The Gothic Alphabet

A look at the ancient Greek-derived alphabet used to write Gothic (note: not in any way identical to the fonts often called "Gothic" today).

[bob___]

On why Wulfila would have developed a new alphabet for the Bible, instead of using runes, Wulfila's alphabet seems well adapted for writing with a quill, where runes seem to be well adapted for inscription.

[dcdcdc]

Counterpoint to the social/religious aspect of scripts: yiddish is often written in the Hebrew rather than the Roman script, and I think other Jewish dialects/languages like Ladino may be similar. Of course, the Jewish ethnoreligious identity has historically been stronger than and different from, say, Gothic. In the migration period generally, ethnic designations seem very fluid, and people from diverse linguistic backgrounds like Hunnic, Gothic, and Alan, were often under the same tribal confederations. (Though perhaps after Christianization, there was an identification between Goths and Arianism, but that's maybe just a tangent spurred by too much coffee?)

[astrOtuba]

11:16 A minor correction. Bulgarian is a South Slavic language.
And the Cyrillic script was created for Church Slavonic, a literary language based on medieval Bulgarian with Greek loanwords for the religious stuff. It replaced an earlier Glagolitic script (ⰃⰎⰀⰃⰑⰎⰉⰜⰀ¹) which is now used only by nerds, and freaks who believe it connects you to the cosmic powers, but it was used in Croatia until 19th century

1. Android renders it using the later Croatian blocky font and Windows use the earlier Bulgarian rounded font by default

[travelingonline]

The longer I look at runes the more I am convinced that they all came from Greek rather than Latin. Massilia as a Greek colony did have amber trade and there is no reason to believe that Germanic and Greek traders would not know of each other. Looking at this Gothic alphabet, I think that Greek Koppa existed and continued to be used as the number sign for 90. And it was written with "half circle" opening to the upper left. So both the Gothic "q" as well the Gothic "j" look very similar to original Greek Koppa. Further, the Gothic "hw" may also be an Omikron. If you turn a Theta you get a Phi. And finally Digamma was a Greek letter used to denote the number 6. So there is no need to assume that Ulfila copied anything from Latin in creating his alphabet.

[marjae]

I'm partial to the Wulfilan alphabet, but it's a *lot* easier if you have larger and smaller letters, if you have closed Rs that don't look like Ks, etc. So far, Skeirs is most readable font I've found for it.

[janetchennault]

Thank you for pointing out the letter-names of the Gothic alphabet per Alcuin.

[stevelknievel]

Although I'm not one myself, Scottish and Irish speakers of English generally don't have the wine-whine merger and as such still pronounce 'wh' as [ʍ] rather than [w].

[quinn]

Thank you! I love looking at all these languages through your lens!

[pierreabbat]

The font used in Wiktionary I have trouble reading; the letters B, K, and R look confusingly similar. The font you show is easier to read, but the Δ, while clearly distinct from A, looks like some font of a. I think there should be a Gothic font that looks like the Latin and Greek capital alphabets, except for those letters that don't, like hwair.

[PrestonRobertNorris]

Venetic and Lepontic use versions of phi that look more like a theta with a vertical line (Φ without the line surpassing the circle)—Venetic /b/, Lepontic /p~b/. Wondering if there is a variant Phi in some Greek alphabet maybe combined with a dialect that pronounces phi as a bilabial affricate [pφ] or maybe fricative [φ] circa 300AD. If so, maybe Wulfila sources the /hw/ letter from phi an not theta.

The distance between [pφ~φ] and [hw] might seem large, but it reminds me of English transcription of Maori bilabial fricative [φ] as <wh>

There’s at least 3 logical leaps here, very unlikely this is the real story, but I’m planting a flag here

[SplendidMisanthropy]

Concerning ease of reading, it‘s a matter of exposure, I guess. I have no trouble at all reading „gebrochene Schrift“ (Fraktur) but I constantly struggle with „Deutsche Schrift“ (Sütterlin).

[reesheidi]

Thanks! Been looking for the Gothic alphabet for a while.

[instantramen_]

Wanted to give another point on the religious aspect of scripts - in the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are several instances of writing God's name in paleo-hebrew script, while the rest of the text is in the later aramaic hebrew script. It definitely points to the script choice having some theological weight in their cultural context, especially as parts of the tanakh were likely originally written in paleo-hebrew.

[Cjinglaterra]

Missourian here. I think I'm a couple years younger than you (I'm 36), but I too still pronounce WH in most circumstances. And once again, I don't know many other folks who do.

[tjstarr]

For the Gothic Alphabet, the influence from Greek, or some Greek-derived alphabet is undeniable, but we have to consider the possibility that Wulfilas possibly had some knowledge of the Latin script, but it is more speculative to say it has influence from the Runic Script, or "Futhark". The shape of letters like lambda and gamma and pi and especially chi are similar to the Greek letters, as well as the order of the letters (mostly, with some Latin influence, for example the "F" or "V" letter ((Digamma in Greek)) appearing after "U" or "W"), The use of upsilon Y for the /w/ sound conclusively proves the Greek influence for me, as well as the alphabetical order. The letters R and S look very similar to the Latin alphabet, but the S could have come from some kinds of Greek scripts that had a 3-stroke sigma. The only letters that show any similarity to Runes are the "U" letter looking like and upside-down "V", and possibly the "G" or "Y" letter "Gaar". This letter possibly shows the bilingualism (or, at least knowledge of both Latin and Greek) of Wulfilas. Because "G" can be palatalized in Greek to a "Y" sound before the vowel /i/, Also, Alcuin cites the letter names being similar to the Runic names, but we don't know if these are the "original" letter names in Gothic, or if Alcuin was being influenced by his own knowledge of the Runic letter names.

[ediable]

Great video but unfortunately the volume is very low!

[KristopherCarlyle]

I imagine others have pointed it out, but your videos are extremely quite compared to the average YouTube video.
I like to put your videos while I get work done, but in order to make your video audible I have to crank my computer's volume up to double or triple what it was for the last video from any other channel, to the point where any other notification or sound my computer makes can be heard by my neighbors. Your videos would be much more enjoyable and informative (at least for me) if you sampled some other videos on the site and matched the volume of your videos to them.

[gregoryheers]

9:12 Noo! Please don't be shed off the living body of American English! I love hearing your aspirated "wh-" and have tried doing it myself. :)

[RoyalKnightVIII]

14:05 indeed but l think it might be a more modern idea. Cyrillic vs Latin does carry some religious connotation. You do sew Cyrillic be used as a shorthand for barbaric russians or whatever nonsense people wrote now

[midtskogen]

The Gothic alphabet doesn't have the distinction between s and z as in Proto-Norse for earlier s and later Norse r, which makes me wonder whether there truly was no distinction or if it's from Greek influense which didn't distinguish between the s and sh sounds suggesting that Gothic nominative s was devoiced into the sh sound.