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".

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.

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 (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.

Letter	Translit.	c.f.	IPA
a	Α	ahsa / aza	1
b	Β	bairkan / bercna	2
g	Γ	giba / geuua	3
d	Δ	dags / daaz	4
e	Ε	aiƕus / eyz	5
q	Π	qairþra (qairthra) / qertra	6
z	Ζ	ezec	7
h	H	hagl / haal	8
þ, th	Θ	þiuþ (thiuth) / thyth	9
i	Ι	eis / iiz	10
k	Κ	kusma / chozma	20
l	Λ	lagus / laaz	30
m	Μ	manna	40
n	Ν	nauþs (nauths) / noicz	50
j	ᛃ	jer / gaar	60
u	ᚢ	urus / uraz	70
p	Π	pairþra (pairthra) / pertra	80
	Ϟ		90
r	R	raida / reda	100
s	S	sauil / sugil	200
t	Τ	teiws / tyz	300
w	Υ	winja / uuinne	400
f	F	faihu / fe	500
x	X	iggws / enguz	600
, hw		/ uuaer	700
o	Ω	oþal (othal) / utal	800
	Ϡ		900

j, u (expressed in Greek as a digraph ου), , q (interestingly not derived from Greek koppa, which figures merely as the numeral 90 Gothic 90.png, but a variant of Gothic p.png p). Gothic th.png þ similalry to Cyrillic Ф seems derived from Greek Φ rather than Θ. r and Gothic s.png s appear derived from the Latin rather than the Greek alphabet. Likewise, the shape of Gothic f.png 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").

q takes the place of digamma (6); Gothic j.png j takes the place of ξ (60), Gothic u.png u that of ο (70) Gothic hw.png that of ψ (700).

Diacritics and punctuation

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).

Character encoding

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.

External links

Fonts

Alphabetic writing systems | Gothic writing | Monolingual writing systems

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Gothic alphabet

The letters

Diacritics and punctuation

Character encoding

See also

External links