Franc Serafin Metelko

Who was Franc Serafin Metelko?

Franc Serafin Metelko, also known as Fran Metelko was a Slovene Roman Catholic priest, author, and philologist, best known for his proposal of a new script for the Slovene called the Metelko alphabet, which was meant to replace the traditional Bohorič alphabet, used since the late sixteenth century.

Metelko was born in the village of Škocjan, in what was then the Duchy of Carniola in the Habsburg Monarchy. He studied theology and philosophy in Ljubljana. In 1814 he was ordained a priest and in 1817 he started teaching Slovene at the Lyceum in Ljubljana.

In 1825, he published a book in German titled Lehrgebäude der slowenischen Sprache im Königreiche Illyrien und in den benachbarten Provinzen. Following the advice of the liguist Jernej Kopitar, his newly created alphabet was phonetic, with each character corresponding a sound in the spoken language. It was also quite complicated, containing unneeded or redundant characters for glottal h and the clusters lj, nj, and šč as well as unfamiliar characters taken from Cyrillic. In addition, Metelko based his phonology on his local Lower Carniolan dialect, which was not acceptable for most contemporary Slovenian authors.