Dajnko alphabet

A song in dajnčica, by P. Dajnko

Dajnko alphabet or dajnčica was a Slovene writing system invented by Peter Dajnko. It was used in years 1824–1839 - mostly in the region of Styria (in what is now eastern Slovenia).

Dajnko introduced his alphabet in 1824 in the book Lehrbuch der windischen Sprache = Book for learning slovene language (written in German). He decided to replace older Bohorič alphabet with his own new writing system. He decided to write phonemes /ts/, /s/, /z/ with letters C, S, Z (equally as in modern slovene alphabet) and phonemes /tʃ/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/ with special letters (see table bellow). Besides he invented two extra symbols, which were omitted after 1829 (see table below):

Dajnčica

majuscule	minuscule	IPA	modern slovene
C	c	/ts/	c
		/tʃ/	č
S	s	/s/	s
	or	/ʃ/	š
Z	z	/z/	z
X	x	/ʒ/	ž
		/nj/ or /ɲ/	nj
Y	y	/y/	ü (in eastern dialects only)

The alpabetical order according to Dajnko is as follows:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S Z X T U Y V

The Dajnko alphabet was no longer in use after 1839. Soon after that Slovenes began using Gaj's alphabet imported from Croatian.

[edit] External links

• Dajnčica, text sample

[edit] References

Enciklopedija Slovenije, 2. zvezek, članek Dajnčica. Mladinska knjiga, Ljubljana, 1988.