Gothic alphabet

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This article contains gothic characters. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of letters.

The Gothic alphabet is an alphabetic writing system attributed by Philostorgius^{[citation needed]} to Ulfilas (also known as Wulfila), used exclusively for writing the ancient Gothic language. Before its creation in the fourth century in Nicopolis ad Istrum (modern Bulgaria), Gothic was possibly written in runes. It was primarily used by Ulfilas to translate the Bible into Gothic. It appears to be derived from the Greek alphabet with some borrowings from the Latin alphabet, as well. The names are clearly related to the names of the Runic alphabet.

[edit] The letters

Below is a table of the Gothic alphabet. Two letters used in its transliteration are not used in current English: þ (þiuþ, thorn) and ƕ (hwair). These represent sounds like the th in thin and the voiceless wh respectively.

As with the Greek alphabet, letters were also used as numerals. When used as numerals, letters were generally written with an overdot or overbar. There are two numerals (representing 90 and 900) with no phonetic value.

The letter names are recorded in a 9th century manuscript of Alcuin (Codex Vindobonensis 795). Most of them seem to be Gothic forms of names also appearing in the rune poems. The names are given in the reconstructed form of the Gothic words, followed by the spelling of their actual attestation.

Most of the letters are taken over from the Greek alphabet directly, but a few letters are innovated to accurately express Gothic phonology; these are 𐌾 (j), 𐌿 (u; likely directly from the runic alphabet; u is expressed in Greek as a digraph ου), 𐍈 (ƕ), and 𐌵 (q; interestingly not derived from Greek Qoppa—which figures merely as the numeral 90 𐍁—but a variant of 𐍀 p). 𐌸 þ (similarly to the Cyrillic ef Ф) is from Greek but seems derived from phi Φ rather than theta Θ.

𐍂 (r) and 𐍃 (s) appear derived from Latin rather than Greek. Likewise, the shape of 𐍆 (f) is probably derived from the Latin F rather than the Greek digamma Ϝ, since it takes the place of phi ϕ, not Ϝ, in alphabetical order.

𐍇 (x) is only used in proper names and loanwords containing Greek chi Χ (xristus "Christ", galiugaxristus "ψευδόχριστος", zaxarias "Zacharias", aivxaristia "eucharist").

Regarding the letters' numeric values, most correspond to that of the Greek numerals. The Gothic 𐌵 q takes the place of digamma Ϝ (6); 𐌾 j takes the place of xi ξ (60), 𐌿 u that of omicron Ο (70), and 𐍈 ƕ that of psi ψ (700).

[edit] Diacritics and punctuation

Diacritics and punctuation used in the Codex Argenteus include a trema placed on 𐌹 i, transliterated as ï, in general applied to express diaeresis, the Interpunct (·) and colon (:) as well as overlines to indicate sigla (such as xaus for xristaus).

[edit] Character encoding

The Gothic alphabet is encoded in Unicode in the range U+10330–U+1034F. As older software^[which?] often assumes that all Unicode codepoints can be expressed as 16 bit numbers (U+FFFF or lower), problems may be encountered using the Gothic alphabet Unicode range.

[edit] See also

• Gothic language
• Help:Gothic Unicode Fonts
• Runic alphabet
• Rune poem
• Blackletter

[edit] External links

• Omniglot's Gothic writing page
• Pater Noster in Gothic
• JavaScript Gothic transliterator
• Unicode code chart for Gothic
• WAZU JAPAN's Gallery of Gothic Unicode Fonts