The primary purpose of
De orthographia bohemica was to simplify and unify Czech orthography in order to promote literacy by making the language "clearer and easier" to read and write. Instead of representing sounds using
digraphs and
trigraphs, it proposed a "diacritic orthography", where one letter indicates only one sound, and different but related sounds (such as those now represented by
r and
ř) are distinguished by diacritics. Briefly, one can summarize the spelling changes in Orthographia Bohemica as follows: • The basic letters of the
Latin alphabet (as well as the Latin digraph
ch) were to be used for writing Czech, with sound values according to the conventions of medieval Latin pronunciation in
Bohemia at the time. The only difference was that the letter
c was always to be used to represent the sound , and never for .
d represented /d/ as in Latin, and the letter
g before
e and
i represented ; in other cases
g represented . • Czech consonants that Latin did not possess would be represented by a Latin letter adorned with a diacritic dot. In particular, as Czech additionally possessed
palatalized consonants and a hard
l, the dot indicated softness above
n,
d,
t,
c and
z, and hardness for
l. • Long vowels (which Latin possessed but did not indicate) were to be indicated by the
čárka (an
acute accent) above
a,
e,
i and
y. To illustrate the simple and revolutionary nature of this spelling, take as an example the various ways of representing ř, compared with that seen in the grammar of
Jan Gebauer. In manuscripts written before Hus, all of the following representations were in use: , , , , , , , and . Long vowels were written either with no indication of the length, or written double (sometimes with the second letter written in
superscript), or with any of a wide and unstandardized range of diacritical marks. One could not even assume that the same scribe would consistently use their own conventions, and their use often varied even within a single manuscript. ==Significance and impact==