Metelko alphabet
The Metelko alphabet was a Slovene writing system developed by Franc Serafin Metelko. It was used by a small group of authors from 1825 to 1833 but it was never generally accepted.
History
Metelko introduced his alphabet in the book Lehrgebäude der slowenischen Sprache im Königreiche Illyrien und in den benachbarten Provinzen. He invented his alphabet to replace the Bohorič alphabet, which was considered problematic in certain situations. Metelko was influenced by the ideas of Jernej Kopitar, a well-known linguist who also participated in the development of the modern Serbian alphabet.Alphabet
Metelko's alphabet has 32 letters in the following order:Impact
The main problem of Metelko's alphabet was its graphic design. Metelko's letters appeared strange to the average Slovene writer and the alphabet itself was soon nicknamed krevljica 'the twisted alphabet'. Some letters were in fact difficult to write by hand. In addition to Metelko being strongly influenced by his own dialect, certain solutions were not accepted by speakers of other dialects. Soon strong opposition arose against Metelko's alphabet.After the "Slovene alphabet war" Metelko's alphabet was forbidden in 1833. A few years later Slovenes accepted Gaj's Latin alphabet, which is easier to write. In this alphabet, the various mid vowels are written using diacritics, but only in cases when it is necessary to distinguish two words.
The IETF language tags have assigned the variant to Slovene in the Metelko alphabet.