Dje Explained

Dje (Ђ ђ; italics:

Ђ ђ) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

Dje is the sixth letter of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, used in Serbo-Croatian to represent the voiced alveolo-palatal affricate pronounced as //d͡ʑ//.

Dje corresponds to the Latin letter D with stroke (Đ đ) in Gaj's Latin alphabet of Serbo-Croatian and is so transliterated. When strokes are unavailable, it is transliterated as or .

History

Dje was constructed by request of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić.[1] There were several proposed shapes of the letter (one by Pavle Solarić, another by Gligorije Geršić). The variant now in use was designed by Lukijan Mušicki;[2] [3] it was designed by modification of the letter Ћ, itself a revival of the old Cyrillic letter Djerv (Ꙉ). The new letter was adopted in Karadžić's 1818 dictionary and thus entered widespread usage. There was also a Д and Ь ligature variant that hasn't been added in Unicode as a character, and was used before Dje took its current form.

Related letters and other similar characters

References

  1. Maretić, Tomislav. Gramatika i stilistika hrvatskoga ili srpskoga književnog jezika, p. 14-15. 1899.
  2. Book: Lalević, Miodrag S.. Potsetnik iz srpskohrvatskog jezika i pravopisa: s pravopisnim i jezičkim savetnikom. 1953. Rad. 75. Облик му је у Вуковој азбуци дао песник Лукијан Мушицки.
  3. Петар Ђорђић. Историја српске ћирилице. Београд, 1971.