Form of Latin script used to write Serbo-Croatian
Gaj's Latin alphabet
(
Serbo-Croatian
:
Gajeva latinica
/
Га?ева латиница
,
pronounced
[?aːj?va
lat?nitsa]
), also known as
abeceda
(
Serbian Cyrillic
:
абецеда
,
pronounced
[abets?ːda]
) or
gajica
(
Serbian Cyrillic
:
га?ица
,
pronounced
[??jitsa]
), is the form of the
Latin script
used for writing
Serbo-Croatian
and all of its
standard varieties
:
Bosnian
,
Croatian
,
Montenegrin
, and
Serbian
.
The alphabet was initially devised by Croatian linguist
Ljudevit Gaj
in 1835 during the
Illyrian movement
in
ethnically Croatian
parts of
Austrian Empire
. It was largely based on
Jan Hus
's
Czech alphabet
and was meant to serve as a unified orthography for
three Croat-populated kingdoms
within the Austrian Empire at the time, namely
Croatia
,
Dalmatia
and
Slavonia
, and their three dialect groups,
Kajkavian
,
Chakavian
and
Shtokavian
, which historically utilized different spelling rules.
A slightly modified version of it was later adopted as the formal Latin writing system for the unified Serbo-Croatian standard language per the
Vienna Literary Agreement
. It served as one of the official scripts in the
unified
South Slavic
state of
Yugoslavia
alongside
Vuk's Cyrillic alphabet
.
A
slightly reduced version
is used as the alphabet for
Slovene
, and a
slightly expanded version
is used for modern standard Montenegrin. A modified version is used for the
romanization
of
Macedonian
. It further influenced
alphabets of Romani languages
that are spoken in
Southeast Europe
, namely
Vlax
and
Balkan Romani
.
Letters
[
edit
]
The alphabet consists of thirty
upper
and
lower case
letters:
Gaj's original alphabet contained the digraph
⟨dj⟩
, which Serbian linguist
đuro Dani?i?
later replaced with 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.
/f?/
). When clarity is needed, they are pronounced similar to the
German alphabet
:
a, be, ce, ?e, ?e, de, d?e, đe, e, ef, ge, ha, i, je, ka, el, elj, em, en, enj, o, pe, er, es, e?, te, u, ve, ze, ?e
. These rules for pronunciation of individual letters are common as far as the 22 letters that match the
ISO basic Latin alphabet
are concerned. The use of others is mostly limited to the context of linguistics,
[1]
[2]
while in mathematics,
⟨j⟩
is commonly pronounced
jot
, as in the
German of Germany
.
[a]
The missing four letters are pronounced as follows:
⟨q⟩
as
ku
,
kju
, or
kve
;
⟨w⟩
as
duplo v
,
duplo ve
(standard in Serbia), or
dvostruko ve
(standard in Croatia) (rarely also
dubl ve
);
⟨x⟩
as
iks
; and
⟨y⟩
as
ipsilon
.
Digraphs
[
edit
]
Digraphs
⟨
d?
⟩
,
⟨
lj
⟩
and
⟨
nj
⟩
are considered to be single letters:
- In dictionaries,
njegov
comes after
novine
, in a separate
⟨nj⟩
section after the end of the
⟨n⟩
section;
bolje
comes after
bolnica
;
nad?ak
(digraph
⟨d?⟩
) comes after
nad?ivjeti
(prefix
nad-
), and so forth.
- If only the initial letter of a word is capitalized, only the first of the two component letters is capitalized:
Njema?ka
('
Germany
'), not
NJema?ka
. In
Unicode
, the form
⟨Nj⟩
is referred to as
titlecase
, as opposed to the uppercase form
⟨NJ⟩
, representing one of the few cases in which titlecase and uppercase differ. Uppercase is used only if the entire word was capitalized:
NJEMA?KA
.
- In vertical writing (such as on signs),
⟨d?⟩
,
⟨lj⟩
,
⟨nj⟩
are written horizontally, as a unit. For instance, if
ulj
('oil') is written vertically,
⟨lj⟩
appears on the second line. In
crossword
puzzles,
⟨d?⟩
,
⟨lj⟩
,
⟨nj⟩
each occupy a single square.
- If words are written with a space between each letter (such as on signs), each digraph is written as a unit. For instance:
U LJ
.
Origins
[
edit
]
The Serbo-Croatian Latin alphabet was mostly designed by
Ljudevit Gaj
, who modelled it after
Czech
(?, ?, ?) and
Polish
(?), and invented
⟨lj⟩
,
⟨nj⟩
and
⟨d?⟩
, according to similar solutions in
Hungarian
(ly, ny and dzs, although d? combinations exist also in Czech and Polish). In 1830 in
Buda
, he published 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 đamanji? (1639),
Ignjat đurđevi?
and
Pavao Ritter Vitezovi?
. 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 Vitezovi? and the
Czech orthography
, making one letter of the Latin script for each sound in the language. Following
Vuk Karad?i?
's reform of Cyrillic in the early nineteenth century, in the 1830s Ljudevit Gaj did the same for
latinica
, using the Czech system and producing a one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correlation between the Cyrillic and Latin orthographies, resulting in a parallel system.
[3]
đuro Dani?i?
suggested in his
Rje?nik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika
("Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian language") published in 1880 that Gaj's digraphs
⟨d?⟩
,
⟨dj⟩
,
⟨lj⟩
and
⟨nj⟩
should be replaced by single letters :
⟨?⟩
,
⟨đ⟩
,
⟨?⟩
and
⟨?⟩
respectively. The original Gaj alphabet was eventually revised, but only the digraph
⟨dj⟩
has been replaced with Dani?i?'s
⟨đ⟩
, while
⟨d?⟩
,
⟨lj⟩
and
⟨nj⟩
have been kept.
[4]
Correspondence between Cyrillic and Latin alphabets
[
edit
]
The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of Gaj's Latin alphabet, along with the equivalent forms in the Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic alphabet and the
International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA) value for each letter. 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. /??/).:
Computing
[
edit
]
In the 1990s, there was a general confusion about the proper
character encoding
to use to write text in Latin Croatian on computers.
- An attempt was made to apply the 7-bit "
YUSCII
", 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, this led to jokes calling it
?abeceda
(
?aba
=frog,
abeceda
=alphabet).
- Other short-lived vendor-specific efforts were also undertaken.
[
which?
]
- The
8-bit
ISO 8859-2
(Latin-2) standard was developed by ISO.
- MS-DOS
introduced 8-bit encoding
CP852
for Central European languages, disregarding the ISO standard.
- Microsoft Windows
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.
- Apple
's
Macintosh Central European encoding
does not include the entire Gaj's Latin alphabet. Instead, a separate codepage, called
MacCroatian encoding
, is used.
- EBCDIC
also has a Latin-2 encoding.
[5]
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, as of 2010
[update]
, one can still find programs as well as databases that use
CP1250
,
CP852
or even CROSCII.
Digraphs
⟨d?⟩
,
⟨lj⟩
and
⟨nj⟩
in their upper case, title case and lower case forms have dedicated Unicode code points as shown in the table below, However, these are included chiefly for backwards
compatibility with legacy encodings
which kept a one-to-one correspondence with Cyrillic; modern texts use a sequence of characters.
Character
sequence
|
Composite
character
|
Unicode
code point
|
D?
|
?
|
U+01C4
|
D?
|
?
|
U+01C5
|
d?
|
?
|
U+01C6
|
LJ
|
?
|
U+01C7
|
Lj
|
?
|
U+01C8
|
lj
|
?
|
U+01C9
|
NJ
|
?
|
U+01CA
|
Nj
|
?
|
U+01CB
|
nj
|
?
|
U+01CC
|
Usage for Slovene
[
edit
]
Since the early 1840s, Gaj's alphabet was increasingly used for
Slovene
. In the beginning, it was most commonly used by Slovene authors who treated Slovene as a variant of Serbo-Croatian (such as
Stanko Vraz
), but it was later accepted by a large spectrum of Slovene-writing authors. The breakthrough came in 1845, 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 that had circulated in the
Slovene Lands
since the 1830s: the traditional
bohori?ica
, named after
Adam Bohori?
, who codified it; the
dajn?ica
, named after
Peter Dajnko
; and the
metel?ica
, named after
Franc Serafin Metelko
.
The Slovene version of Gaj's alphabet differs from the Serbo-Croatian one in several ways:
- The Slovene alphabet does not have the characters
⟨?⟩
and
⟨đ⟩
; the sounds they represent do not occur in Slovene.
- In Slovene, the digraphs
⟨lj⟩
and
⟨nj⟩
are treated as two separate letters and represent separate sounds (the word
polje
is pronounced
[?poːlj?]
or
[p??ljeː]
in Slovene, as opposed to
[po?e]
in Serbo-Croatian).
- While the phoneme
/d?/
exists in modern Slovene and is written
⟨d?⟩
, it is used in only borrowed words and so
⟨d⟩
and
⟨?⟩
are considered separate letters, not a digraph.
As in Serbo-Croatian, Slovene orthography does not make use of diacritics to mark accent in words in regular writing, but
headwords
in dictionaries are given with them to account for
homographs
. For instance, letter
⟨e⟩
can be pronounced in four ways (
/eː/
,
/?/
,
/?ː/
and
/?/
), and letter
⟨v⟩
in two (
[?]
and
[w]
, though the difference is not
phonemic
). Also, it does not reflect consonant voicing assimilation: compare e.g. Slovene
⟨odpad⟩
and Serbo-Croatian
⟨otpad⟩
('junkyard', 'waste').
Usage for Macedonian
[
edit
]
Romanization
of
Macedonian
is done according to Gaj's Latin alphabet
[6]
[7]
with slight modification. Gaj's
?
and
đ
are not used at all, with
?
and
?
introduced instead. The rest of the letters of the alphabet are used to represent the equivalent Cyrillic letters. Also, Macedonian uses the letter
dz
, which is not part of the Serbo-Croatian phonemic inventory. As per the orthography, both
lj
and
?
are accepted as romanisations of ? and both
nj
and
?
for ?. For informal purposes, like texting, most Macedonian speakers will omit the diacritics or use a digraph- and trigraph-based system for ease as there is no Macedonian Latin keyboard supported on most systems. For example,
?
becomes
sh
or
s
, and
d?
becomes
dzh
or
dz
.
Keyboard layout
[
edit
]
The standard Gaj's Latin alphabet
keyboard layout
for personal computers is as follows:
See also
[
edit
]
Sources
[
edit
]
- Ljiljana Joji? (2003).
Pravopisni priru?nik - dodatak Velikom rje?niku hrvatskoga jezika
(in Croatian).
- Vladimir Ani?; Josip Sili? (1987).
Pravopisni priru?nik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika
(in Croatian and Serbian).
Notes
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
?agarova, Margita; Pintari?, Ana (July 1998).
"O nekim sli?nostima i razlikama između hrvatskoga i slova?koga jezika"
[On some similarities and differences between Croatian and Slovakian].
Jezikoslovlje
(in Croatian).
1
(1). Faculty of Philosophy, University of Osijek: 129?134.
ISSN
1331-7202
. Retrieved
2012-04-18
.
- ^
"Ortografija"
(PDF)
.
Jezi?ne vje?be
(in Croatian). Faculty of Philosophy, University of Pula. Archived from
the original
(PDF)
on 2012-03-14
. Retrieved
2012-04-18
.
- ^
Comrie, Bernard
; Corbett, Greville G., eds. (2003).
The Slavonic Languages
. London: Taylor & Francis. p. 45.
ISBN
978-0-203-21320-9
. Retrieved
23 December
2013
.
Following Vuk's reform of Cyrillic (see above) in the early nineteenth century, Ljudevit Gaj in the 1830s performed the same operation on Latinica, using the Czech system and producing a one-to-one symbol correlation between Cyrillic and Latinica as applied to the Serbian and Croatian parallel system.
- ^
Mareti?, Tomislav (1899).
Gramatika i stilistika hrvatskoga ili srpskoga knji?evnog jezika
(in Croatian)
. Retrieved
13 April
2023
.
- ^
"IBM Knowledge Center"
.
www.ibm.com/us-en
. Archived from
the original
on 2022-11-09
. Retrieved
2023-09-29
.
- ^
Lunt, Horace G. (1952).
Grammar of the Macedonian Literary Language
. Skopje.
- ^
Macedonian Latin alphabet, Pravopis na makedonskiot literaturen jazik, B. Vidoeski, T. Dimitrovski, K. Koneski, K. To?ev, R. Ugrinova Skalovska - Prosvetno delo Skopje, 1970, p.99
External links
[
edit
]