The Gothic alphabet is an

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

used for writing the

Gothic language Gothic is an extinct East Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the '' Codex Argenteus'', a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizeable te ...

Ulfilas Ulfilas (–383), also spelled Ulphilas and Orphila, all Latinized forms of the unattested Gothic form *𐍅𐌿𐌻𐍆𐌹𐌻𐌰 Wulfila, literally "Little Wolf", was a Goth of Cappadocian Greek descent who served as a bishop and missio ...

(or Wulfila) developed it in the 4th century AD for the purpose of translating the Bible. The alphabet essentially uses uncial forms of the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as ...

, with a few additional letters to express Gothic phonology: *

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

F and G * a questionably Runic letter to distinguish the glide from

vocalic A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...

* the letter hwair () to express the Gothic labiovelar.

Origin

Ulfilas is thought to have consciously chosen to avoid the use of the older Runic alphabet for this purpose, as it was heavily connected with

pagan Paganism (from classical Latin ''pāgānus'' "rural", "rustic", later "civilian") is a term first used in the fourth century by early Christians for people in the Roman Empire who practiced polytheism, or ethnic religions other than Judaism. I ...

beliefs and customs. Also, the Greek-based script probably helped to integrate the Gothic nation into the dominant Greco-Roman culture around the

Black Sea The Black Sea is a marginal mediterranean sea of the Atlantic Ocean lying between Europe and Asia, east of the Balkans, south of the East European Plain, west of the Caucasus, and north of Anatolia. It is bounded by Bulgaria, Georgia, Rom ...

Letters

Below is a table of the Gothic alphabet. Two letters used in its

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or L ...

are not used in current English: thorn '' þ'' (representing ), and hwair (representing ). As with the Greek alphabet, Gothic letters were also assigned numerical values. When used as numerals, letters were written either between two dots (•• = 12) or with an overline ( = 12). Two letters, (90) and (900), have no phonetic value. The letter names are recorded in a 9th-century manuscript of Alcuin (

Codex Vindobonensis 795 The Codex Vindobonensis 795 (Vienna Austrian National Library Codex) is a 9th-century manuscript, most likely compiled in 798 or shortly thereafter (after Arno of Salzburg returned from Rome to become archbishop). It contains letters and treatises ...

). Most of them seem to be Gothic forms of names also appearing in the rune poems. The names are given in their attested forms followed by the reconstructed Gothic forms and their meanings. Most of the letters have been taken over directly from the

, though a few have been created or modified from

and possibly (more controversially) Runic letters to express unique phonological features of Gothic. These are: * (q; derived either from a form of Greek stigma/

digamma Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called ''wa ...

(

),Magnús Snædal (2015). "Gothic Contact with Latin" in ''Early Germanic Languages in Contact'', Ed. John Ole Askedal and Hans Frede Nielsen. or from a cursive variant of kappa (), which could strongly resemble a '' u'', or by inverting Greek pi (𐍀) /p/, perhaps due to similarity in the Gothic names: ''pairþa'' versus ''qairþa'') * (þ; derived either from Greek phi (Φ) /f/ or psi (Ψ) /ps/ with phonetic reassignment, or Runic ) * (j; derived from Latin G /ɡ/) * (u; possibly an allograph of Greek Ο (cf. the numerical values), or from Runic /u/) * (; derived from Greek Θ /θ/ with phonetic reassignment; possibly the letterform was switched with ) * (o; derived either from Greek Ω or from Runic , or from a cursive form of Greek Ο, as such a form was more common for omicron than for omega in this time period, and as the sound values of omicron and omega had already merged by this time.) (r), (s) and (f) appear to be derived from their Latin equivalents rather than from the Greek, although the equivalent Runic letters (, and ), assumed to have been part of the Gothic futhark, possibly played some role in this choice. However, Snædal claims that "Wulfila's knowledge of runes was questionable to say the least", as the paucity of inscriptions attests that knowledge and use of runes was rare among the East Germanic peoples. Some variants of (s) are shaped like a sigma and more obviously derive from the Greek Σ. (x) is only used in proper names and loanwords containing Greek Χ (''xristus'' "Christ", ''galiugaxristus'' "Pseudo-Christ", ''zaxarias'' "Zacharias", ''aiwxaristia'' "eucharist").Wright (1910:5). Regarding the letters' numeric values, most correspond to those of the

Greek numerals Greek numerals, also known as Ionic, Ionian, Milesian, or Alexandrian numerals, are a system of writing numbers using the letters of the Greek alphabet. In modern Greece, they are still used for ordinal numbers and in contexts similar to those ...

. Gothic takes the place of Ϝ (6), takes the place of ξ (60), that of Ο (70), and that of ψ (700).

Diacritics and punctuation

Diacritics and punctuation used in the Codex Argenteus include a

trema Trema may refer to: * a Greek and Latin root meaning ''hole'' * ''Tréma'', a word in French meaning diaeresis ** more generally, two dots (diacritic) * ''Trema'' (plant), a genus of about 15 species of small evergreen trees * Tréma (record la ...

placed on ''i'', transliterated as ''ï'', in general applied to express diaeresis, the

interpunct An interpunct , also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot and centered dot or centred dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in ancient Latin script. (Word-separating spaces did n ...

(·) and colon (:) as well as overlines to indicate sigla (such as ''xaus'' for ''xristaus'') and numerals. Codex Argenteus

Unicode

The Gothic alphabet was added to the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

Standard in March 2001 with the release of version 3.1. The Unicode block for Gothic is U+10330– U+1034F in the ''Supplementary Multilingual Plane''. As older software that uses UCS-2 (the predecessor of UTF-16) assumes that all Unicode codepoints can be expressed as 16 bit numbers (U+FFFF or lower, the ''Basic Multilingual Plane''), problems may be encountered using the Gothic alphabet Unicode range and others outside of the ''Basic Multilingual Plane''.

Notes

References

* Braune, Wilhelm (1952). ''Gotische Grammatik''. Halle: Max Niemeyer. * Cercignani, Fausto, "The Elaboration of the Gothic Alphabet and Orthography", in ''Indogermanische Forschungen'', 93, 1988, pp. 168–185. * Dietrich, Franz (1862). ''Über die Aussprache des Gotischen Wärend der Zeit seines Bestehens''. Marburg: N. G. Elwert'sche Universitätsbuchhandlung. * Friesen, Otto von (1915). "Gotische Schrift" in Hoops, J. ''Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, Bd. II''. pp. 306–310. Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner. * Haarmann, Harald (1991). ''Universalgeschichte der Schrift''. Frankfurt: Campus. * Jensen, Hans (1969). ''Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart''. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften. * Kirchhoff, Adolf (1854). ''Das gothische Runenalphabet''. Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz. * Mees, Bernard (2002/2003). "Runo-Gothica: the runes and the origin of Wulfila's script", in ''Die Sprache'', 43, pp. 55-79. * Streitberg, Wilhelm (1910). ''Gotisches Elementarbuch''. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. * Weingärtner, Wilhelm (1858). ''Die Aussprache des Gotischen zur Zeit Ulfilas''. Leipzig: T. O. Weigel. * Wright, Joseph (1910). ''Grammar of the Gothic Language''. Oxford:

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print book ...

. * Zacher, Julius (1855). ''Das gothische Alphabet Vulvilas und das Runenalphabet''. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus.

External links

Omniglot's Gothic writing pageJavaScript Gothic transliteratorUnicode code chart for GothicGNU FreeFont
Unicode font family with the Gothic range in a serif face. {{DEFAULTSORT:Gothic Alphabet Gothic writing Alphabets Obsolete writing systems Western calligraphy