Talk:Gothic alphabet

Untitled

i trust that you guys have done your research: most lists show the Gothic with the TH as WH & v.v.

script origins explanation

I'd suggest moving the text discussing whether the script came from Greek, Latin or whatever to a separate section towards the end. Most people will want to get a quick overview of what this is about, then see an example, and then get the details. Just an idea.

Suggestion.

I'm having trouble saving the other article right now (/Temp). I'm getting an SQL error. Here's what I want to submit: --Kesuari 14:07, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[It worked today so I've removed the text. --Kesuari 14:55, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)

iuja

the Unicode specs give "iuja" for the z letter, but I was unable to verify this. Rather, the letter seems to have been called ezec. I trust the Patrologia Latina better than Unicode on this, and will therefore change it, but I would like to know where the iuja originated... dab (ᛏ) 12:04, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Unicode chart

Can anybody make a Unicode table similar to those found at other alphabet articles? I see the PDF but before I download a Gothic font and copy it does anybody have a font already? (Yes, I have Windows 2000 so I do have Unicode writing capabilities and I do have Arial Unicode MS which doesn't seem to cover Gothic) Wikiacc 21:16, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Fonts?

Has anybody had *any* luck getting any font including the Gothic alphabet to work with Mozilla (Seamonkey, 1.7.11) under Windows XP? I've tried and installed all the fonts linked on got:Wikipedia:Gothic Unicode Fonts, as well as some more mentioned in the gothic-l Yahoo group, but without any luck whatsoever. Internet Explorer and Opera also suffer from the same problems, so I'm pretty sure it's not just Mozilla acting up.

Any help would be very appreciated. -- Schnee (cheeks clone) 20:08, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Gothic fonts are in Plane 1 of Unicode, which is not as well supported as the Basic Multi Lingual Plane. It could be that WinXP just doesn't support it, in which case you just might not have any luck. But I don't really know anything about WinXP. —Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 01:39, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm using Mozilla under Windows XP and I can see the Gothic letters since I downloaded Code2001. I can't get them to work in Microsoft Word (where when I look at "Insert symbol" for Code2001 there don't seem to be any Gothic letters), but it works in Mozilla. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 10:58, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

Gothic letter in the edit tools box

The Gothic letter ƕ is now available in the edit tools box. Click on the drop-down menu and select "Indo-European"; it's the last one. þ is there too. --Angr (tɔk) 09:12, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Comment on Futhark removed

I have removed a comment from the section on the letters. After the phrase, "a few letters are innovated to accurately express Gothic phonology", the following words appeared: "(other than the Elder Futhark even featuring letters for the labiovelars)".

I understand from this that the Elder Futhark featured letters for the labiovelars. What I don't understand entirely is how it links with its context, either topically or grammatically. The lack of comma after Futhark gives the impression that the Futhark has LV letters, while Gothic doesn't, whereas the reverse is true. The main puzzle is the use of the words other than. I suspect that the writer is not a native English speaker, and is using other to mean unlike.

I am guessing the writer intended to say, ...a few letters are innovated to express more accurately the Gothic phonology, including special letters for the labiovelars, which are not found in the Elder Futhark.

As I am not sure that this is the writer's intent, I leave it to him/her to make the change. Copey 2 14:44, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

the writer's intent was, of course, to express the fact that the Gothic alphabet has labiovelars while the Elder Futhark do not: you would have been most welcome to replace the offending 'other than' with 'unlike'. The point is that the Gothic names for LV letters (quaithra, hwair) have no precedent in runic letter names. q∀p (ᛎ) 14:50, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

þ,hw and the Greek alphabet

It's surprising that discussions on the derivation of the Gothic alphabet never seem to take note of the fact that while þ has the alphabetic position and (later Greek) pronunciation of θ (theta), it has the form of ψ (psi); and conversely, hw has the alphabetic position of ψ, but the old uncial form of θ. Has anyone seen any discussion of this? It makes me wonder how Wulfila wrote Greek. Copey 2 15:11, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Even if it is a bit late, but you can find a mention in "Gotisches Elementarbuch, Wolfgang Binning", page 45. He mentions that the signs are more propably derrived from what you are saying. Zylbath (talk) 17:31, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

yes,The good Bishop spoke & wrote Greek,after all,he did translate from Greek to Gothic.

What ever mystifies me is the transposition of theta & psi,because these sounds have Rune letter equivalents: þ as θ, & hw as ψ, for, if one examine Runes, he will see these letters there, along with R. Wulfilas was not ignorant of Roman letters,& he used them where the Runes resembled them. I do sometimes wonder whether the copyist got them mixed up in the Codex Argentus.AptitudeDesign (talk) 07:28, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

ligature

how is ƕ not a ligature? it's a straightforward contraction of h+w. dab (ᛏ) 10:20, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

The same way that w is not one (a straightforward contraction of v+v or u+u). Hwair is never used to contract h+w, but only to transcribe a single letter from another alphabet. I cannot find any sources of Hwair being used as a ligature, i.e. outside of Gothic transcriptions. -- Jordi·✆ 11:28, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

hwair isn't even used anywhere outside Gothic. Yes it is a "letter" but that doesn't change its status as ligature, and is thus perfectly at home at Ligature_(typography)#Letters_originating_as_ligatures, together with w, I agree. Æ is a ligature, I am sure you'll agree, and still has "letter" status in some languages. "ligature" isn't the opposite of "letter", it's a typographical term. ƕ doesn't contrast with hw in Gothic: it is a ligature typographically, and a digraph orthographically, and represents a phoneme linguistically/semiotically. dab (ᛏ) 12:06, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure that's a useful categorization; Æ is a ligature because in many languages it's a connected form of AE. Hwair, on the other hand, may look like a ligature, but it doesn't connect two different letters.--Prosfilaes 14:17, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Exactly. Hwair is not H+W, as it cannot be used as a ligature: no-one would ever write Higƕater. Æ in modern English is a ligature, as it can replace the letter combination ae seemingly at will: mediaeval can be written mediæval etc.. But in Icelandic AE is not a ligature, but a letter. Not that it is authorative in any way, but even the Unicode Consortium does not call Hwair a ligature: neither the lowercase nor the uppercase form has the formal or informal alias LATIN LIGATURE HW. Compare to AE which can be a ligature: it has the name LATIN SMALL LETTER AE (letter, not ligature because of languages like Icelandic) and the formal alias LATIN SMALL LIGATURE AE.

Hwair has the same status as w, which nobody calls a ligature even though it clearly is v+v, as it is never used as one. Ergo, Hwair is not a ligature, it just resembles one. -- Jordi·✆ 14:40, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

The reason AE is labelled as it is in Unicode is as much due to politics as anything; it was named one, then the other, and they finally choose one (and said that they would never ever change a name again, no matter how wrong or absurd) and put the other as a formal alias, since it was the Unicode 1.0 name.--Prosfilaes 15:15, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

True (Unicode naming is absured), but this does point out that no-one since Unicode 1.1.0 (June 1993), [1] has ever seen a need for a ligature hw alias, as Hwair is never called a ligature. It is a letter, not a ligature. -- Jordi·✆ 15:40, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

It would make perfect sense to instruct a typesetting engine to render hv as ƕ in a language="got" span, hence, in Gothic transliteration (and nowhere else), ƕ is a ligature of hv. (click here for the long version) dab (ᛏ) 14:49, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

And if you were going to be dealing with ASCII text, it would make perfect sense to instruct a typesetting engine to render th in Middle English as þ. But that doesn't make either of them ligatures, or such behavior the correct behavior when dealing with non-ASCII mangled text. Hwair may have arose as a typographic ligature, but it's not a ligature. Ligatures do contrast with letters; ligatures are typographical features that don't typically appear in handwriting and don't appear at the conceptual level of text, whereas letters do appear in handwriting and at the conceptual level of text. Handwritten Gothic in the Latin script would have hwair, thus it's not a ligature.--Prosfilaes 15:35, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

(SIGH) The Gothic script doesn't even have H and W. Saying hwair is a ligature of H and W is like saying theta is a ligature of T and H. The Old Macintosh (talk) 15:00, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

The letter Ƕ is just a Latin letter used to transliterate the Gothic 𐍈. The top talks about the Gothic hwair, not the Latin one.

― Greater Intosh 10:26, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

Given the apparent majority view in the discussion above, and my own perception that ƕ cannot possibly be a ligature (i.e. typographic combination) of the letters 𐌷 and 𐌿, nor 𐌷 and 𐍅, I have just removed the phrase "the ligature" describing the letter ƕ. This phrase first appeared in the as of 14:29, 11 December 2009 by User:Varoon Arya, with no changes since then.

Incidentally, I find that the letter ƕ when rendered in bold appears as ƕ, which does indeed look like a ligature of Latin h and u here on my machine, but this is likely just an artifact of the font Mozilla is using to render this page (probably Skeirs). Meanwhile, Gothic Hwair as a glyph similar to Greek Theta, as shown in the table in the article itself, is in no way a ligature. Cheers, -- Erik Anderson 205.166.76.15 (talk) 20:25, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

This wasn't just pulled out of thin air. Standard reference works such as W. Braune's Gotische Grammatik plainly refer to ƕ as a ligature (Balg, in the introduction to his English edition, does the same). Pullum and Ladusaw (Phonetic Symbol Guide, University of Chicago, 1986, pg. 73) also refer to it specifically as a ligature, as does W. Lehmann (Auwera and König (Eds.) The Germanic Languages, 1994, pg. 21), and about a dozen others - more if you start counting journal articles. What justification is there for changing the article when numerous respected sources can be provided demonstrating the same useage? 84.75.167.144 (talk) 06:46, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

All I can think, not having read the sources you mention, is that there must be some other meaning of the word "ligature" that these folks intend. The Wikipedia article on ligatures agrees with what I recall learning as the meaning of the term.

In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms" where the specific shape of a letter depends on context such as surrounding letters or proximity to the end of a line.

If we agree on this definition for what a ligature is, then we must agree that the Gothic letter ƕ is not a ligature -- that it is not a combination of two or more graphemes.

Or is your argument that the Gothic letter ƕ is in fact a combination of multiple graphemes? If so, which ones?

FWIW, Braune's Gotische Grammatik as scanned by Google describes hwair as (search for "hv"):

• On page 2: Von den 25 zeichen des gotischen alphabets fallen in der transcription zwei weg (hv, kv), da sie nur einfache zeichen für zweifachen laut sind. -- not a ligature.

• On page 17: Die lautverbindungen kv und hv haben im gotischen alphabet eigene einfache zeichen. -- not a ligature.

• On page 24: Für hv hat das got. Alphabet ein einheitliches zeichen. -- not a ligature.

I suppose Google's OCR might be faulty, but it appears that the book does not include a single instance of the word Ligatur. Neither does the German-language page de:Gotisches_Alphabet.

-- Cheers, Erik Anderson -- 205.166.76.15 (talk) 23:46, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Quick postscript -- Google's scan of Balg's English-language edition only mentions "ligature" twice, in reference to using the Latin-alphabet ligature of h+v to render Gothic hwair. Pullum and Ladusaw only mention "Gothic" in relation to this and other Latin-alphabet characters used for transliteration. This makes me wonder if you might be having font display issues? The character that others and I are describing as not a ligature looks like a circle with a dot in it, and is the 25th letter of the Gothic alphabet. The character that Balg, Pullum, et al are describing as definitely a ligature looks like a Latin-alphabet h combined with a Latin-alphabet v or u, and is *not* a letter in the Gothic alphabet, though it is indeed a ligature (combination of multiple graphemes). Perhaps this is the crux of the issue? -- Cheers, Erik Anderson -- 205.166.76.15 (talk) 23:56, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

References

Why does this article not have any references? WP policy stipulates articles must be based on verifiable published books. Having a section of external links at the bottom is not sufficient.
Arbo talk 14:02, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Because it doesn't? That's not the most carefully followed policy in Wikipedia, and nobody really enforces it on minor, uncontroversial articles like this one. http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch13.pdf is one source; http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/germanic/aa_texts.html has some older books.--Prosfilaes 14:13, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

The article could be significantly improved with inline references. Since I am not an active contributor to the article, I do not feel qualified to initiate the effort. Concerning the "citation needed" for the attribution of the Gothic alphabet to Wulfila by Philostorgius, the appropriate reference is the "Epitome of the Ecclesiastical History of Philostorgius" compiled by Photius. A translation of the epitome by Edward Walford was published in 1855. The appropriate reference for the "needed citation" can be found in Chapter 5 of the second book of the Epitome. An online version of the work can be found at the following link - "Epitome of the Ecclesiastical History of Philostorgius" Leeannedy (talk) 22:56, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Usage of Wulfila and Ulfilas

I find it unnecessarily confusing that the names Wulfila and Ulfilas are used to refer to the same person in different portions of the article. An improvement would be to select one of the two to be used throughout the article. The other name could be parenthetically referenced upon the first usage in the article. Any other opinions? Leeannedy (talk) 23:17, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Go ahead. Any other opinion would be silly.--Niels Ø (noe) (talk) 14:33, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

"in decline by 500"?

What is the basis for this? The Deeds of Naples and Arezzo are dated to the mid 6th century: http://www.gotica.de/urkunden.html As far as I know there is no precise date for the Bible manuscripts (5th-6th c.). With the possible exception of the Godex Gissensis fragment (found in Egypt) they're usually supposed to have been produced in the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy, which lasted to the middle of the 6th century. The Visigothic kingdom survived to 711 in Spain, and was Arian till 589. Vandal rule in North Africa ended 534-534. Salvian criticised the quality of Bible texts belonging to the Vandals and Goths (De gubernatione Dei, c. 440-450). The Burgundian kingdom fell to the Franks in 534, but had already moved towards Roman Catholicism. Whether the alphabet was in decline in any of these kingdoms before their demise is impossible to say, I would have thought, given the scantness of manuscript evidence. How long the language or the alphabet survived (in Western Europe, Eastern Europe or Africa) after the loss of Gothic etc. political identity is another mystery. The Brunshausen inscription, c. 822, contains a single word of Gothic written in Wulfila's alphabet. The Vienna-Salzburg Codex preserves two versions of the Gothic alphabet, a sample from the gospel of Luke, and pronunciation notes; how the scribe came by this Gothic material in the 9th or 10th c. is unknown. --Dependent Variable.

Examples

I just cleaned up the markup in the Examples section, but I'm a bit puzzled by what "Fennic" is supposed to be. There's no WP page, and the server suggests maybe I meant Finnic, but the Finnic languages are decidedly un-Germanic, so that can't be right. Can anyone else with a clue add the right link / use the right spelling? -- Cheers, Erik Anderson -- 205.166.76.15 (talk) 23:40, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Lord's Prayer, word-for-word translation

Moved from article, since it's just rife with errors — and why should it be in the alphabet article, anyway?

“ The following shows the Gothic (English/Old Norse/some Fennic) word for word transliteration:

Atta (father/faðir) unsar (our/várr/okkar), þu (you/þú) in (in) himinam (heavens/himinum), weihnai (hallowed be/veinað/cry out/praise) namo (name/nama) þein (yours/þitt), qimai (come/komi) þiudinassus (Kingdom/þjoð-ness/siunaus?) þeins (yours/þín),

wairþai (become/verði) wilja (will/vili) þeins (yours/þitt), swe (as/svá) in (in/í) himina (heaven/himni) jah (and/ok/ja?) ana (on/á) airþai (earth/jarði).

Hlaif ( bread, loaf/hleifr) unsarana (our) þana (the/þann, inn) sinteinan (daily)

gif (give/gef) uns (us) himma (this) daga (day/dag),

jah (and/ja/ok) aflet (lessen burdens/forgive/aflett) uns (us) þatei (that of an/það af) skulans (owing/skuldans) sijaima (we be/sém),

swaswe (so as/svo sem) jah (and) weis (we) afletam (lessen burdens/forgive/aflettum) þaim (them/þeim) skulam (owing) unsaraim (our/várum/okkurum),

jah (and/ok/ja) ni (no/nei) briggais (bring/bringir) uns (us/oss/okkur) in (in/í) fraistubnjai (temptations/freistingar),

ak (?) lausei (leas/leystu) uns (us/okkur/oss) af (from/af/av) þamma (the/hinum, theim) ubilin (evil/oviljin/juvilin/djävulen/);

[unte (because/only/einungs/) þeina (yours) ist (is) þiudangardi (kingdom/þjóðan garð)

jah (and/ja/ok) mahts (might/maehti) jah (and) wulþus (almighty/valdi/voldug) in (in) aiwins (forever/aevinlega).]

Amen (so let it be).

”

— Eru·tuon 00:39, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

Order

This relates to the order of the gothic characters in the main database on the page.

Would it be prudent to order the characters as close as possible to the anglish 'alphabet song' or is the current order relative to the actual gothic order of the characters?

I think presenting the characters in the song order would make the graph itself easier to understand to a broader audience. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.218.85.222 (talk) 00:58, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

raida vs. kusma

are these letters really this similar? even in written texts?

raida

kusma

∈Sensorsweep (talk) 01:25, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

• From what I have seen of the Codex Argenteus (scanned pages at Uppsala), the letters are easily confused but the strokes are not "hooked". The key diffference is that the vertical beginning stroke of the "R" goes down below the line while for "K" it does not. --2604:3D08:8E80:7800:1409:D3D:B6CB:7186 (talk) 18:19, 19 October 2019 (UTC)

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Sigma vs Latin S

How many cases are there of writings in Gothic where the letter "S" was replaced by a Greek sigma? I realize that the Codex Argenteus is the best surviving example of Gothic and has "S" in it, but there are some other codexes that show more Greek influence (albeit with a peculiar italicized system of letters that I don't think I've ever seen in Greek), and the sigma is in those, as I understand. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2604:3D08:8E80:7800:1409:D3D:B6CB:7186 (talk) 18:23, 19 October 2019 (UTC)

Latin "G"?

Below the table it is said that Gothic has two letters that derive from the Latin F and G, while I am not contesting the former I'm definitely hoping to disagree with the latter.

The Gothic for /ɡ/ is "𐌲", which is clearly from Greek, I suppose there was confusion with "𐌾", but that is clearly not a "g" but /j/ and doesn't seem to come from Latin but the Elder Futhark "ᛃ" which is also pronounced /j/. ALBA-CENTAURI (talk) 17:34, 20 March 2023 (UTC)