Old Germ. alphabet, written records.

Latin: Horace - lyric poet and satirist; Virgil - epic, didactic and pastoral poet; Petronius – novelist; Pliny the Elder – scientist; Pliny the Younger – correspondent; Apuleius - novellist and philosopher.

Runic (Futhark) - The two best known runic inscriptions in England are the earliest extant OE written records. One of them is and inscription on a box called the “Frank’s Casket”, the other is a short text on a stone cross near the village of Ruthwell known as the “Ruthwell Cross”.

OE alphabet – Runic inscriptions: “The Frank’s Casket” VIII c; “The Ruthwell Cross” VIII c; “Beowulf” (VIII) X c; Orosious’ “World History” (V) IX; “The Anglo-Saxon chronicles” VIII-XII c.

Gothic alphabet – “The Silver Codex” – CODEX ARGENTEUS. It’s a fragment of Ulfila’s translation of the Gospels (5^th – 6^th c A.D.). This manuscript is written on parchment with silver and golden letters. Now is kept in Uppsala, Sweden.

The commonly used alphabets were Latin, Wulfilian and Runic.

The term rune refers to any member of a set of symbols found in a distinctive Germanic alphabet. It is called Futhark after the sound values of the first six symbols. It was used primarily in northern Europe from probably the mid-first century on. It gives below twenty four symbols found in the oldest version of this alphabet, known as the older futhark, along with their common Romanizations and probable Germanic names.

1. The runes for b, d, g had two pronunciations, namely as the stops [b], [d], [g] and as fricatives [b], [d] [g] as in Gothic.

2. The runes show no distinction between long and short vowels, but it obviously existed.

3. The letter R, given in parenthesis after z, is actually the only value for the rune in the inscriptions that have survived. It presents a sound somewhere between [z] and [r], like Slavonic [ж]. This is the original Germanic sound [z], which is rhotacized in all the Germanic languages except Gothic.

4. The rune names represent mnemonics.

The earliest surviving runic inscriptions date from the second half of the second century, and are found on materials, such as metal or stone, that resist decomposition. It is likely, that the runes were devised to be carved in wood, as their forms suggest by their aviodance of curves and horizontal lines.

The language of the older futhark is traditionally called Proto-Norse. The majority of inscriptions were found in Scandinavia, with a few scattered in Germany, England and eastern Europe.

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome, which alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.

During the Middle Ages, it was adapted to the Romance languages, the direct descendants of Latin, as well as to the Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and some Slavic languages, and finally to most of the languages of Europe.

With the age of colonialism and Christian proselytism, the Latin alphabet was spread overseas, and applied to Indigenous American, Indigenous Australian, Austronesian, East Asian, and African languages. More recently, western linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin alphabet or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin alphabet) when transcribing or creating written standards for non-European languages, such as the African reference alphabet.

In modern usage, the term Latin alphabet is used for any direct derivation of the alphabet first used to write Latin. These variants may discard letters from the classical Roman script (like the Rotokas alphabet) or add new characters to it, as from the Danish and Norwegian alphabet. Letter shapes have changed over the centuries, including the creation of entirely new lower case characters.

Classical Latin alphabet
Letter	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H
Name	ā	bē	cē	dē	ē	ef	gē	hā
Pronunciation (IPA)	/aː/	/beː/	/keː/	/deː/	/eː/	/ef/	/geː/	/haː/
Letter	I	K	L	M	N	O	P	Q
Name	ī	kā	el	em	en	ō	pē	qū
Pronunciation (IPA)	/iː/	/kaː/	/el/	/em/	/en/	/oː/	/peː/	/kʷuː/
Letter	R	S	T	V	X	Y	Z
Name	er	es	tē	ū	ex	ī Graeca	zēta
Pronunciation (IPA)	/er/	/es/	/teː/	/uː/	/eks/	/iː ˈgraika/	/ˈzeːta/

The runic alphabet is a specifically Germanic alphabet, not to be found in languages of other groups. The word rune originally meant ’secret’, ‘mystery’ and hence came to denote inscriptions believed to be magic. The runes were used as letters, each symbol to indicate separate sound. This alphabet is called futhark after the first six letters. Runic letters are angular; straight lines are preferred, curved lines avoided; this is due to the fact that runic inscriptions were cut in hard material: stone, bone or wood. The shapes of some letters resemble those of Greek or Latin, other have not been traced to any known alphabet, and the order of the runes in the alphabet is certainly original. The number of runes in different OG languages varied. As compared to continental, the number of runes in England was larger: new runes were added as new sounds appeared in English (from 28 to 33 runes in Britain against 16 or 24 on the continent). The main use of runes was to make short inscriptions on objects, often to bestow on them some special power or magic. The two best known runic inscriptions in England are the earliest extant OE written records. One of them is and inscription on a box called the “Franks Casket”, the other is a short text on a stone cross near the village of Ruthwell known as the “Ruthwell Cross”

The three best-known runic alphabets are the Elder Futhark (around 150 to 800 AD), the Old English Futhorc (400 to 1100 AD), and the Younger Futhark (800–1100). The Younger Futhark is further divided into the long-branch runes (also called Danish, although they were also used in Norway and Sweden), short-twig or Rök runes (also called Swedish-Norwegian, although they were also used in Denmark), and the Hälsinge runes (staveless runes). The Younger Futhark developed further into the Marcomannic runes, the Medieval runes (1100 AD to 1500 AD), and the Dalecarlian runes (around 1500 to 1800 AD).

OE scribes used two kinds of letters: the runes and the letters of the Latin alphabet. The bulk of the OE material is written in the Latin script. The use of Latin letters in English differed in some points from their use in Latin, for the scribes made certain modifications and additions in order to indicate OE sounds. The most interesting peculiarity of OE writing was the use of some runic characters, in the first place, the rune called “thorn” which was employed alongside the crossed d, ∂ to indicate [th] and [∂]. In the manuscripts one more rune was regularly used – “wynn” for the sound [w]. Like any alphabetic writing, OE writing was based on a phonetic principle: every letter indicated a separate sound. This principle, however, was not always observed, even at the earliest stages of phonetic spelling. Some OE letters indicated two or more sounds, even distinct phonemes. The letters could indicate short and long sounds. In reading OE texts one should observe the following rules for letters indicating more than one sound. The letters f, s and [th], [∂] stand for voiced fricatives between vowels and also between a vowel and a voiced consonant; otherwise they indicate corresponding voiceless fricatives. The letter з stands for [g] initially before back vowels, for [j] before and after front vowels, for [γ] between back vowels and for [g’] mostly when preceded by c: OE daз [j]

The letter h stands for [x] between a back vowel and a consonant and also initially before consonants and for [x’] next to front vowels: OE niht [x’]

The letter n stands for [n] in all positions except when followed by [k] or [g]; in this case it indicates [ŋ]: OE sinзan.

The Gothic alphabet is an alphabetic writing system attributed to Ulfilas (or Wulfila) which was used exclusively for writing the ancient Gothic language. Before its creation in the fourth century, the Goths had used runes to write their language. The new alphabet was created by Ulfilas for the purpose of translating the Christian Bible into Gothic, and it is largely derived from an uncial form of the Greek alphabet, though some elements have been borrowed from the Latin and Runic alphabets as well. Ulfilas is thought to have consciously chosen to avoid the use of the older Runic alphabet for this purpose, as it was heavily connected with ancient heathen beliefs and customs. Also, the Greek-based script probably helped to integrate of the Gothic nation into the dominant Greco-Roman culture around the Black Sea. The individual letters, however, still bore names derived from those of their Runic equivalents.