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Vithkuqi script, also called Büthakukye or Beitha Kukju after the appellation applied to it by German Albanologist
Johann Georg von Hahn Johann Georg von Hahn (11 July 1811 – 23 September 1869) was an Austrian and later Austro-Hungarian diplomat, philologist and specialist in Albanian history, language and culture. Hahn was born in Frankfurt am Main. In 1847, he was named Aust ...
, was an
alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
ic script invented for writing the
Albanian language Albanian ( endonym: or ) is an Indo-European language and an independent branch of that family of languages. It is spoken by the Albanians in the Balkans and by the Albanian diaspora, which is generally concentrated in the Americas, Eur ...
between 1825 and 1845 by Albanian scholar Naum Veqilharxhi.


History

Though the script is sometimes erroneously claimed to be named after its inventor, as in Carl Faulmann's ''Das Buch der Schrift'', the script's name is derived from
Vithkuq Vithkuq is a village and a former municipality in the Korçë County, southeastern Albania. At the 2015 local government reform it became a subdivision of the municipality Korçë. The population at the 2011 census was 1,519. The municipal unit c ...
, a village in the
Korçë Korçë (; sq-definite, Korça) is the eighth most populous city of the Republic of Albania and the seat of Korçë County and Korçë Municipality. The total population is 75,994 (2011 census), in a total area of . It stands on a plateau som ...
region where Veqilharxhi was born. The script never took hold because of its inventor's premature death and because of the prohibitive costs of cutting new type for the invented characters; nevertheless, a number of documents using the script were published in the late 19th century. The script was eventually overwhelmed by the
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
,
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
and
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
scripts it had been designed to supplant, the latter becoming the official one in 1909. Other original scripts used for Albanian were the
Elbasan script The Elbasan script is a mid 18th-century alphabetic script created for the Albanian language ''Elbasan Gospel Manuscript'', also known as the ''Anonimi i Elbasanit'' ("the Anonymous of Elbasan"), which is the only document written in it. The doc ...
and the Todhri script of the 18th century. These scripts similarly failed to see prolonged widespread usage.


Description

Vithkuqi script was specifically designed to be as religiously neutral as possible, avoiding the duplication of Greek, Latin, or Arabic characters. It had a near-perfect correspondence between letters and phonemes, but lacked characters for modern Albanian "gj", "rr", "xh", and "zh". Additionally, modern "b" and "h" were each represented by two characters- the lesser-used characters in each pair are transliterated as "bb" and "hh" below.


Typeface

The books by Veqilharxhi were lithographed in
Bucharest Bucharest ( , ; ro, București ) is the capital and largest city of Romania, as well as its cultural, industrial, and financial centre. It is located in the southeast of the country, on the banks of the Dâmbovița River, less than north o ...
by George Venrich, as was recently discovered. Though the script was lithographed, in 1847 it was also cut for typographic use in
Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...
, by the Austrian philologists and punchcutter Alois Auer. It was first used for a type speciment called ''Das Vaterunser in 206 Sprachen'' by the Imperial Printing Press (k.k. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei) in Vienna, under the direction of Auer. The same type was also used by Carl Faulmann in a different book a few years later. It is the first typeface to be cut for an original
Albanian alphabet The Albanian alphabet ( sq, alfabeti shqip) is a variant of the Latin alphabet used to write the Albanian language. It consists of 36 letters: ''Note:'' The vowels are shown in bold. The letters are named simply by their sounds, followed by ë ...
.Yll Rugova (2022)
Tipografia shqiptare 1555–1912
Varg & Berk, Prishtinë, p. 170-177


Unicode

Vithkuqi script was added to the
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
Standard in September 2021 with the release of version 14.0. The Unicode block for Vithkuqi is U+10570–U+105BF:


See also

* Todhri script *
Elbasan script The Elbasan script is a mid 18th-century alphabetic script created for the Albanian language ''Elbasan Gospel Manuscript'', also known as the ''Anonimi i Elbasanit'' ("the Anonymous of Elbasan"), which is the only document written in it. The doc ...
* Vellara script *
Albanian alphabet The Albanian alphabet ( sq, alfabeti shqip) is a variant of the Latin alphabet used to write the Albanian language. It consists of 36 letters: ''Note:'' The vowels are shown in bold. The letters are named simply by their sounds, followed by ë ...


References


Sources

* Diringer, David. (1949). The Alphabet. * Десницкая, Агния Васильевна. (1968). Албанский язык и его диалекты. Leningrad: Nauka. * Десницкая, Агния Васильевна. (1987). Албанская литература и албанский язык. Leningrad: Nauka. * Elsie, Robert. (1995). The Elbasan Gospel Manuscript (Anonimi i Elbasanit), 1761, and the struggle for an original Albanian alphabet. * Faulmann, Karl. (1880). Das Buch der Schrift. * Skendi, Stavro. 1960. The history of the Albanian alphabet: a case of complex cultural and political development. ''Südost-Forschungen: Internationale Zeitschrift für Geschichte, Kultur und Landeskunde Südosteuropas'' 19:263-284. * Trix, Frances. 1997. Alphabet conflict in the Balkans: Albanian and the congress of Monastir. ''International Journal of the Sociology of Language'' 128:1-23. * Veqilharxhi, Naum. (1845). Evëtori Shqip Fort i Shkurtër. {{list of writing systems Albanian scripts Alphabets Obsolete writing systems Constructed scripts