Background
Metelko was born in the village of Škocjan in Lower Carniola, then part of the Habsburg Monarchy.
Metelko was born in the village of Škocjan in Lower Carniola, then part of 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 (Slovenian Textbook for the Kingdom of Illyria and Neighboring Provinces). Following the advice of the linguist Jernej Kopitar, his newly created alphabet (which soon became known as the metelčica "Metelko alphabet") was phonetic, with each character corresponding a sound in the spoken language.
lieutenant 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. Metelko"s proposal further aggravated the "Slovene alphabet War", which was started by Peter Dajnko"s quest for a new, more phonetic alphabet, replacing the traditional Bohorič alphabet (bohoričica).
Čop also persuaded the local Austrian educational authorities to ban Metelko"s alphabet from schools, which they did with an official decree in 1833. The Alphabet War nevertheless continued until the 1840s, when a slightly modified version of Gaj"s Latin alphabet was finally adopted, which is still used to this day.
Metelko"s alphabet remained in public memory because of a satirical poem by France Prešeren titled "First Rate (at Lloyd's)" prav se piše kaa ali kaſha" (How to Write the Word Porridge), which criticized the Alphabet War as nonsense.
Metelko was also a collector of folk songs and an amateur poet. Metelko Street (Metelkova ulica) in the center of Ljubljana is named after him. He died in Ljubljana.