Slovene Language - Writing System

Writing System

This alphabet (Slovene: abeceda) was derived in the mid-1840s from the system created by Croatianist Ljudevit Gaj. Intended for Serbo-Croatian language (in all its varieties), it was patterned on the Czech pattern of the 1830s. Before that /s/ was, for example, written as ⟨ʃ⟩, ⟨ʃʃ⟩ or ⟨ſ⟩; /tʃ/ as ⟨tʃch, ⟨cz⟩, ⟨tʃcz⟩ or ⟨tcz⟩; /i/ sometimes as ⟨y⟩ as a relic from now modern Russian yery ⟨ы⟩; /j/ as ⟨y⟩; /l/ as ⟨ll⟩; /ʋ/ as ⟨w⟩; /ʒ/ as ⟨ʃ⟩, ⟨ʃʃ⟩ or ⟨ʃz⟩.

The writing itself in its pure form does not use any letters beyond the letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet plus ⟨č⟩, ⟨š⟩, and ⟨ž⟩, except optional diacritics when it is necessary to distinguish between similar words with a different meaning. Note that these are usually not written and the reader is expected to gather the meaning of the word from the context. When diacritics are not used, the orthography underdifferentiates the phonemes /e/, /ɛ/ and /ə/, which are all written ⟨e⟩, and the phonemes /ɔ/ and /o/, which are both written ⟨o⟩. For example:

• gòl /ɡəu/ ('naked') vs. gól /ɡol/('goal'),
• jêsen /'jɛsən/ ('ash (tree)') vs. jesén /jɛ'sen/ ('autumn'),
• kót /kot/ ('angle') vs. kot /kɔt/ ('as'),
• med /mɛt/ ('between') vs. méd /met/ ('honey'),
• pôl /pɔl/ ('half an hour before (the hour)') vs. pól /pol/ ('pole'),
• prècej /'pretsɛj/ ('at once', archaic) vs. precèj /prɛ'tsɛj/ ('a great deal (of)'),