Gaj's Latin Alpha bet

Gaj's Latin Alpha bet Gajeva latinica
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	early 19th century – present
Languages	Serbo-Croatian
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic Alpha bet Phoenician Alpha bet Greek Alpha bet Old Italic scripts Latin Alpha bet Czech Alpha bet Gaj's Latin Alpha bet
Child systems	Slovene Alpha bet Montenegrin Latin Alpha bet Macedonian Latin Alpha bet
Unicode
Unicode range	subset ofLatin

Gaj's Latin Alpha bet(Serbo-Croatian:Gajeva latinica/Гајева латиница,pronounced[ɡâːjěvalatǐnitsa]), also known asabeceda(Serbian Cyrillic:абецеда,pronounced[abetsěːda]) orgajica(Serbian Cyrillic:гајица,pronounced[ɡǎjitsa]), is the form of theLatin scriptused for writingSerbo-Croatianand all of itsstandard varieties:Bosnian,Croatian,Montenegrin,andSerbian.

The Alpha bet was initially devised by Croatian linguistLjudevit Gajin 1835 during theIllyrian movementinethnically Croatianparts ofAustrian Empire.It was largely based onJan Hus'sCzech Alpha betand was meant to serve as a unified orthography forthree Croat-populated kingdomswithin the Austrian Empire at the time, namelyCroatia,DalmatiaandSlavonia,and their three dialect groups,Kajkavian,ChakavianandShtokavian,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 theVienna Literary Agreement.It served as one of the official scripts in theunifiedSouth Slavicstate ofYugoslaviaalongsideVuk's Cyrillic Alpha bet.

Aslightly reduced versionis used as the Alpha bet forSlovene,and aslightly expanded versionis used for modern standard Montenegrin. A modified version is used for theromanizationofMacedonian.It further influencedAlpha bets of Romani languagesthat are spoken inSoutheast Europe,namelyVlaxandBalkan Romani.

Letters

The Alpha bet consists of thirtyupperandlower caseletters:

Majuscule forms(also calleduppercaseorcapital letters)

A

B

C

Č

Ć

D

Dž

Đ

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

Lj

M

N

Nj

O

P

R

S

Š

T

U

V

Z

Ž

Minuscule forms(also calledlowercaseorsmall letters)

a

b

c

č

ć

d

dž

đ

e

f

g

h

i

j

k

l

lj

m

n

nj

o

p

r

s

š

t

u

v

z

ž

IPA Value

/a/

/b/

/t͡s/

/t͡ʃ/

/t͡ɕ/

/d/

/d͡ʒ/

/d͡ʑ/

/e/

/f/

/ɡ/

/x/

/i/

/j/

/k/

/l/(/ɫ/)

/ʎ/

/m/

/n/

/ɲ/

/o/

/p/

/r/

/s/

/ʃ/

/t/

/u/

/ʋ/

/z/

/ʒ/

Gaj's Latin Alpha bet omits 4 letters (q,w,x,y) from theISO Basic Latin Alpha bet.

Gaj's original Alpha bet contained the digraph⟨dj⟩,which Serbian linguistĐuro Daničićlater 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 shortschwa,e.g./fə/). When clarity is needed, they are pronounced similar to theGerman Alpha bet: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 theISO basic Latin Alpha betare concerned. The use of others is mostly limited to the context of linguistics,while in mathematics,⟨j⟩is commonly pronouncedjot,as in theGerman of Germany.The missing four letters are pronounced as follows:⟨q⟩asku,kju,orkve;⟨w⟩asduplo v,duplo ve(standard in Serbia), ordvostruko ve(standard in Croatia) (rarely alsodubl ve);⟨x⟩asiks;and⟨y⟩asipsilon.

Digraphs

Digraphs⟨dž⟩,⟨lj⟩and⟨nj⟩are considered to be single letters:

• In dictionaries,njegovcomes afternovine,in a separate⟨nj⟩section after the end of the⟨n⟩section;boljecomes afterbolnica;nadžak(digraph⟨dž⟩) comes afternadživjeti(prefixnad-), and so forth.
• If only the initial letter of a word is capitalized, only the first of the two component letters is capitalized:Njemačka('Germany'), notNJemačka.InUnicode,the form⟨Nj⟩is referred to astitlecase,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:NJEMAČKA.

U LJ

• In vertical writing (such as on signs),⟨dž⟩,⟨lj⟩,⟨nj⟩are written horizontally, as a unit. For instance, ifulj('oil') is written vertically,⟨lj⟩appears on the second line. Incrosswordpuzzles,⟨dž⟩,⟨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

Croatian linguistLjudevit Gaj

The Serbo-Croatian Latin Alpha bet was mostly designed byLjudevit Gaj,who modelled it afterCzech(č, ž, š) andPolish(ć), and invented⟨lj⟩,⟨nj⟩and⟨dž⟩,according to similar solutions inHungarian(ly, ny and dzs, although dž combinations exist also in Czech and Polish). In 1830 inBuda,he published the bookKratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja( "Brief basics of the Croatian-Slavonic orthography" ), which was the first common Croatianorthographybook. It was not the first ever Croatian orthography work, as it was preceded by works of Rajmund Đamanjić (1639),Ignjat ĐurđevićandPavao Ritter Vitezović.Croats had previously used the Latin script, but some of the specific sounds were not uniformly represented. Versions of theHungarian Alpha betwere most commonly used, but others were too, in an often confused, inconsistent fashion.

Gaj followed the example of Pavao Ritter Vitezović and theCzech orthography,making one letter of the Latin script for each sound in the language. FollowingVuk Karadžić's reform of Cyrillic in the early nineteenth century, in the 1830s Ljudevit Gaj did the same forlatinica,using the Czech system and producing a one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correlation between the Cyrillic and Latin orthographies, resulting in a parallel system.

Đuro Daničićsuggested in hisRječnik 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 Alpha bet was eventually revised, but only the digraph⟨dj⟩has been replaced with Daničić's⟨đ⟩,while⟨dž⟩,⟨lj⟩and⟨nj⟩have been kept.

Correspondence between Cyrillic and Latin Alpha bets

The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of Gaj's Latin Alpha bet, along with the equivalent forms in the Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic Alpha bet and theInternational 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. /ʃə/).:

Cyrillic Latin IPA value А а A a /ä/ Б б B b /b/ В в V v /ʋ/ Г г G g /ɡ/ Д д D d /d/ Ђ ђ Đ đ /dʑ/ Е е E e /e/ Ж ж Ž ž /ʒ/ З з Z z /z/ И и I i /i/ Ј ј J j /j/ К к K k /k/ Л л L l /l/ Љ љ Lj lj /ʎ/ М м M m /m/

Cyrillic Latin IPA value Н н N n /n/ Њ њ Nj nj /ɲ/ О о O o /ɔ/ П п P p /p/ Р р R r /r/ С с S s /s/ Т т T t /t/ Ћ ћ Ć ć /tɕ/ У у U u /u/ Ф ф F f /f/ Х х H h /x/ Ц ц C c /ts/ Ч ч Č č /tʃ/ Џ џ Dž dž /dʒ/ Ш ш Š š /ʃ/

Computing

In the 1990s, there was a general confusion about the propercharacter encodingto 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 itžabeceda(žaba=frog,abeceda= Alpha bet).
• Other short-lived vendor-specific efforts were also undertaken.
• The8-bitISO 8859-2(Latin-2) standard was developed by ISO.
• MS-DOSintroduced 8-bit encodingCP852for Central European languages, disregarding the ISO standard.
• Microsoft Windowsspread yet another 8-bit encoding calledCP1250,which had a few letters mapped one-to-one with ISO 8859-2, but also had some mapped elsewhere.
• Apple'sMacintosh Central European encodingdoes not include the entire Gaj's Latin Alpha bet. Instead, a separate codepage, calledMacCroatian encoding,is used.
• EBCDICalso has a Latin-2 encoding.

The preferredcharacter encodingfor Croatian today is either theISO 8859-2,or theUnicodeencodingUTF-8(with two bytes or 16 bits necessary to use the letters with diacritics). However, as of 2010,one can still find programs as well as databases that useCP1250,CP852or even CROSCII.

Digraphs⟨dž⟩,⟨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 backwardscompatibility with legacy encodingswhich kept a one-to-one correspondence with Cyrillic; modern texts use a sequence of characters.

Character sequence	Composite character	Unicode code point
DŽ	DŽ	U+01C4
Dž	Dž	U+01C5
dž	dž	U+01C6
LJ	LJ	U+01C7
Lj	Lj	U+01C8
lj	lj	U+01C9
NJ	NJ	U+01CA
Nj	Nj	U+01CB
nj	nj	U+01CC

Usage for Slovene

Since the early 1840s, Gaj's Alpha bet was increasingly used forSlovene.In the beginning, it was most commonly used by Slovene authors who treated Slovene as a variant of Serbo-Croatian (such asStanko Vraz), but it was later accepted by a large spectrum of Slovene-writing authors. The breakthrough came in 1845, when the Slovene conservative leaderJanez Bleiweisstarted using Gaj's script in his journalKmetijske in rokodelske novice( "Agricultural and Artisan News" ), which was read by a wide public in the countryside. By 1850, Gaj's Alpha bet (known asgajicain Slovene) became the only officialSlovene Alpha bet,replacing three other writing systems that had circulated in theSlovene Landssince the 1830s: the traditionalbohoričica,named afterAdam Bohorič,who codified it; thedajnčica,named afterPeter Dajnko;and themetelčica,named afterFranc Serafin Metelko.

The Slovene version of Gaj's Alpha bet differs from the Serbo-Croatian one in several ways:

• The Slovene Alpha bet does not have the characters⟨ć⟩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 wordpoljeis pronounced[ˈpóːljɛ]or[pɔˈljéː]in Slovene, as opposed to[pôʎe]in Serbo-Croatian).
• While the phoneme/dʒ/exists in modern Slovene and is written⟨dž⟩,it is used in only borrowed words and so⟨d⟩and⟨ž⟩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, butheadwordsin dictionaries are given with them to account forhomographs.For instance, letter⟨e⟩can be pronounced in four ways (/eː/,/ɛ/,/ɛː/and/ə/), and letter⟨v⟩in two ([ʋ]and[w],though the difference is notphonemic). Also, it does not reflect consonant voicing assimilation: compare e.g. Slovene⟨odpad⟩and Serbo-Croatian⟨otpad⟩('junkyard', 'waste').

Usage for Macedonian

Main article:Romanization of Macedonian

RomanizationofMacedonianis done according to Gaj's Latin Alpha betwith slight modification. Gaj'sćandđare not used at all, withḱandǵintroduced instead. The rest of the letters of the Alpha bet are used to represent the equivalent Cyrillic letters. Also, Macedonian uses the letterdz,which is not part of the Serbo-Croatian phonemic inventory. As per the orthography, bothljandĺare accepted as romanisations of љ and bothnjandńfor њ. 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,šbecomesshors,anddžbecomesdzhordz.

Keyboard layout

See also:QWERTZ § South Slavic Latin

The standard Gaj's Latin Alpha betkeyboard layoutfor personal computers is as follows:

See also

• Glagolitic Alpha bet
• Montenegrin Alpha bet
• Serbian Cyrillic Alpha bet
• Serbo-Croatian
• Slovene Alpha bet
• Yugoslav braille
• Yugoslav manual Alpha bet
• Romanization of Serbian– describes usage not the Alpha bet

Sources

• Ljiljana Jojić (2003).Pravopisni priručnik - dodatak Velikom rječniku hrvatskoga jezika(in Croatian).
• Vladimir Anić; Josip Silić (1987).Pravopisni priručnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika(in Croatian and Serbian).

External links

• Omniglot