarding the ISO standard. - Microsoft WindowsMicrosoft WindowsMicrosoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
spread yet another 8-bit encoding called CP1250, which had a few letters mapped one-to-one with ISO 8859-2, but also had some mapped elsewhere. - AppleApple ComputerApple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
used yet another encoding called the Macintosh Central European encodingMacintosh Central European encodingMacintosh Central European encoding is used in Apple Macintosh computers to represent texts in Central European and Southeastern European languages that use the Latin script....
. - EBCDICEBCDICExtended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is an 8-bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems....
also has a Latin-2 encoding.
The preferred character encoding
Character encoding
A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...
for Croatian today is either the ISO 8859-2, or the Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
encoding UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
(with two bytes or 16 bits necessary to use the letters with diacritics). However, , one can still find programs as well as databases that use CP1250, CP852
Code page 852
Code page 852 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Central European languages that use Latin script ....
or even CROSCII.
Usage in the Slovene language
Since the early 1840s, Gaj's alphabet was increasingly used for the Slovene language. In the beginning, it was Slovene authors who treated Slovene as a variant of Croatian alphabet (such as Stanko VrazStanko Vraz
Stanko Vraz was a Croatian-Slovenian poet. He Slavicized his name to Stanko Vraz in 1836.-Biography:...
) who most commonly used it, but it was later accepted by a large spectrum of Slovene-writing authors. The breakthrough came when the Slovene conservative leader Janez Bleiweis
Janez Bleiweis
Janez Bleiweis was a Slovene conservative politician, journalist and public figure. He was the leader of the so-called Old Slovene political movement. Already during his lifetime, he was called father of the nation....
started using Gaj's script in his journal Kmetijske in rokodelske novice
Kmetijske in rokodelske novice
Kmetijske in rokodelske novice , frequently referred to simply as Novice , was a Slovene language newspaper in the 19th century, which had an influential role in the Slovene national revival....
("Agricultural and Artisan News)"), which was read by a wide public in the countryside. By 1850, Gaj's alphabet (known as gajica in Slovene) became the only official Slovene alphabet, replacing three other writing systems which circulated in the Slovene Lands
Slovene Lands
Slovene Lands or Slovenian Lands is the historical denomination for the whole of the Slovene-inhabited territories in Central Europe. It more or less corresponds to modern Slovenia and the adjacent territories in Italy, Austria and Hungary in which autochthonous Slovene minorities live.-...
since the 1830s: the traditional bohoričica (after its inventor Adam Bohorič
Adam Bohoric
Adam Bohorič was a Slovene Protestant preacher, teacher and author of the first grammar of Slovene.Bohorič was born in the market town of Rajhenburg in the Duchy of Styria, on the border between Lower Carniola and Lower Styria...
) and the two innovative proposals by the Peter Dajnko
Peter Dajnko
Peter Dajnko was a Slovene priest, author, and linguist, known primarily as the inventor of an innovative proposal for the writing system for Slovene: the Dajnko alphabet ....
(the dajnčica) and Franc Serafin Metelko
Franc Serafin Metelko
Franc Serafin Metelko, also known as Fran Metelko was a Slovene Roman Catholic priest, author, and philologist, best known for his proposal of a new script for the Slovene called the Metelko alphabet, which was meant to replace the traditional Bohorič alphabet, used since the late sixteenth...
(the metelčica).
The Slovene version of Gaj's alphabet differs from the Croatian one in the following traits:
- the Slovene alphabet does not have the characters ⟨ć⟩ and ⟨đ⟩; the sounds these letters represent are not present in the Slovene language;
- in the Slovene variant, the digraphs ⟨lj⟩ and ⟨nj⟩ are treated as two separate letters and represent separate sounds (e.g. the word poljePoljeA polje is a large flat plain in karst territory, with areas usually 5 to 400 km². The name derives from the Slavic languages and is a cognate with the English word field.-In geology:...
is pronounced /polje/ in Slovene, as opposed to /poʎe/ in Croatian). - while the phoneme /dʒ/ exists in modern Slovene and is written ⟨dž⟩, it is only used in borrowed words, and ⟨d⟩ and ⟨ž⟩ are considered separate letters, not a digraph.
Slovene orthography is comparatively less phonetic than Croatian. For instance, letter ⟨e⟩ can be pronounced in three ways (/e/, /ɛ/ and /ə/), and letter ⟨v⟩ in two (/ʋ/ and /w/). Also, it does not record consonant voicing assimilation: compare e.g. Slovene ⟨odpad⟩ and Croatian ⟨otpad⟩ ('junkyard', 'waste').
Usage in the Macedonian
The romanization of Macedonian, according to the academic sources, is done with the help of the Gaj's Latin alphabet. However, this alphabet is slightly modified according to the phonetics and phonology of the language. Therefore, the Gaj's letters ć and đ are not used at all, but instead the letters ḱ and ǵ were introduced. The rest of the letters of the alphabet are used to represent the equivalent Cyrillic letters. Additionally to that, Macedonian introduced the letter dz, which is not part of the Croatian phonetic inventory.See also
- Slovene alphabet
- Montenegrin alphabetMontenegrin alphabetThe Montenegrin alphabet is the collective name given to "Abeceda" and "Азбука" writing systems used to write the Montenegrin language. It was adopted on 9 June 2009 by the minister of education of Montenegro, Sreten Škuletić and replaced the Serbian Cyrillic and Croatian Latin alphabets...
- Serbian alphabetSerbian Cyrillic alphabetThe Serbian Cyrillic alphabet is an adaptation of the Cyrillic script for the Serbian language, developed in 1818 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić. It is one of the two standard modern alphabets used to write the Serbian language, the other being Latin...