Gothic alphabet

This article is about the 4th century alphabet of the Gothic bible. Blackletter typefaces are sometimes also referred to as "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 possibly written in 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.

The letters

Below is a table of the Gothic alphabet. Two non-English letters are used in its transliteration: þ (þiuþ, thorn) and ƕ (hwair). These represent sounds like the th in thin and a breathy wh respectively. The þ is used to write Old English and Icelandic. The letter hwair is transcribed by ƕ, a h+v ligature created for this purpose, and used only to transcribe Gothic.

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.

The letter names are recorded in a 9th century manuscript of Alcuin. 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.

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. See got:Wikipedia:Gothic_Unicode_Fonts

See also

• Gothic language
• Runic alphabet
• Rune poem

External links

• Omniglot's Gothic writing page
• Unicode code chart for Gothic
• Code 2001 freeware font including Gothic