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"."

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Infobox Writing system
name=Gothic
languages=Gothic language
type=Alphabet
time=Before 300, in decline by 500
fam1=Mostly Greek, with Latin and Runic influences
iso15924=GothThe Gothic alphabet is an alphabetic writing system attributed by PhilostorgiusFact|date=October 2007 to Ulfilas (also known as Wulfila), used exclusively for writing the ancient Gothic language. Before its creation in the fourth century in Nicopolis ad Istrum (modern Bulgaria), Gothic was possibly written in runes. It was primarily used by Ulfilas 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 the Runic alphabet.

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 unicode|"ƕ" (hwair). These represent sounds like the "th" in "thin" and the voiceless "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; these are "j",; u is expressed in Greek as a digraph ου), "unicode|ƕ",and ., since it takes the place of Φ, not digamma, in alphabetical order.").

Regarding the letters' numeric values, most correspond to that of the Greek numerals. (700).

Diacritics and punctuation

Diacritics and punctuation used in the Codex Argenteus include a trema placed on (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.

ee also

* Gothic language
*
* Runic alphabet
* Rune poem
* Blackletter

External links

* [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/gothic.htm Omniglot's Gothic writing page]
* [http://www.christusrex.org/www1/pater/JPN-gothic.html Pater Noster in Gothic]
* [http://marnanel.org/gothic JavaScript Gothic transliterator]
* [http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U10330.pdf Unicode code chart for Gothic]
* [http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Gothic.html WAZU JAPAN's Gallery of Gothic Unicode Fonts]