Peter Dajnko - Posvetne pesmi (1827, fragment)

The Dajnko alphabet ( sl, dajnčica) was a Slovene

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

invented by

Peter Dajnko Peter Dajnko (23 April 1787 – 22 February 1873) was a Slovene priest, author, and linguist, known primarily as the inventor of the Dajnko alphabet ( sl, dajnčica), an innovative proposal for the Slovene alphabet. Dajnko was also a proficien ...

. It was used from 1824 to 1839 mostly in

Styria Styria (german: Steiermark ; Serbo-Croatian and sl, ; hu, Stájerország) is a state (''Bundesland'') in the southeast of Austria. With an area of , Styria is the second largest state of Austria, after Lower Austria. Styria is bordered ...

(in what is now eastern

Slovenia Slovenia ( ; sl, Slovenija ), officially the Republic of Slovenia (Slovene: , abbr.: ''RS''), is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the southeast, and ...

History

Dajnko introduced his alphabet in 1824 in his book ''Lehrbuch der windischen Sprache'' (Slovene Textbook). He decided to replace the older

Bohorič alphabet The Bohorič alphabet ( sl, bohoričica) was an orthography used for Slovene between the 16th and 19th centuries. Origins Its name is derived from Adam Bohorič, who codified the alphabet in his book ''Articae Horulae Succisivae''. It was print ...

with his own new writing system because of the problems with the writing of

sibilant Sibilants are fricative consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English words ''sip'', ''zip'', ''ship'', and ...

s. In 1825,

Franc Serafin Metelko Franc Serafin Metelko, also known as Fran Metelko (14 July 1789 – 27 December 1860) was a Slovene Roman Catholic priest, author, and philologist, best known for his proposal of a new script for the Slovene called the Metelko alphabet, which ...

came up with a similar proposal, complicating the issue. The Dajnko alphabet, which was introduced to schools in 1831, was fiercely opposed by Anton Murko and Anton Martin Slomšek. After 1834 it gradually came out of use with the adoption of a slightly modified version of

Gaj's Latin alphabet Gaj's Latin alphabet ( sh-Latn-Cyrl, Gajeva latinica, separator=" / ", Гајева латиница}, ), also known as ( sh-Cyrl, абецеда, ) or ( sh-Cyrl, гајица, link=no, ), is the form of the Latin script used for writing Serb ...

as the new Slovene script and was in 1839 officially abolished.

Letters

He represented the phonemes , , with the letters C, S, Z (as in the modern

Slovene alphabet The Slovene alphabet ( sl, slovenska abeceda, or ''slovenska gajica'' ) is an extension of the Latin script used to write Slovene. The standard language uses a Latin alphabet which is a slight modification of the Croatian Gaj's Latin alphabet ...

) and the phonemes , , with special characters (see table below). In addition, he invented two extra symbols, which were omitted after 1829 (see table below): Dajnko's alphabetical order was as follows: The

IETF language tag An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code or tag that is used to identify human languages in the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in ''Best Current Practice (BCP) 47''; the s ...

s have assigned the variant to Slovene in the Dajnko alphabet.

References

Slovene alphabet Writing systems introduced in the 19th century {{Slavic-lang-stub