Dajnko alphabet

The Dajnko alphabet (Slovene: dajnčica) was a Slovene alphabet invented by Peter Dajnko. It was used from 1824 to 1839 mostly in Styria (in what is now eastern Slovenia).

A poem by Dajnko in the Dajnko alphabet

History

Dajnko introduced his alphabet in 1824 in his book Lehrbuch der windischen Sprache (Slovene Textbook).^[1] He decided to replace the older Bohorič alphabet with his own new writing system because of the problems with the writing of sibilants.^[2] 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.^[3] After 1834 it gradually came out of use with the adoption of a slightly modified version of Gaj's Latin alphabet as the new Slovene script and was in 1839 officially abolished.^[4]

Letters

He represented the phonemes /ts/, /s/, /z/ with the letters C, S, Z (as in the modern Slovene alphabet) and the phonemes /tʃ/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/ with special characters (see table below). In addition, he invented two extra symbols, which were omitted after 1829 (see table below):

Dajnčica

Upper case	Lower case	IPA	Modern Slovene
C	c	/t͡s/	c
Ч	ɥ	/t͡ʃ/	č
S	s	/s/	s
Ȣ	ȣ	/ʃ/	š
Z	z	/z/	z
X	x	/ʒ/	ž
Ŋ	ŋ	/n̪ʲ/	nj
Y	y	/y/	ü (in eastern dialects only)

Dajnko's alphabetical order was as follows:

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

The IETF language tags have assigned the variant sl-dajnko to Slovene in the Dajnko alphabet.^[5]