Gothic alphabet
This article is about the 4th century alphabet of the Gothic bible. Blackletter typefaces for the Latin alphabet are sometimes referred to as "Gothic script". |
Representation of the Gothic alphabet surrounding its inventor Ulfilas. |
The
Gothic alphabet is an alphabetic writing system attributed by
Philostorgius to
Wulfila, used exclusively for writing the ancient
Gothic language. Before its creation in the
fourth century, Gothic was possibly
written in runes. It was primarily used by Wulfila to translate the
Bible into Gothic. It appears to be derived from the
Greek alphabet with some borrowings from the
Latin one. The names clearly derive from the names of runes.
Below is a table of the Gothic alphabet. Two letters used in its
transliteration are not used in current English:
þ (þiuþ,
thorn) and (
hwair, a
h+v ligature ). These represent sounds like the
th in
thin and a breathy
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 (other than the
Elder Futhark even featuring letters for the
labiovelars); these are
j,
u (expressed in Greek as a digraph ου),
,and
q (interestingly not derived from Greek
koppa, which figures merely as the numeral 90
, but a variant of
p).
þ similalry to Cyrillic
Ф seems derived from Greek
Φ rather than
Θ.
r and
s appear derived from the Latin rather than the Greek alphabet. Likewise, the shape of
f is derived from Latin F rather than Greek
digamma, since it takes the place of Φ, not digamma, in alphabetical order.
x is only used in proper names and loanwords containing Greek
X (
xristus "
Christ",
galiugaxristus "
ψευδόχριστος",
zaxarias "
Zacharias",
aivxaristia "
eucharist").
Regarding the letters' numeric values, most correspond to that of the
Greek numerals.
q takes the place of
digamma (6);
j takes the place of
ξ (60),
u that of
ο (70)
that of
ψ (700).
Diacritics and punctuation used in the
Codex Argenteus include a
trema placed on
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).
The Gothic alphabet is encoded in
Unicode in the range U+10330"U+1034F. As older software often assumes that all Unicode codepoints can be expressed as 16
bit numbers (smaller than U+10000), problems may be encountered using the Gothic alphabet Unicode range.
*
Gothic language*
Runic alphabet*
Rune poem*
Omniglot's Gothic writing page*
Pater Noster in Gothic*
JavaScript Gothic transliterator*
Unicode code chart for GothicFonts
*David McCreedy's Gallery of Gothic Unicode Fonts
*Code 2001 freeware font including Gothic
