The Vithkuqi alphabet, also called Büthakukye or Beitha Kukju after the appellation applied to it by German Albanologist Johann Georg von Hahn, was an

alphabetic script An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given ...

invented for writing the

Albanian language Albanian (Endonym and exonym, endonym: , , or ) is an Indo-European languages, Indo-European language and the only surviving representative of the Albanoid, Albanoid branch, which belongs to the Paleo-Balkan languages, Paleo-Balkan group. It ...

between 1825 and 1845 by

Albanian Albanian may refer to: *Pertaining to Albania in Southeast Europe; in particular: **Albanians, an ethnic group native to the Balkans **Albanian language **Albanian culture **Demographics of Albania, includes other ethnic groups within the country ...

scholar

Naum Veqilharxhi Naum Veqilharxhi (born Naum Panajot Bredhi; 1797–1846) was an Albanian lawyer and scholar. In 1844, he published using a unique alphabet for the Albanian language with characters he had created himself, the Vithkuqi script. Veqilharxhi is one ...

History

Though the alphabet 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 uni ...

, a village in the

Korçë Korçë (; sq-definite, Korça) is the List of cities and towns in Albania, eighth most populous city of Albania and the seat of Korçë County and Korçë Municipality. The total population of the city is 51,152 and 75,994 of Korçë municipal ...

region where Veqilharxhi was born. The alphabet 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 alphabet were published in the late 19th century. The alphabet was eventually overwhelmed by the

Greek Greek may refer to: 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 of all kno ...

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

and

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

scripts it had been designed to supplant, the last becoming the official one in 1909. Other original alphabets used for Albanian were the

Elbasan alphabet The Elbasan alphabet 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 d ...

and the

Todhri alphabet The Todhri alphabet is an 18th-century Albanian alphabetical writing system invented for writing the Albanian language by Theodhor Haxhifilipi, also known as Dhaskal Todhri. History It is a complex writing system of fifty-two characters which ...

of the 18th century. These similarly failed to see prolonged widespread usage.

Description

The Vithkuqi alphabet 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. VithkuqiScript

Typeface

The books by Veqilharxhi were lithographed in

Bucharest Bucharest ( , ; ) is the capital and largest city of Romania. The metropolis stands on the River Dâmbovița (river), Dâmbovița in south-eastern Romania. Its population is officially estimated at 1.76 million residents within a greater Buc ...

by George Venrich, as was recently discovered. Though the alphabet was lithographed, in 1847 it was also cut for typographic use in

Vienna Vienna ( ; ; ) is the capital city, capital, List of largest cities in Austria, most populous city, and one of Federal states of Austria, nine federal states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. ...

, by the Austrian philologists and punchcutter

Alois Auer Alois Auer (11 May 1813 – 10 July 1869) was an Austrian printer, inventor and botanical illustrator, most active during the 1840s and 1850s. He produced a number of works in German and other languages, including the first regarding the nature p ...

. It was first used for a type specimen called ' 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 () is a variant of the Latin alphabet used to write the Albanian language. It consists of 36 letters representing all the phonemes of Standard Albanian: The vowels are shown in bold. The letters are named simply by their ...

.Yll Rugova (2022)
Tipografia shqiptare 1555–1912
Varg & Berk, Prishtinë, p. 170-177

Unicode

Vithkuqi was added to the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

Standard in September 2021 with the release of version 14.0. The Unicode block for Vithkuqi is U+10570–U+105BF:

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). Ëvetar Shqip Fort i Shkurtër. {{list of writing systems Albanian scripts Alphabets Albanian inventions Obsolete writing systems Constructed scripts

History

Description

Typeface

Unicode

See also

References

Sources