The alphabet
To display the alphabet correctly, I have changed the character set of
this page. Instead of the traditional Latin 1, this page uses one of the
so called Baltic character sets - ISO 8859-4. Please make sure that your
browser is capable of displaying this! The reason for this is that Estonian
has two characters outside of the Latin 1 repertoire: S with caron and
Z with caron (caron is a diacritical mark that looks like small "v" above
the character). Of these two, scaron is usable under Windows operating
system, zcaron is not. There is a new ISO character set released that suits
Estonian perfectly - ISO 8859-15 but since the correct display depends
on the capabilities of your browser, I cannot use it yet.
The following is the Estonian alphabet:
A B (C) D E F G H I J K L M N O P (Q) R
S © Z ® T U V (W) Õ Ä Ö Ü (X) (Y)
Personal names, placenames and quotations of foreign origin also need
additional letters of the latin alphabet to be used, the most common ones
are c, q, w, x, y, this is why they are bracketed.
Characters f, ¹, z and ¾
only occur in loanwords. Since by convention all personal and placenames
of latin origin are written preserving their original shape, full Latin
character repertoire is commonly used in Estonian newspapers and books.
Official documents, databases etc are required to use a minimum Latin character
repertoire of 199 letters.