History
This modern alphabet (abeceda) was standardised in mid-1840s from an arrangement of the Croatian national reviver and leader Ljudevit Gaj that would become the Croatian alphabet, and was in turn patterned on the Czech alphabet. Before that Š was, for example, written as ∫, ∫∫ or ſ, Č as T∫CH, CZ, T∫CZ or TCZ, I sometimes as Y as a relict from now modern Russian 'yery' Ы, J as Y, L as LL, V as W, Ž as ∫, ∫∫ or ∫z.
In the old alphabet used by most distinguished writers, "bohoričica", developed by Adam Bohorič, the characters č, š and ž would be spelt as zh, ſh and sh respectively, whereas c, s and z would be spelt as z, ſ and s. To remedy this, so that each vocal sound would have a written equivalent, Jernej Kopitar urged development of new alphabets.
In 1825, Franc Serafin Metelko proposed his version of the alphabet called "metelčica". However, it was banned in 1833 in favour of the bohoričica after the so-called Suit of the Letters (Črkarska pravda) (1830–1833), which was won by France Prešeren and Matija Čop. Another alphabet, "dajnčica", was developed by Peter Dajnko in 1824, which did not catch on as much as metelčica; it was banned in 1838. The reason for their being banned is because they mixed Latin and Cyrillic characters, which was seen as a bad way to handle missing characters.
The gajica (see Gaj's Latin alphabet) was adopted afterwards, however it still fails to feature all phonemes of the Slovene language.
Read more about this topic: Slovene Alphabet
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