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The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet for writing the Gothic language. It was developed in the 4th century AD by Ulfilas (or Wulfila), a Gothic preacher of Cappadocian Greek descent, for the purpose of translating the Bible.

The alphabet essentially uses uncial forms of the Greek alphabet, with a few additional letters from the Latin and Runic alphabets to express Gothic phonology.

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 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.

Letters

Below is a table of the Gothic alphabet. Two letters used in its transliteration are not used in current English: thorn (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). 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 Greek alphabet, though a few have been created or modified from Latin and possibly (more controversially) Runic letters to express unique phonological features of Gothic. These are:

* - q; possibly from a form of Greek stigma/digamma (),, from a cursive variant of kappa (), which could strongly resemble a '' u'', or from Latin minuscule q.
* - þ; derived either from Greek phi (Φ) /f/ or psi (Ψ) /ps/ with phonetic reassignment, Runic , or a cursive form of Ⲑ from the 4th century.
* - j; possibly from Latin G /ɡ/, Runic , Greek ξ, or the Greek epsilon-iota ligature.
* - u; possibly an allograph of Greek Ο (cf. the numerical values), or from Runic /u/)
* - ; potentially derived from Greek Θ /θ/ with phonetic reassignment; also potentially derived from Greek Ο /o/; possibly the letterform was switched with ; also possibly pictographic in nature, with O for rounding and • for aspiration.
* - 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, though the idea that it was derived from omicron does not explain why omega and occupy the same numerical spot, the similarity between the Gothic alphabet ending with and the Greek alphabet ending with Φ Χ Ψ Ω, or the fact that the Gothic alphabet is ordered from to like the Greek alphabet being ordered from Α to Ω.

(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. Miller refutes this claim, stating that it is "not implausible" that Wulfila used a runic script in his creation of the Gothic alphabet, noting six other authors—Wimmer, Mensel, Hermann, d'Alquen, Rousseau, and Falluomini—who support the idea of the Gothic alphabet having runic contributions. 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").

Regarding the letters' numeric values, most correspond to those of the Greek numerals. 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 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'') and numerals.

Unicode

The Gothic alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in March 2001 with the release of version 3.1.

The Unicode block for Gothic is – 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 ( or lower, the ''Basic Multilingual Plane''), problems may be encountered using the Gothic alphabet Unicode range and others outside of the ''Basic Multilingual Plane''.

See also

* Ring of Pietroassa
* Help:Gothic Unicode Fonts

Notes

References

Sources

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Further reading

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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.

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Gothic writing
Alphabets
Obsolete writing systems
Western calligraphy