The Dajnko alphabet () was a Slovene
alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...
invented by
Peter Dajnko. It was used from 1824 to 1839 mostly in
Styria
Styria ( ; ; ; ) is an Austrian Federal states of Austria, state in the southeast of the country. With an area of approximately , Styria is Austria's second largest state, after Lower Austria. It is bordered to the south by Slovenia, and cloc ...
(in what is now eastern
Slovenia
Slovenia, officially the Republic of Slovenia, is a country in Central Europe. It borders Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the south and southeast, and a short (46.6 km) coastline within the Adriati ...
).
History
Dajnko introduced his alphabet in 1824 in his book ''Lehrbuch der windischen Sprache'' (Slovene Textbook).
He decided to replace the older
Bohorič alphabet with his own new writing system because of the problems with the writing of
sibilant
Sibilants (from 'hissing') are fricative and affricate 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 w ...
s.
In 1825,
Franc Serafin Metelko 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
Beatification, Blessed Anton Martin Slomšek (26 November 1800 – 24 September 1862) was a Slovene Catholic Church, Roman Catholic prelate who served as the Bishop of Lavant from 1846 until his death. He served also as an author and poet as wel ...
. 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 ( sr-Cyrl, абецеда, ) or ( sr-Cyrl, гајица, link=no, ), is the form of the Latin script used for writing all ...
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 or Slovenian alphabet (, 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 that is used to identify human languages on the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in ''Best Current Practice (BCP) 47''; the subtags ...
s have assigned the variant to Slovene in the Dajnko alphabet.
References
Slovene alphabet
Writing systems introduced in 1824
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