Indo-European, East Germanic · Gothic alphabet
Gothic
𐌲𐌿𐍄𐌸𐌹𐌿𐌳𐌰 gutþiuda, “the Gothic people”
- Spoken
- c. AD 300–800; Crimean Gothic until the 1700s
- Written
- Bible manuscripts of the 500s
- Where
- The lower Danube, today Romania and Bulgaria, later Italy, Spain and Crimea
Gothic is the oldest Germanic language with real texts, centuries older than Old English or Old Norse. Almost everything we have comes from one man's project: Wulfila, a fourth-century bishop who invented an alphabet so the Goths could read the Bible. His translation survives in fragments, most splendidly in the Codex Argenteus, written in silver and gold ink on purple parchment. A few phrases of it would sound strangely familiar to an English or German speaker.
Where and when
The Goths were a Germanic people who reached the Black Sea region by the third century AD. Wulfila worked among Goths settled south of the lower Danube, in Roman Moesia, around AD 350. Later, Gothic kingdoms rose in Italy under Theodoric (493–553) and in Spain under the Visigoths. Wulfila himself descended from Christian captives taken from Cappadocia.
The surviving manuscripts were mostly copied in Ostrogothic Italy in the sixth century. Besides the Bible fragments there is a commentary on John, a calendar fragment and some deeds. A separate dialect, Crimean Gothic, was spoken in the Crimean mountains into early modern times. Almost all we know of it comes from one sixteenth-century word list.
How it fell silent
The Gothic kingdoms were small ruling minorities among much larger Latin-speaking populations. The Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy fell to the Byzantines in 553, and the Visigoths in Spain gave up their Arian Christianity for Catholicism in 589, which removed the main reason to keep reading the Gothic Bible. Within a few generations the Goths of Italy and Spain spoke Latin, the ancestor of Italian and Spanish.
In Crimea, though, Gothic lived on. In the 1560s the Flemish diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq met two men in Constantinople and wrote down about eighty words and a song of their language, recognisably Germanic. Crimean Gothic was gradually replaced by Crimean Tatar and Greek, and it probably died out in the eighteenth century, though the exact date is unknown.
How it may have sounded
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𐌰𐍄𐍄𐌰 𐌿𐌽𐍃𐌰𐍂 𐌸𐌿 𐌹𐌽 𐌷𐌹𐌼𐌹𐌽𐌰𐌼
Atta unsar þu in himinam
Say it roughly AHT-tah OON-sar thoo in HIM-in-ahm/ˈatːa ˈunsar θuː in ˈhiminam/
“Our Father, thou in the heavens”
The opening of the Lord's Prayer in the Codex Argenteus; the consonants are fairly secure, while vowel lengths are reconstructed from comparison with other Germanic languages.
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𐍅𐌴𐌹𐌷𐌽𐌰𐌹 𐌽𐌰𐌼𐍉 𐌸𐌴𐌹𐌽
weihnai namo þein
Say it roughly WEEKH-neh NAH-moh THEEN/ˈwiːxnɛː ˈnamoː θiːn/
“hallowed be thy name”
Wulfila spelled long i as ei, as Greeks of his day did; whether his ai was a diphthong or an open e like here is one of the oldest debates in Gothic studies.
Your name, set in stone
Gothic is a full alphabet, mostly Greek with a few Latin and runic letters. There is no c, so k does the work; long i is written ei, and the sound th has its own letter, þ.
A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.
Three things
- The Codex Argenteus, now in Uppsala, Sweden, is written in silver and gold ink on purple-dyed parchment.
- Busbecq's Crimean Gothic word list from the 1560s includes 'broe' for bread and 'schuuester' for sister.
- Wulfila reportedly left the Books of Kings untranslated, because they were too full of war for the Goths.