Jožef Poklukar’s Universal Alphabet: A Utopian Project to Solve Notation of Special Slavonic Sounds

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article describes the utopian alphabet project of Slovenian clergyman Jožef Poklukar, in which he tried to establish a universal alphabet for the notation of the Slavic languages in the 19th century. Despite the fact that Czech diacritical marks were accepted in Slovenian orthography in the late 1840s, he wanted to start another reform due to his view that diacritics were not satisfactory. Poklukar began working on the project in the 1820s, but published the first version of the alphabet only in 1851. After that, he intensively developed his alphabet and published numerous updated versions of lithographic tables in daily newspapers and as a publisher. Printed material sources were used as the core material of the research. Although his project was interesting from a linguistic and typographic point of view, it had no influence on the orthography and remains an example of a utopian project.