The Metelko alphabet ( sl, metelčica) was a Slovene writing system developed by

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 ...

. It was used by a small group of authors from 1825 to 1833 but it was never generally accepted. Mihael Dezman tombstone

Metelko introduced his alphabet in the book (Textbook of the Slovene Language of

Kingdom of Illyria The Kingdom of Illyria was a crown land of the Austrian Empire from 1816 to 1849, the successor state of the Napoleonic Illyrian Provinces, which were reconquered by Austria in the War of the Sixth Coalition. It was established according to th ...

and Neighboring Provinces, 1825). He invented his alphabet in order to replace the formerly used

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 ...

( sl, bohoričica, link=no), which was considered problematic in certain situations. Metelko was influenced by the ideas of

Jernej Kopitar Jernej Kopitar, also known as Bartholomeus Kopitar (21 August 1780 – 11 August 1844), was a Slovene linguist and philologist working in Vienna. He also worked as the Imperial censor for Slovene literature in Vienna. He is perhaps best known ...

, a well-known linguist who also participated in the development of the modern Serbian alphabet (created by Vuk Karadžić, following Kopitar's ideas). Metelko's alphabet has 32 letters in the following order: Special letters are explained in the following table (other letters have the same meaning as in modern Slovene): Metelko wanted to solve the problem of the formerly used digraphs ZH (for ) and SH (for and ) by replacing them with the special letters Ɥ, and , based on the

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking co ...

letters Ч, Ш, Ж. Metelko also added special letters for some common clusters: , and . The difference between glottal and velar H (, ) is in fact not relevant to Slovene phonology, and therefore the letter was omitted by some authors. In the formerly used Bohorič alphabet, certain words with different pronunciation had the same spelling. Metelko wanted to solve this problem by splitting E into three and O into two variants. Metelko's letters E, and Ƨ represent the vowels , and , which were formerly written with E. Metelko's letters O and represent the vowels and , which were formerly written with O. The main problem of Metelko's alphabet was its graphic design. Metelko's letters appeared strange to the average Slovene writer and the alphabet itself was soon nicknamed ''krevljica'' 'the twisted alphabet'. Some letters were in fact difficult to write by hand. Besides Metelko was strongly influenced by his own dialect, certain solutions were not accepted by speakers of other dialects. Soon strong opposition rose against Metelko's alphabet. After the "Slovene alphabet war" Metelko's alphabet was forbidden in 1833. A few years later Slovenes accepted

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 ...

(Slovene: ''gajica''), which is easier to write. In this alphabet variants in pronunciation are written using diacritics (é, ê, ó, ô, etc.) but only in cases when it is necessary to distinguish two words (e.g. ''klóp'' = '' bench''; ''klôp'' = ''

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''). 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 Metelko alphabet.

References

Sources

*Toporišič, Jože. 1993. "Metelčica." ''Enciklopedija Slovenije'', vol. 7, pp. 103–104. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga.

External links

{{commonscat, Metelko alphabet
Metelčica
text example
Unicode proposal
Slovene alphabet Writing systems introduced in the 19th century

See also

References

Sources

External links