[gothic-l] Re: Runes and Wulfila's alphabet

[babeck at ALPHALINK.COM.AU]

--- In gothic-l at y..., "Francisc Czobor" <czobor at c...> wrote:
> as I have read, Wulfila invented the new alphabet because the runes 
> were considered as "pagan". Apparently, he still used some runic 
> letters because there was not exact correspondent in the Greek 
> alphabet.
> For instance: the "J" letter of Wulfila's alphabet is from runic, 
> because there was no letter for semivocalic "i" in the Greek 
alphabet.
> The "U" letter of Wulfila is also from runic, because the Greek 
> upsilon was at that time already pronounced [ü] or even [i].
> Why did Wulfila use a runic letter for "F" I don't know, since I 
> suppose that the "phi" letter was already pronounced [f] by the 
Greeks 
> of that time.
> The "Q" letter is from Greek (koppa). The "Þ" and "Hw" letters seem 
to 
> be Greek letter (psi, respectively theta) to whom Wulfila assigned 
a 
> different phonetic value as in Greek.
> 
> Francisc 
> 
Hi Francisc,
  Yes, I agree with what you say, but it still does not explain why 
Wulfila chose single letters for /kw/ and /xw/ instead of digraphs as 
in runic.  With regard to the "F", perhaps he felt the "phi" was too 
easily confused with the "psi-like" character he used for "th".  
Also, although he provided Gothic with "J" for a semivocalic "i" in 
contrast to both Latin and Greek which used "i" for both the vowel 
and semi-vowel, he still followed the Greek custom of using "i" to 
represent the Hebrew "yod" in biblical names.  There are however just 
a few instances where he (or his scribe) do actually use "J" instead 
of "I".

Brian



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