Gothic alphabet
The Gothic alphabet is an alphabetic writing system attributed to Wulfila used exclusively for writing the ancient Gothic language. Before its creation, Gothic was written in Gothic runes. It was primarily used by Wulfilas 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.
As with the Greek alphabet, there were no numbers; letters served dual purposes. They are generally written with an overdot or overbar when serving as numbers. Two of the letters are used only as numbers.
Below is a table of the Gothic alphabet. Two letters are used in its transliteration that English speakers may be unfamiliar with: þ (thorn) and ƕ (hwair). These represent sounds like the th in 'thin' and a breathy w respectively. The þ was originally a Rune, adopted into the Latin alphabet to write Old English. It is still used to write Icelandic. The letter hwair was invented solely to be able to translate the Gothic alphabet on a one-to-one basis.
The letter names are recorded in a 9th century manuscript of Alcuin.
| Letter
| Translit.
| Name
| SAMPA
| Numeric value
|
| 𐌰 | a | ahsa | /a, a:/ | 1
|
| 𐌱 | b | bairkan | /b/ | 2
|
| 𐌲 | g | giba | /g/ | 3
|
| 𐌳 | d | dags | /d, ð/ | 4
|
| 𐌴 | e | aiƕus (aihvus) | /e, e:/ | 5
|
| 𐌵 | q | qairþra (qairthra) | /k_w/ | 6
|
| 𐌶 | z | iuja | /z/ | 7
|
| 𐌷 | h | hagl | /h/ | 8
|
| 𐌸 | þ, th | þiuþ (thiuth) | /T/ | 9
|
| 𐌹 | i | eis | /i, i:/ | 10
|
| 𐌺 | k | kusma | /k/ | 20
|
| 𐌻 | l | lagus | /l/ | 30
|
| 𐌼 | m | manna | /m/ | 40
|
| 𐌽 | n | nauþs (nauths) | /n/ | 50
|
| 𐌾 | j | jer | /j/ | 60
|
| 𐌿 | u | urus | /u, u:/ | 70
|
| 𐍀 | p | pairþra (pairthra) | /p/ | 80
|
| 𐍁 | | | | 90
|
| 𐍂 | r | raida | /r/ | 100
|
| 𐍃 | s | sauil | /s/ | 200
|
| 𐍄 | t | teiws | /t/ | 300
|
| 𐍅 | w | winja | /w, y/ | 400
|
| 𐍆 | f | faihu | /f/ | 500
|
| 𐍇 | x | iggws | /k_h/ | 600
|
| 𐍈 | ƕ, hv, hw | ƕair (hvair) | /W/ | 700
|
| 𐍉 | o | oþal (othal) | /o, o:/ | 800
|
| 𐍊 | | | | 900
|
See also: Gothic language
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 number (smaller than 10000HEX or 65536), problems may be encountered using the Gothic alphabet Unicode range.
