Gaj's Latin alphabet

Template:Short description Template:Infobox writing system

Gaj's Latin alphabet (Template:Lang-sh-Latn-Cyrl, {{#invoke:IPA|main}}), also known as {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (Template:Lang-sr-Cyrl, {{#invoke:IPA|main}}) or {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (Template:Lang-sr-Cyrl, {{#invoke:IPA|main}}), is the form of the Latin script used for writing all four standard varieties of Serbo-Croatian: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian. It contains 27 individual letters and 3 digraphs. Each letter (including digraphs) represents one Serbo-Croatian phoneme, yielding a highly phonemic orthography. It closely corresponds to the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet.

The alphabet was initially devised by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in 1835 during the Illyrian movement in ethnically Croatian parts of the 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. The alphabet's final form was defined in the late 19th century.

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.

LettersEdit

The alphabet consists of thirty upper and lower case letters:

Majuscule forms (also called uppercase or capital 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 called lowercase or small 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
Broad IPA Value
Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink

File:SrbLatAlphabet.png

Gaj's Latin alphabet omits 4 letters (q,w,x,y) from the ISO Basic Latin alphabet.

Letters are referred to by their name: 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,Template:Sfn Template:Sfn or, in the case of consonants, by being appended by schwa, e.g. {{#invoke:IPA|main}}.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn In mathematics, Template:Angbr is commonly pronounced jot, as in the German of Germany.Template:Citation needed

Foreign lettersEdit

Various foreign letters are utilised in orthographically unadapted loanwords and foreign proper names, such as Québec.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Orthographically unadapted spelling of foreign names and some loanwords is standard in Croatia, whereas Serbians prefer to use orthographically adapted spellings. Non-native letters Q, W, X, and Y appear on the Serbo-Croatian keyboard. These four letters are usually named as follows: Template:Angbr as kve or ku, Template:Angbr as duplo ve or dvostruko ve, Template:Angbr as iks, and Template:Angbr as ipsilon.Template:Sfn<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>Template:Sfn

DigraphsEdit

Digraphs Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr are considered to be single letters, and they signify single phonemes. However, they are distinguished from occurences of two such letters that signify two distinct phonemes: džep (Template:Ipa, Cyrillic џеп) uses the digraph, while nadživjeti (Template:Ipa, Cyrillic надживјети, morphological boundary: prefix nad- + base živjeti) uses two separate letters.

In dictionaries, njegov comes after novine, in a separate Template:Angbr section after the end of the Template:Angbr section; bolje comes after bolnica; nadžak (digraph Template:Angbr) comes after nadživjeti (Template:Angbr+Template:Angbr sequence), 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'), not NJemačka. Uppercase is used only if the entire word was capitalized: NJEMAČKA.Template:Sfn In Unicode, the form Template:Angbr is referred to as titlecase, as opposed to the uppercase form Template:Angbr, representing one of the few cases in which titlecase and uppercase differ.

U
LJ
E

M
J
E
NJ
A
Č
N
I
C
A

In vertical writing (such as on signs), Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr are written horizontally, as a unit. For instance, if ulje ('oil') is written vertically, Template:Angbr appears on the second line. In crossword puzzles, Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr each occupy a single square. The word mjenjačnica ('bureau de change') is written vertically with Template:Angbr on the fourth line, while Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr appear separately on the first and second lines, respectively, because Template:Angbr contains two letters, not one.
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 E, M J E NJ A Č N I C A.

Accent marksEdit

The vowels {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, along with the syllabic consonants {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} and {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, can take one of 5 accents: the double grave accent (◌̏) for a short vowel with falling tone, the inverted breve (◌̑) for a long vowel with falling tone, the grave accent (◌̀) for a short vowel with rising tone, the acute accent (◌́) for long vowel with rising tone, and macron (◌̄) for a non-tonic long vowel. These diacritic accents are typically used in dictionaries and linguistic publications, and in poetry to denote metrically correct reading. In ordinary prose they occur when needed to resolve semantic ambiguity between homographs: {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} ('at') vs. {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} ('code'), {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} ('am') vs. {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} ('alone'). For the same reason, the length of an unaccented syllable can be marked with ⟨◌̄⟩ or circumflex ⟨◌̂⟩, without accentuating the rest of the word. This is typically used to distinguish homographic nominative singular and genitive plural forms of nouns, where the genitive plural has a long final vowel: {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} ('book' Template:Abbr) vs. {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} or {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} ('books' Template:Abbr).Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

HistoryEdit

Croatian Latin alphabet before GajEdit

In Croatian writing the Latin alphabet became dominant in the 16th century, marginalising the Cyrillic and the Glagolitic alphabets.Template:Sfn In the 17th century there coalesced two major orthographic practices for using the Latin alphabet. Dalmatia used a system based on the Italian orthography, whereas the continental Kaykavian writing was based on Hungarian. In the 18th century the Slavonian orthography arose as well, a mixture of the previous two.Template:Sfn However, the specifics of the alphabetic systems tended to vary from writer to writer.Template:Sfn

In addition to these three widely used systems, multiple individual writers attempted their own reforms of the alphabet. These include Rajmund Đamanjić (1639), the early 1700s Dubrovnik academy work led by Đuro Matijašević and Ignjat Đurđević, as well as the early 1700s Lexicon Latino-Illyricum by Pavao Ritter Vitezović.

File:Ljudevit Gaj (Knjižnica Gajeva 1875).png

Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj

Gaj's reform and its revisionsEdit

The Serbo-Croatian Latin alphabet was mostly designed by Ljudevit Gaj, who modelled it after Czech (č, ž, š) and Polish (ć), and invented Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr, according to similar solutions in Hungarian (ly, ny and dzs, although dž combinations exist also in Czech (and Polish as dż)). 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.

Gaj followed the example of Pavao Ritter Vitezović and the Czech orthography, making one letter of the Latin script for each sound in the language. Following Vuk Karadžić'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.<ref name="ComrieCorbett2003">Template:Cite book</ref>

In 1878 Đuro Daničić proposed a replacement of the digraphs Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr,Template:Efn Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr with single letters: Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr respectively.Template:Sfn Of the four, Template:Angbr was accepted in Ivan Broz's 1892 Hrvatski pravopis ("Croatian Orthography") and it thus became a part of the standard alphabet, though it was not immediately accepted by all writers and publishers.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The other three letters remained in use only in certain philological publications.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Names of individual people have sometimes retained the pre-đ spelling: Ksaver Šandor Gjalski ({{#invoke:IPA|main}}),<ref>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> Gjuro Szabo ({{#invoke:IPA|main}}).<ref>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Correspondence between Cyrillic and Latin alphabetsEdit

Each Cyrillic and Latin Serbo-Croatian letter has its exact counterpart in the other alphabet, although Latin digraphs Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr correspond to Cyrillic single letters Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr. 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.

Cyrillic	Latin
lang}}	A a
lang}}	B b
lang}}	V v
lang}}	G g
lang}}	D d
lang}}	Đ đ
lang}}	E e
lang}}	Ž ž
lang}}	Z z
lang}}	I i
lang}}	J j
lang}}	K k
lang}}	L l
lang}}	Lj lj
lang}}	M m

Cyrillic	Latin
lang}}	N n
lang}}	Nj nj
lang}}	O o
lang}}	P p
lang}}	R r
lang}}	S s
lang}}	T t
lang}}	Ć ć
lang}}	U u
lang}}	F f
lang}}	H h
lang}}	C c
lang}}	Č č
lang}}	Dž dž
lang}}	Š š

ComputingEdit

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 žabeceda (žaba=frog, abeceda=alphabet).
Other short-lived vendor-specific efforts were also undertaken.Template: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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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, Template:As of, one can still find programs as well as databases that use CP1250, CP852 or even CROSCII.

Digraphs Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr 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
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 SloveneEdit

{{#invoke:Labelled list hatnote|labelledList|Main article|Main articles|Main page|Main pages}} 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 bohoričica, named after Adam Bohorič, who codified it; the dajnčica, named after Peter Dajnko; and the metelčica, 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 Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr; the sounds they represent do not occur in Slovene.
In Slovene, the digraphs Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr are treated as two separate letters and represent separate sounds (the word polje is pronounced {{#invoke:IPA|main}} or {{#invoke:IPA|main}} in Slovene, as opposed to {{#invoke:IPA|main}} in Serbo-Croatian).
While the phoneme {{#invoke:IPA|main}} exists in modern Slovene and is written Template:Angbr, it is used in only borrowed words and so Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr 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 Template:Angbr can be pronounced in four ways ({{#invoke:IPA|main}}, {{#invoke:IPA|main}}, {{#invoke:IPA|main}} and {{#invoke:IPA|main}}), and letter Template:Angbr in two ({{#invoke:IPA|main}} and {{#invoke:IPA|main}}, though the difference is not phonemic). Also, it does not reflect consonant voicing assimilation: compare e.g. Slovene Template:Angbr and Serbo-Croatian Template:Angbr ('junkyard', 'waste').

Usage for MacedonianEdit

{{#invoke:Labelled list hatnote|labelledList|Main article|Main articles|Main page|Main pages}}

Romanization of Macedonian is done according to Gaj's Latin alphabet<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Macedonian Latin alphabet, Pravopis na makedonskiot literaturen jazik, B. Vidoeski, T. Dimitrovski, K. Koneski, K. Tošev, R. Ugrinova Skalovska - Prosvetno delo Skopje, 1970, p.99</ref> with slight modification. Gaj's ć and đ are not used at all, with ḱ and ǵ 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 ĺ are accepted as romanisations of љ and both nj and ń for 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, š becomes sh or s, and dž becomes dzh or dz.