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Gaj's Latin alphabet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Latin alphabet used by the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian and Serbo-Croat languages was devised by Ljudevit Gaj, in his book 1830 Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja (A short primer of Croatian-Slavonic orthography) (Note that there is an ongoing debate as to whether some or all of these are separate languages, or whether they are in fact one language). It consists of thirty upper and lowercase letters:
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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 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
Each of the five vowels may also be written with additional pitch accents, but that is uncommon.
The Serbian language uses a modified Cyrillic, the Serbian Cyrillic, which maps one to one to the Latin alphabet. When Serbian is written in Latin script, the above letters are used.
Note that Dž, Lj, Nj are considered to be single letters — they are digraphs. This means that:
- In dictionaries, njegov comes after novine, in a separate NJ section after the end of the N section, and bolje comes after bolnica, and so forth.
| M |
| J |
| E |
| Nj |
| A |
| Č |
| N |
| I |
| C |
| A |
- In vertical writing (such as on signs), Dž, Lj, Nj are nevertheless written horizontally, as a unit. For instance, if mjenjačnica is written vertically, nj appears on the fourth line (but note m and j appear separately on the first and second lines, respectively, because mj contains two letters, not one). In crossword puzzles, Dž, Lj, Nj each occupy a single square.
- In cases where words are written with a space between each letter (such as on signs), each of these letters is written together. For instance: M J E NJ A Č N I C A (Bureau de Change).
- In cases where only the initial letter of a word is capitalized, only the first of the two component letters is capitalized: Njemačka and not NJemačka. In Unicode, the form Nj is referred to as titlecase, as opposed to the uppercase form NJ, representing one of the few cases where titlecase and uppercase differ. Uppercase would be used if the entire word was capitalized: NJEMAČKA.
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The Croatian Latin was mostly designed by Ljudevit Gaj, who modelled it after Czech and Polish, and invented Lj/lj, Nj/nj and Dž/dž. In 1830 in Buda he printed the book Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja ("Brief basics of the Croatian-Slavonic orthography"), which was the first common Croatian orthography book. It was not the first ever Croatian orthography work, as it was preceded by works of Rajmund Đamanjić (1639), Ignjat Đurđević and Pavao Ritter Vitezović. The Croatians had previously used the Latin alphabet, but some of the specific sounds were not uniformly represented.
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. His alphabet mapped completely on Serbian Cyrillic which was standardized by Vuk Karadžić a few years before. Đuro Daničić added the letter Đ/đ.
In the 1990s, there was a general confusion about the proper character encoding to use to write text in Croatian on computers.
- An attempt was made to apply the 7-bit "YUSCII" (later adapted to CROSCII), which included the five letters with diacritics at the expense of five non-letter characters ([, ], {, }, @), but it was ultimately unsuccessful.
- the 8-bit ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2) standard was developed by ISO, but
- Microsoft Windows spread 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
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).