GOTHS and GOTHIC ALPHABET

GOTHS and GOTHIC ALPHABET

The Goths were one of the most important "barbarian" tribes responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire and the politics of early Medieval Europe. By the 4th century CE, the Goths were becoming Christianized. At this time, the Goths wrote their language using their version of the Futhark alphabet, but it was deemed to be a pagan invention.

Instead, Bishop Wulfila (or Ulfilas), a Greek missionary responsible for the conversion of the Goths to Christianity, took the Greek alphabet, added letters from Latin and Futhark alphabets, and created a new alphabet to write the Gothic language.

Note that there are two letters that don't stand for any sounds. This is because they were adopted from Greek only for their numeric value. The Classical Greek alphabet doubled as a number system, and each letter had a number associated with it. The Gothic alphabet continued this tradition, and so in the case of Gothic, the first row of letters have numeric values of 1 to 9, the second row from 10 to 90, and the third row from 100 to 900.

The Goths spoke a Germanic language, and it is unique not only in that it is the earliest documented Germanic language, but also in that it is the only language in a completely separate branch of the Germanic family unrelated to any other surviving Germanic languages.

ULFILAS (ελληνικά: Ουλφίλας)

 Ο Ουλφίλας σχημάτισε και καθιέρωσε το Γοτθικό αλφάβητο με βάση το Ελληνικό σε λατινικούς χαρακτήρες. Μετέφρασε την Αγία Γραφή και δίδαξε Ελληνικά στην Αυτοκρατορική σχολή της Τριέρης. Εισήγαγε επίσης πλήθος Ελληνικών λέξεων και εννοιών, άγνωστων μέχρι τότε στους Γότθους.

Ulfilas or Gothic Wulfila (also Ulphilas. Orphila) (ca. 310 – 383), bishop, missionary, and Bible translator, was a Goth or half-Goth and half-Greek from Cappadocia who had spent time inside the Roman Empire at the peak of the Arian controversy.

Ulfilas was ordained a bishop by Eusebius of Nicomedia and returned to his people to work as a missionary.

In 348, to escape religious persecution by a Gothic chief, probably Athanaric he obtained permission from Constantius II (Κωνστάντιος Β') to migrate with his flock of converts to Moesia and settle near Nicopolis ad Istrum (Νικόπολις η προς Ίστρον), in what is now northern Bulgaria.

There, Ulfilas translated the Bible from Greek into the Gothic language. For this he devised the Gothic alphabet.

Fragments of his translation have survived, notably the Codex Argenteus  held since 1648 in the University Library of Uppsala in Sweden.