1.2. Wulfila’s Gothic alphabet
The
Gothic alphabet
was invented in about the middle of the IV century AD by Bishop
Wulfila (Ulfilas,
Ulfila) (311-383
AD), the religious leader of the Visigoths, to provide his people
with a written language. It was used exclusively for writing the
ancient Gothic
language
and was primarily implied by Wulfila to translate the Bible
into Gothic.
As for the origin of the alphabet there is not so much doubts about it. As far as among the closest neighbours Cyrilic and Armenian alphabets appeared later than Gothic one, the points of view concerning which alphabet was the basis of the Gothic script are practically restricted to the Greek, Latin and Runic alphabets.
Gothic alphabet is believed to be derived from the Greek alphabet (Greek uncial alphabet) with some borrowings from the Latin and runic alphabets as well. Most of the letters are taken over from the Greek alphabet directly, but a few letters are innovated to accurately express Gothic phonology. In cases Greek symbols were not sufficient to designate Germanic sounds he relied on Latin and runic alphabets.
All in all the Gothic alphabet consists of 27 characters, among them 25 modified Greek symbols and two runes.
The Gothic alphabet and its phonetic standard are given below:
The names of the letters are clearly related to the names of the Runic alphabet. As in the Greek alphabet, letters were also used as numerals.
There are only a few Gothic manuscripts which survived. The largest body of them consists of codices written by Wulfila. Almost three-quarters of the New Testament and some fragments of the Old Testament from his Gothic Bible translation have survived.
The largest of these fragments is the Codex Argenteus (188 leaves), which contains about half of the Gospels and is preserved in Uppsala, Sweden. Codex Argenteus dates back to the VI century.
Codex Ambrosianus (Milan) which is preserved in five parts (193 leaves) contains scattered passages from the New Testament, the Old Testament and some commentaries known as Skeireins. This text is likely to be somewhat modified by copyists.
Codex Gissensis (Gießen): 1 leaf, fragments of Luke 23-24. It was found in Egypt in 1907, but destroyed by water damage in 1945.
Codex Carolinus (Wolfenbüttel): 4 leaves, fragments of Romans.
Codex Vaticanus Latinus: 3 leaves and the Skeireins.
Except codices scattered old documents are preserved (alphabets, calendars, glosses found in manuscripts, a small dictionary of more than eighty words, and a song without translation).
There are not so many references to Gothic after the IX century.
1.3 Introduction of the Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet superseded both Runic and Gothic alphabets. Introduction of the Latin alphabet accompanied the spread of Christianity and Christian religious texts written in Latin.
Latin alphabet was introduced and started to spread among Germanic peoples in the Early Middle Age period (VI –XI centuries), when Latin was the only literary language and the primary language of church and religion. Latin religious texts were incomprehensible to common people, therefore in additions to them the monks made glosses and glossaries with the trasnlations of Latin words. The task of the first glossaries was also to teach Latin.
Later West Germanic and North Germanic peoples started to refer to the Latin alphabet in order to commit to paper their own texts. But they came across some difficulties, for the Latin alphabet was certainly not adequate to represent peculiar Germanic sounds. So, the Latin alphabet needed adaptation.
Latin alphabet itself underwent transformations before it was adopted by the Germanic tribes. Having evolved from Phoenician via Greek (and sometimes Etruscan) to the Romans it has spread around the world.
Ancient Latin Alphabet
There were several ‘varieties’ of Latin alphabet that reflect the way it was modified before it assumed its modern form in different languages.
1) In the Ist century BC the Latin alphabet had 21 letters (above). The Latin form used throughout the Roman Empire from the 1st century AD is known as rustic capitals.
2) In III-IV centuries it was transformed into uncial form of writing, which was used in Latin manuscripts till VIII century AD. On its basis low case letters were developed.
In IV century it developed to half-uncial, which in its turn was modified into minuscule that was mainly adopted and spread in the majority of Germanic texts. There were several subtypes of minuscule Latin scripts used by Germanic peoples, where insular and continental ones were differentiated. Each of these varieties was expanded be means of specific letters being modified to the phonology of separate Germanic dialects.
In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were already written with the Roman characters. To represent these new sounds, extensions were performed by adding diacritics to existing letters, by joining multiple letters together to make ligatures, by creating completely new forms, or by assigning a special function to pairs or triplets of letters. These new forms can vary with the particular language where some letters could be discarded from the classical Roman script or new ones added to it (like the Danish and Norwegian alphabet). Now the term "Latin alphabet" is used for any straightforward derivation of the alphabet first used to write Latin.
The changes that took place in the Latin alphabet during all this interval of time in the Germanic systems of writing could by summed up in the following points:
1) Letter shapes have changed over the centuries, including the creation of entirely new lower case forms. The style of writing changed and varied greatly throughout the Middle Ages, and even after the invention of the printing press.
2) Wholly new letters were added:
a) It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter W (originally a ligature of V and V) was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval Latin. Besides letter W, the letters J and U of the modern alphabet were added in medieval times, which did not appear in the classical alphabet, except that J and U could be alternative forms for I and V.
b) The examples of new letters added to the Old English alphabet are the Runic letters wynn (Ƿ/ƿ) and thorn (Þ/þ), and the Irish letter eth (Ð/ð) used to denote the sound w, and ð. As a result, the Old English alphabet developed on the basis of Latin, was the following:
Old English Alphabet
Another Irish letter added is the insular g, developed into yogh (Ȝ/ȝ), used in Middle English. Wynn was later replaced with the new letter w, eth and thorn with th, and yogh with gh. Although the four are no longer part of the English alphabet, eth and thorn are still used in the modern Icelandic alphabet.
c) In some languages ligatures were introduced. A ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new glyph or character. Examples are Æ/æ (from AE, called "ash"), Œ/œ (from OE, sometimes called "oethel"), German symbol ß ("sharp S").
3) Some letters were modified due to certain elements added to the symbols:
a) A diacritic (also called an accent) is a small symbol which can appear above or below a letter, or in some other position, such as the umlaut sign used in the German characters Ä, Ö, Ü, slash Ø in Danish and Norwegian, ring ů, å in Swedish, etc. Their main function is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also modify the pronunciation of a whole syllable or word, or distinguish between homographs. The value of diacritics is language-dependent.
b) Modified letters such as the symbols Å, Ä, and Ö may be regarded as new individual letters in themselves, and assigned a specific place in the alphabet for collation purposes, separate from that of the letter on which they are based, as is done in Swedish.
4) Introduction of digraphs and trigraphs. A digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. Examples are CH, RH, SH in English, or the Dutch IJ. A trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German SCH. In the orthographies of some languages, digraphs and trigraphs are regarded as independent letters of the alphabet.
Reading material
Basic
Жлуктенко Ю.О., Яворська Т.А., op. cit., c.43-51.
Макаев Э.А. Язык древнейших рунических надписей: лингвистический и историко-филологический анализ. - М., 1965.