Gothic Orthography Cheat Sheet

The Gothic Alphabet + List of Digraphs and IPA Correspondences

Hello! I am releasing here a “cheat sheet” which I created for the Gothic language orthography (writing system). Down below are the letters used in the Gothic alphabet in the top half of the page, along with their corresponding numeric values and modern day transliterations, with the bottom half of the page being a guide for deriving phonetic information (presented in the IPA) from the Gothic writing conventions. The top half is organized by alphabetical order whereas the bottom is organized by theme.

Notes on Tools, Sources, and Resources:

• The chart was composed in LibreOffice Draw

• My primary source was:

  Lambdin, Thomas O. “Introduction.” An Introduction to the Gothic Language, Wipf & Stock, Eugene, 2006, pp. 11–16.

• This project was made possible by the Ulfilas font created by Robert Pfeffer, which can be found on fontspace.com/ulfilas-font-f3264. The font is a good option for anyone looking for the Gothic alphabet and is free to download. As of the time of writing there is no way to donate to Pfeffer.

How to read the Bottom Half of the Chart:

The bottom half is the main reason I bothered with this project in the first place. It could stand some minor edits, but the theming of the groupings is clear. On the left are all vowels and diphthongs (only ‘iu’ belongs to this class) and how they are represented (left hand side). Everything to the right of this section is for consonants, with the far right being all those which have identical values to their IPA counterparts. The middle includes all those exceptional consonants.

Thorn (þ) is used in modern day Icelandic, and has historical use in Germanic languages, but is going to be uncommon for English speakers. ‘h’ is realized as [x] and not [h]. Letters ‘q’ and ‘x’ were used in loan words.

The letters ‘b’, ‘d’, and ‘g’ each change in a similar fashion depending on their phonological environment, similar to voiced consonants in modern day German and Dutch. They share their IPA value as initials and when followed by another consonant. Between two voiced they become voiced fricatives, and at the end of a word they become voiceless fricatives. In basic terms, the sound becomes weaker.

The final section is found above the previous section on the right and represents the multigraphs used in Gothic (that aren’t vowels). Multigraphs are when two or more letters (graphemes) are used to mean a specific sound.

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I have intentions to beautify this a bit more but I am happy with the chart. This is downloadable now on this page, and will be made available on my Patreon sometime this October. along with my Old Norse Bookmark.