Diacritic-based orthography (De orthographia Bohemica)
Ortografía con signos diacríticos (De orthographia Bohemica)
- Date
- c. 1406-1412 · confidence low
- Place
- Prague, Bohemia, Czechia
- Credited to
- Attributed to Jan Hus
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
A treatise proposing that the digraphs and letter clusters of the Latin alphabet be replaced by one letter with a superscript mark for each Czech sound (the háček, the acute accent and the dot). It is the first systematically designed orthography for a Slavic language in the Latin script.
The work circulates anonymously and its attribution to Hus (c. 1406-1412) is traditional but debated; the reform only prevailed in Czech printing from the 16th century.
What it led to
- the Czech diacritic orthography, essentially still in use
- a model for the Latin-script orthographies of other Slavic languages
- Gaj's Croatian Latin alphabet (1835), inspired by the Czech model