Czech alphabet
|
|
The Czech alphabet consists of 42 letters (or more precisely - graphemes):
- A, Á, B, C, Č, D, Ď, E, É, Ě, F, G, H, Ch, I, Í, J, K, L, M, N, Ň, O, Ó, P, Q, R, Ř, S, Š, T, Ť, U, Ú, Ů, V, W, X, Y, Ý, Z, Ž
Most of the diacritic letters were added to the alphabet through reforms brought about by Jan Hus at the beginning of the 15th century to replace the digraphs and trigraphs used to write Czech sounds that had no equivalent in the Latin alphabet. During the 16th century, the letter "Ů", indicating the long U (the same as "Ú" only used in different contexts) was added to the list. The only digraph that was left in the alphabet is "Ch", being ordered between the "H" and "I" letters, indicating the sound similar to the German "ch" or the Russian "Х".
The acute accent letters (Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú, Ý) and Ů indicate long vowels. They have the same alphabetical ordering as their non-diacritic counterparts. The hacek "ˇ" indicates a palatalization of the appropriate base letter. The letters Č, Ř, Š, and Ž are ordered behind their corresponding base letters; the other letters with haceks have the same alphabetical ordering as their non-diacritic counterparts.
In computing, several different coding standards have existed for this alphabet:
- ISO 8859-2
- Windows codepage 1250
- IBM PC code page 852
- Kamenicky or KEYBCS2 on early DOS PCs and on Fidonet
- Unicode
See also: Latin alphabet, Hacek
External links
- Czech Language (http://www.czech-language.cz/)
- Czech Encodings FAQ (http://www-kiv.zcu.cz/~luki/cs/cs-encodings-faq.html)
- Typo.cz (http://euro.typo.cz/) Information on Central European typography and typesetting