Gothic | |
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Script type | |
Time period | From c. 350, in decline by 600 |
Direction | Left-to-right |
Languages | Gothic |
Related scripts | |
Parent systems | |
ISO 15924 | |
ISO 15924 | Goth(206),Gothic |
Unicode | |
Unicode alias | Gothic |
U+10330–U+1034F | |
History of the alphabet | ||
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The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet used 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. [1]
The alphabet essentially uses uncial forms of the Greek alphabet, with a few additional letters to express Gothic phonology:
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. [2] Also, the Greek-based script probably helped to integrate the Gothic nation into the dominant Greco-Roman culture around the Black Sea. [3]
Below is a table of the Gothic alphabet. [4] Two letters used in its transliteration are not used in current English: thorn þ (representing /θ/), and hwair ƕ (representing /hʷ/).
As with the Greek alphabet, Gothic letters were also assigned numerical values. When used as numerals, letters were written either between two dots (•𐌹𐌱• = 12) or with an overline (𐌹𐌱 = 12). Two letters, 𐍁 (90) and 𐍊 (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. [5]
Letter | Translit. | Compare | Gothic name | PGmc rune name | IPA | Numeric value | XML entity | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
𐌰 | a | Α, Ⲁ | aza < *ans "god" or asks "ash" | *ansuz | /a, aː/ | 1 | 𐌰 | |
𐌱 | b | Β, Ⲃ | bercna < *bairka "birch" | *berkanan | /b/ [ b , β ] | 2 | 𐌱 | |
𐌲 | g | Γ, Ⲅ | geuua < giba "gift" | *gebō | /ɡ/ [ ɡ , ɣ , x ]; /n/ [ ŋ ] | 3 | 𐌲 | |
𐌳 | d | Δ, D, Ⲇ | daaz < dags "day" | *dagaz | /d/ [ d , ð ] | 4 | 𐌳 | |
𐌴 | e | Ε, Ⲉ | eyz < aiƕs "horse" or eiws "yew" | *eihwaz, *ehwaz | /eː/ | 5 | 𐌴 | |
𐌵 | q | (Ϛ), ϰ, Ⲋ(?) | quetra < *qairþra ? or qairna "millstone" | (see *perþō) | /kʷ/ | 6 | 𐌵 | |
𐌶 | z | Ζ, Ⲍ | ezec < (?) [6] | *algiz | /z/ | 7 | 𐌶 | |
𐌷 | h | Η, Ⲏ | haal < *hagal or *hagls "hail" | *haglaz | /h/, /x/ | 8 | 𐌷 | |
𐌸 | þ (th) | Φ, Ψ, Ⲑ | thyth < þiuþ "good" or þaurnus "thorn" | *thurisaz | /θ/ | 9 | 𐌸 | |
𐌹 | i | Ι, Ⲓ | iiz < *eis "ice" | *īsaz | /i/ | 10 | 𐌹 | |
𐌺 | k | Κ, Ⲕ | chozma < *kusma or kōnja "pine sap" | *kaunan | /k/ | 20 | 𐌺 | |
𐌻 | l | Λ, Ⲗ | laaz < *lagus "sea, lake" | *laguz | /l/ | 30 | 𐌻 | |
𐌼 | m | Μ, Ⲙ | manna < manna "man" | *mannaz | /m/ | 40 | 𐌼 | |
𐌽 | n | Ν, Ⲛ | noicz < nauþs "need" | *naudiz | /n/ | 50 | 𐌽 | |
𐌾 | j | G, ᛃ, Ⲝ(?) | gaar < jēr "year" | *jēran | /j/ | 60 | 𐌾 | |
𐌿 | u | ᚢ , Ⲟ(?) | uraz < *ūrus "aurochs" | *ūruz | /ʊ/, /uː/ | 70 | 𐌿 | |
𐍀 | p | Π, Ⲡ | pertra < *pairþa ? | *perþō | /p/ | 80 | 𐍀 | |
𐍁 | Ϙ, Ϥ | 90 | 90 | 𐍁 | ||||
𐍂 | r | R, Ⲣ | reda < *raida "wagon" | *raidō | /r/ | 100 | 𐍂 | |
𐍃 | s | S, Ⲥ | sugil < sauil or sōjil "sun" | *sôwilô | /s/ | 200 | 𐍃 | |
𐍄 | t | Τ, ᛏ, Ⲧ | tyz < *tius "the god Týr" | *tīwaz | /t/ | 300 | 𐍄 | |
𐍅 | w | Υ, Ⲩ | uuinne < winja "field, pasture" or winna "pain" | *wunjō | /w/, /y/ | 400 | 𐍅 | |
𐍆 | f | Ϝ, F, Ⲫ(?) | fe < faihu "cattle, wealth" | *fehu | /ɸ/ | 500 | 𐍆 | |
𐍇 | x | Χ, Ⲭ | enguz < *iggus or *iggws "the god Yngvi" | *ingwaz | /k/ [7] | 600 | 𐍇 | |
𐍈 | ƕ (hw) | Θ, Ⲯ(?) | uuaer < * hwair "kettle" | /hʷ/, /ʍ/ | 700 | 𐍈 | ||
𐍉 | ō | Ω, Ο, ᛟ , Ⲱ | utal < *ōþal "ancestral land" | *ōþala | /oː/ | 800 | 𐍉 | |
𐍊 | ᛏ, Ͳ (Ϡ), Ⳁ | 900 | 𐍊 |
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 [8] ) Runic letters to express unique phonological features of Gothic. These are:
𐍂 (r), 𐍃 (s) and 𐍆 (f) appear to be derived from their Latin equivalents rather than from the Greek, although the equivalent Runic letters ( ᚱ , ᛋ and ᚠ ), assumed to have been part of the Gothic futhark, possibly played some role in this choice. [12] 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. [8] Some variants of 𐍃 (s) are shaped like a sigma and more obviously derive from the Greek Σ. [8]
𐍇 (x) is only used in proper names and loanwords containing Greek Χ (xristus "Christ", galiugaxristus "Pseudo-Christ", zaxarias "Zacharias", aiwxaristia "eucharist"). [13]
Regarding the letters' numeric values, most correspond to those of the Greek numerals. Gothic 𐌵 takes the place of Ϝ (6), 𐌾 takes the place of ξ (60), 𐌿 that of Ο (70), and 𐍈 that of ψ (700).
Diacritics and punctuation used in the Codex Argenteus include a trema placed on 𐌹i, 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.
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 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.
Gothic [1] [2] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF) | ||||||||||||||||
0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | |
U+1033x | 𐌰 | 𐌱 | 𐌲 | 𐌳 | 𐌴 | 𐌵 | 𐌶 | 𐌷 | 𐌸 | 𐌹 | 𐌺 | 𐌻 | 𐌼 | 𐌽 | 𐌾 | 𐌿 |
U+1034x | 𐍀 | 𐍁 | 𐍂 | 𐍃 | 𐍄 | 𐍅 | 𐍆 | 𐍇 | 𐍈 | 𐍉 | 𐍊 | |||||
Notes |
D, or d, is the fourth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is dee, plural dees.
T, or t, is the twentieth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is tee, plural tees.
Ulfilas (Greek: Ουλφίλας; c. 311 – 383), known also as Wulfila(s) or Urphilas, was a 4th century Gothic preacher of Cappadocian Greek descent. He was the apostle to the Gothic people.
The Old Italic scripts are a family of ancient writing systems used on the Italian Peninsula between about 700 and 100 BC, for various languages spoken in that time and place. The most notable member is the Etruscan alphabet, which was the immediate ancestor of the Latin alphabet used by more than 100 languages today, including English. The runic alphabets used in Northern Europe are believed to have been separately derived from one of these alphabets by the 2nd century AD.
The Coptic script is the script used for writing the Coptic language, the latest stage of Egyptian. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the uncial Greek alphabet, augmented by letters borrowed from the Egyptian Demotic. It was the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language. There are several Coptic alphabets, as the script varies greatly among the various dialects and eras of the Coptic language.
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ used in English and French, in which the letters ⟨a⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the first ligature and the letters ⟨o⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, ⟨f⟩ and ⟨i⟩ are often merged to create ⟨fi⟩ ; the same is true of ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ to create ⟨st⟩. The common ampersand, ⟨&⟩, developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters ⟨e⟩ and ⟨t⟩ were combined.
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.
Hwair is the name of 𐍈, the Gothic letter expressing the or sound. Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature ƕ used to transcribe Gothic.
The reconstructed Proto-Germanic name of the Elder Futhark u rune ᚢ is *Ūruz meaning "wild ox" or *Ūrą "water". It may have been derived from the Raetic alphabet character u as it is similar in both shape and sound value. The name of the corresponding letter in the Gothic alphabet is urus.
The Elder Futhark, also known as the Older Futhark, Old Futhark, or Germanic Futhark, is the oldest form of the runic alphabets. It was a writing system used by Germanic peoples for Northwest Germanic dialects in the Migration Period. Inscriptions are found on artifacts including jewelry, amulets, plateware, tools, and weapons, as well as runestones in Scandinavia, from the 2nd to the 10th centuries.
The Mandaic alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Mandaic language. It is thought to have evolved between the second and seventh century CE from either a cursive form of Aramaic or from Inscriptional Parthian. The exact roots of the script are difficult to determine. It was developed by members of the Mandaean faith of Lower Mesopotamia to write the Mandaic language for liturgical purposes. Classical Mandaic and its descendant Neo-Mandaic are still in limited use. The script has changed very little over centuries of use.
Algiz is the name conventionally given to the "z-rune" ᛉ of the Elder Futhark runic alphabet. Its transliteration is z, understood as a phoneme of the Proto-Germanic language, the terminal *z continuing Proto-Indo-European terminal *s via Verner's law.
The history of the alphabet goes back to the consonantal writing system used to write Semitic languages in the Levant during the 2nd millennium BCE. Nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic script. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and Pakistan, mainly through Ancient South Arabian, Phoenician and the closely related Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, and later Aramaic and the Nabatean—derived from the Aramaic alphabet and developed into the Arabic alphabet—five closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE.
Unicode has a certain amount of duplication of characters. These are pairs of single Unicode code points that are canonically equivalent. The reason for this are compatibility issues with legacy systems.
The Gothic Bible or Wulfila Bible is the Christian Bible in the Gothic language spoken by the Eastern Germanic (Gothic) tribes in the Early Middle Ages.
The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, and technically Latin writing system is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy. The Greek alphabet was altered by the Etruscans, and subsequently their alphabet was altered by the Romans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.
Komi Nje is a letter of the Molodtsov alphabet, a variant of Cyrillic. It was used only in the writing of the Komi language in the 1920s.
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 text corpus. All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loanwords in other, mainly Romance, languages.
B, or b, is the second letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is bee, plural bees.
Ernst Julius August Zacher was a German philologist.