Gaj’s Latin alphabet
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Gaj’s Latin alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet devised by Ljudevit Gaj, in his 1830 book, Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja (A short primer of Croatian-Slavic orthography). It is the only script of the Bosnian and Croatian standard languages in current use, and one of the two scripts of the Serbian standard language.
It consists of thirty upper and lowercase letters:
| Letter | Name | IPA | Letter | Name | IPA | Letter | Name | IPA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A, a | a | /a/ | G, g | ge | /g/ | O, o | o | /o/ |
| B, b | be | /b/ | H, h | ha | /x/ | P, p | pe | /p/ |
| C, c | ce | /ʦ/ | I, i | i | /i/ | R, r | er | /r/ |
| Č, č | če | /tʃ/ | J, j | je, jot | /j/ | S, s | es | /s/ |
| Ć, ć | će | /ʨ/ | K, k | ka | /k/ | Š, š | eš | /ʃ/ |
| D, d | de | /d/ | L, l | el | /l/ | T, t | te | /t/ |
| Dž, dž | dže | /dʒ/ | Lj, lj | elj | /ʎ/ | U, u | u | /u/ |
| Đ, đ | đe | /ʥ/ | M, m | em | /m/ | V, v | ve | /ʋ/ |
| E, e | e | /e/ | N, n | en | /n/ | Z, z | ze | /z/ |
| F, f | ef | /f/ | Nj, nj | enj | /ɲ/ | Ž, ž | že | /ʒ/ |
The original Gaj's alphabet contained a letter Dj, which was later replaced by Đ.
Each of the five vowels may also be written with additional pitch accents, but that is uncommon.
The Serbian language also uses a modified Cyrillic, the Serbian Cyrillic, which maps one to one to the Latin alphabet. When Serbian is written in Latin script, the above letters are used.
The previously official Serbo-Croatian language also used the same alphabet. The prospective Montenegrin language does so as well.
Slovenian language also uses a variant of this alphabet (see below).
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[edit] Digraphs
Note that Dž, Lj, Nj are considered to be single letters — they are digraphs. 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.
- In vertical writing (such as on signs), Dž, Lj, Nj are nevertheless written horizontally, as a unit. For instance, if mjenjačnica 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 crossword 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 (Bureau de Change).
| 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 Unicode, 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.
[edit] Origins
The Croatian Latin was mostly designed by Ljudevit Gaj, who modelled it after Czech and Polish, and invented Lj/lj, Nj/nj and Dž/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. The Croatians had previously used the Latin alphabet, but some of the specific sounds were not uniformly represented.
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 added the letter Đ/đ.
[edit] Computing
In the 1990s, there was a general confusion about the proper character encoding to use to write text in Croatian on computers.
- An attempt was made to apply the 7-bit "YUSCII" (later adapted to CROSCII), which included the five letters with diacritics at the expense of five non-letter characters ([, ], {, }, @), but it was ultimately unsuccessful.
- the 8-bit ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2) standard was developed by ISO, but
- Microsoft Windows spread 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
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).
[edit] Gaj's alphabet for Slovenian language
After 1839/40 Gaj's alphabet was more and more often used for the Slovene language - in the beginning mostly by authors who treated Slovenian as a variant of Croatian, but later also by real Slovene authors. Soon Gaj's alphabet (Slovene: gajica) became the only official Slovenian alphabet, replacing three other writing systems called bohoričica, dajnčica and metelčica (their authors were Bohorič, Dajnko and Metelko, respectively).
The Slovene version of Gaj's alphabet differs from croatian in the following:
- Slovenian alphabet doesn't know letters Ć and Đ - these sounds are not present in the Slovene language.
- DŽ is not present in the Slovene language either, however it is used in borrowings, e.g.: džungla (= jungle)
- In Slovenian variant groups DŽ, LJ and NJ are not digraphs - they are treated as two separated letters and they are even pronounced separately (e.g. the word polje is pronounced pol-je in Slovenian and po-lje in croatian).
[edit] See also
- Croatian language
- Slovenian language, Slovenian alphabethr:Hrvatska abeceda
hu:Horvát ábécé pl:Alfabet chorwacki sl:Gajica sv:Kroatiska alfabetet
