Slovenian alphabet
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The Slovenian alphabet is an extension of the Latin alphabet and is used in the Slovene language. The language uses a modified Latin alphabet, consisting of 25 unique lower- and uppercase letters:
The following Latin letters are also used in foreign names: Q W X Y Ć and Đ.
Slovenska_abeceda.PNG
The writing itself in its pure form does not use any other signs, except, for instance, additional accentual marks, when it is necessary to distinguish between similar words with a different meaning. For example:
- gl (naked) | gl (goal),
- jsen (ash (tree)) | jesn (autumn),
- kt (angle, corner) | kot (as, like),
- kzjak (goat's dung) | kozjk (goat-shed),
- med (between) | md (brass) | md (honey),
- pl (pole) | pl (half (of)) | pl (expresses a half an hour before the given hour),
- prcej (at once) | precj (a great deal (of))),
- rem (draw) | rmi (rummy (- a card game)).
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History
This alphabet (abeceda) was derived in the mid 1840s from an arrangement of the Croatian national reviver and leader Ljudevit Gaj (1809–1872) for Croatians (alphabet called gajica or Croatian gajica, patterned on the Czech pattern of the 1830s). Before that Š was, for example, written as ∫, ∫∫ or ſ, Č as T∫CH, CZ, T∫CZ or TCZ, I sometimes as Y as a relict from now modern Russian 'yeri' Ы, J as Y, L as LL, V as W, Ž as ∫, ∫∫ or ∫z.
In the old alphabet used by most distinguished writers, "bohoričica", developed by Adam Bohorič, the characters č, š and ž would be spelt as zh, ∫h and sh respectively, whereas c, s and z would be spelt as z, ∫ and s. To remedy this, so that each vocal sound would have a written equivalent, Jernej Kopitar urged development of new alphabets.
In 1825, Franc Serafin Metelko proposed his version of the to-be alphabet called "metelčica". However, it was banned in 1833 in favour of the bohoričica after the so-called Suit of the Letters (Črkarska pravda) (1830–1833), which was won by France Prešeren and Matija Čop. Another alphabet, "dajnčica", was developed by Peter Dajnko in 1824, which did not catch on as much as metelčica; it was banned in 1838. The reason for their being banned is because they mixed Latin and Cyrillic characters, which was seen as a bad way to handle missing characters.
The gajica was adopted afterwards, however it still does not feature all characters the language has.
Foreign words
There are 5 letters for vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and 20 for consonants. The Western Q, W, X, Y are excluded from the pure language, as are some Southern Slavic characters, Ć, DŽ, Đ, LJ, NJ, however they are used in encyclopaedias and dictionary listings, for foreign Western proper nouns or toponyms are not transcribed as they are in some other Slavic languages, such as partly in Russian or entirely in Serbian. Such an encyclopaedic listing would make use of this modified Latin alphabet:
- a, b, c, č, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, š, t, u, v, w, x, y, z, ž.
Therefore, Newton or Massachusetts remain the same and are not transformed to Njutn or Mesečusets, which seem very odd to a Slovenian. Other names from non-Latin languages are transcribed in a fashion similar to that used by other European languages, albeit with some adaptations and unwritten rules. Japanese, Indian and Arabic names such as Kajibumi, Djacarta (Djakarta) and Jabar are transcribed as Kadžibumi, Džakarta and Džabar, where j is replaced with ž. Diacritical marks from other foreign alphabets (eg, , Å, Æ, , , Ï, Ń, , , Ş, ) do not influence the alphabetical order either.
Place names
Many well known global places have their own special names.
| Countries and Territories (države in teritoriji)
| Cities (mesta)
Oceans (oceani), Seas (morja), Lakes (jezera), Rivers (reke)
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Some names are, therefore, quite different for sorting from what they are in English.
Computer encoding
The preferred character encodings (writing codes) for Slovenian texts are UTF-8 (Unicode) and ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2).
In the original ASCII frame of 1 to 126 characters one can find these examples of writing text in Slovenian:
- a, b, c, *c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, *s, t, u, v, z, *z
- a, b, c, "c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, "s, t, u, v, z, "z
- a, b, c, c(, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, s(, t, u, v, z, z(
- a, b, c, c^, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, s^, t, u, v, z, z^
In TeX notation, č, š and ž become \v c, \v s, \v z, \v{c}, \v{s}, \v{z} or in their macro versions, "c, "s and "z, or in other representations as \~, \{, \' for lowercase and \^, \[, \@ for uppercase.
See also
External links
- Slovene alphabet (http://www.ijs.si/slo-chset.html-l2)
- Typo.cz Information on Central European typography and typesetting (http://euro.typo.cz/)ru:Словенский алфавит