The earliest form of separate Latin script specifically designed to suit Czech was devised by Czech theologian and church reformist Jan Hus, the namesake of the Hussite movement, in one of his seminal works, De orthographia bohemica (On Bohemian orthography).
The Czech orthography is considered the model for many other Balto-Slavic languages using the Latin alphabet; Slovak orthography being its direct revised descendant, while the Serbo-Croatian Gaj's Latin alphabet and its Slovene descendant system are largely based on it.
Unlike in English but like German, Dutch and Russian, voiced consonants are pronounced voicelessly in the final position in words.
That is, the sounds [ɟɪ, ɟiː, cɪ, ciː, ɲɪ, ɲiː] are written ⟨di, dí, ti, tí, ni, ní⟩ instead of ⟨ďi, ďí, ťi, ťí, ňi, ňí⟩, e.g. in čeština [ˈt͡ʃɛʃcɪna].
The sounds [dɪ, diː, tɪ, tiː, nɪ, niː] are denoted, respectively, by ⟨dy, dý, ty, tý, ny, ný⟩.
In words of foreign origin, ⟨di, ti, ni⟩ are pronounced [dɪ, tɪ, nɪ]; that is, as if they were written ⟨dy, ty, ny⟩, e.g. in diktát, dictation.
Because neutral consonants can be followed by either ⟨i⟩ or ⟨y⟩, in some cases they distinguish homophones, e.g. být (to be) vs. bít (to beat), mýt (to wash) vs. mít (to have).
The originally palatalizing phoneme /ě/ [ʲɛ] became extinct, changing to [ɛ] or [jɛ], but it is preserved as a grapheme which can never appear in the initial position.
Historically, long ⟨ú⟩ changed into the diphthong ⟨ou⟩ [ou̯] (as also happened in the English Great Vowel Shift with words such as "house"), though not in word-initial position in the prestige form.
Thus, the letter ⟨ú⟩ is written at the beginning of word-roots only: úhel (angle), trojúhelník (triangle), except in loanwords: skútr (scooter).
This grammatical principle affects the orthography (see also "Soft" I and "Hard" Y) – it is especially important for the correct choice and writing of plural endings of the participles.
A comma is not placed before a (and), i (as well as), ani (nor) and nebo (or) when they connect parts of sentences or clauses in copulative conjunctions (on a same level).
A comma can, however, occur in front of the word a (and) if the former is part of comma-delimited parenthesis: Jakub, můj mladší bratr, a jeho učitel Filip byli příliš zabráni do rozhovoru.
The first one preceding the quoted text is placed to the bottom line: Other types of quotation marks: ‚‘ »« Apostrophes are used rarely in Czech.
There are five periods in the development of the Czech Latin-based orthographic system: In computing, several different coding standards have existed for this alphabet, among them: