Etruscan, Gothic & Old Permic Alphabets

The Etruscan alphabet is the writing of the Etruscans of central Italy, in use from about 700 BC to about AD 100, and it is the direct ancestor of the Latin letters you are reading now. The Etruscans took it from Greek colonists of Euboea who had settled at Pithekoussai and Cumae on the Bay of Naples, which is why its letters look Greek but not quite: 𐌂 is a gamma, 𐌅 a digamma, 𐌈 a theta, 𐌑 the old Greek letter san.

The oldest complete Etruscan alphabet is scratched into the ivory frame of a wax writing tablet found at Marsiliana d'Albegna, from about 700 BC. It lists 26 letters in this order: 𐌀 a, 𐌁 b, 𐌂 c, 𐌃 d, 𐌄 e, 𐌅 v, 𐌆 z, 𐌇 h, 𐌈 θ, 𐌉 i, 𐌊 k, 𐌋 l, 𐌌 m, 𐌍 n, 𐌎 ś, 𐌏 o, 𐌐 p, 𐌑 ś, 𐌒 q, 𐌓 r, 𐌔 s, 𐌕 t, 𐌖 u, 𐌗 x, 𐌘 φ and 𐌙 χ. That is the first group above, the model alphabet, copied by students on tablets and pots for generations.

Etruscan had no b, d, g or o sounds, so 𐌁, 𐌃 and 𐌏 appear on the model alphabet but almost never in a real inscription, and 𐌂 came to write the k sound. By about 400 BC most of Etruria wrote with a classical alphabet of 20 letters, 𐌀 𐌂 𐌄 𐌅 𐌆 𐌇 𐌈 𐌉 𐌋 𐌌 𐌍 𐌐 𐌑 𐌓 𐌔 𐌕 𐌖 𐌘 𐌙 𐌚, nearly always running from right to left. The figure-eight letter 𐌚 for the f sound is the one letter the Italians added themselves, around 600 to 550 BC, replacing the clumsy two-letter spelling 𐌅𐌇.

Old Italic: Oscan, Umbrian, Venetic and the Etruscan numerals

Unicode calls the whole family Old Italic and encodes it once, in the block U+10300 to U+1032F, added in Unicode 3.1 in 2001. One code point stands for the Etruscan, Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian, South Picene, Venetic and Raetic form of a letter, and the font decides which shape you see. The letters the neighbours added are the second group: 𐌚 f (Etruscan, Faliscan and Oscan), 𐌛 rs and 𐌜 ç (Umbrian), 𐌝 í and 𐌞 ú (Oscan and South Picene, where they mark the vowels Greek letters could not), 𐌭 for Venetic, and 𐌮 and 𐌯, the northern and southern forms of a ts letter in Raetic, the last three added in Unicode 10.0 in 2017.

The Etruscan numerals are the third group: 𐌠 is 1, 𐌡 is 5, 𐌢 is 10, 𐌣 is 50 and 𐌟 is 100. They are written additively from the largest sign down, so 87 is 𐌣𐌢𐌢𐌢𐌡𐌠𐌠, and 4 is simply 𐌠𐌠𐌠𐌠, with none of the subtractive IV or IX the Romans later used. Compare them with the <a>Roman Numeral Symbols</a> collection and the family likeness is plain: I, V, X and L are these signs, and one theory derives both systems from notches cut on tally sticks.

Unicode gives Old Italic a default left-to-right direction, because that is how scholars print it; a right-to-left Etruscan inscription is shown with mirrored glyphs, which a few fonts do and most do not. So when you copy 𐌌𐌉 (mi, 'I am', the opening of countless Etruscan ownership inscriptions) it will read left to right unless your font or app does the mirroring. The Etruscan language itself is only partly understood: the letters are easy to read, the words often are not.

Gothic alphabet: Wulfila's letters, not blackletter

First, a warning about the name. If you searched for 'gothic alphabet' wanting the pointed medieval lettering of newspaper mastheads and metal band logos, that is blackletter, and it lives in the <a>Gothic Letters (Old English Text)</a> collection as 𝔄 𝔅 ℭ. The Gothic alphabet on this page is older and unrelated: the script of the Goths, the Germanic people who sacked Rome in 410 and ruled Italy and Spain afterwards.

Bishop Wulfila (Ulfilas, about 311 to 383) devised it in the 4th century to translate the Bible into Gothic, the earliest Germanic language we have in any quantity. He built it mostly on Greek uncials, with a few shapes from Latin and, scholars argue, from the runes: 𐌿 u, 𐌾 j and 𐍉 o look very like the runes ᚢ, ᛃ and ᛟ in the <a>Rune Symbols</a> collection. The letter names in the grid, 𐌰 ahsa, 𐌱 bairkan, 𐌲 giba, 𐌳 dags, 𐌸 thiuth, 𐍆 faihu, are Gothic words recorded in a 9th-century manuscript in Alcuin's circle; the Goths' own names for them are lost.

Like Greek letters, every Gothic letter is also a number, which is why the grid above runs 1 to 9, 10 to 90 and 100 to 900: 𐌰 is 1, 𐌹 is 10, 𐍂 is 100, 𐍉 is 800. Two signs, 𐍁 for 90 and 𐍊 for 900, exist only as numbers, just like Greek koppa and sampi. A number in a manuscript sits between middle dots, so ·𐌹𐌱· is 12. Other things worth knowing: 𐌴 is a long ē and 𐍉 a long ō, the pair 𐌴𐌹 spells a long ī, 𐍈 hwair is the hw of 'what', and 𐍇 appears only in names borrowed from Greek such as 𐍇𐍂𐌹𐍃𐍄𐌿𐍃, Christ. Nearly all surviving Gothic is Wulfila's Bible, above all the Codex Argenteus at Uppsala: silver and gold ink on purple parchment, written in Italy in the 6th century. Unicode added Gothic (U+10330 to U+1034A) in version 3.1 in 2001.

Old Permic (Abur): Stephen of Perm's alphabet for Komi

Old Permic is the alphabet of the Komi people of the northern Urals, created in the 1370s by Stephen of Perm (about 1340 to 1396), a missionary from Ustyug who learned the language before preaching in it. Rather than force Church Slavonic on his converts he gave them letters of their own, drawn loosely from Greek and Cyrillic shapes and from the Komi pas, the tamga-like property marks the Komi had been carving for centuries, which is why so many letters look carved rather than written. Its usual name, Abur or Anbur, is simply its first two letters, 𐍐 an and 𐍑 bur, the way 'alphabet' is alpha and beta.

It is a plain alphabet written left to right with no capitals. The first group above is the core set that wrote Komi sounds, from 𐍐 a, 𐍑 b, 𐍒 g and 𐍓 d through 𐍕 ž, 𐍖 dž, 𐍗 z and 𐍘 dz to 𐍤 č, 𐍥 š and 𐍩 o; the second group holds letters added for Russian church words and for Russian secret writing, among them 𐍫 f, 𐍬 x, 𐍭 c, 𐍮 v, 𐍯 and 𐍰 (the hard and soft signs), 𐍱 yat, 𐍳 yu and 𐍴 ya. The five combining letters 𐍶 𐍷 𐍸 𐍹 𐍺 are small superscript letters for abbreviations, placed over a word the way Cyrillic manuscripts use a titlo.

The surviving corpus is tiny, a few hundred words: alphabet lists, an inscription on the Zyrian Trinity icon of the late 14th century, a note in a 1510 Nomokanon, a bishop's signature on a 1474 charter. By the 15th century Russian scribes in Moscow and Novgorod were using Abur as a cipher, so some of what survives is Russian in Permic letters. Cyrillic replaced it in the 17th century; modern <a>Komi Alphabet & Letters</a> is Cyrillic with ӧ and і. Unicode encoded Old Permic (U+10350 to U+1037A) in version 7.0 in 2014.

How to copy, type and display these letters

Tap any letter above to copy it, or copy a ready-made alphabet string from the combos below. All three scripts sit in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, above U+FFFF, which has two consequences. They paste fine into modern apps, chats and documents, but some older software counts each letter as two characters, and a plain text field may show them as a box or a question mark when no installed font covers the block.

For fonts, Google's free Noto family has one for each script: Noto Sans Old Italic, Noto Sans Gothic and Noto Sans Old Permic. Windows 10 and later ship Segoe UI Historic, which covers Old Italic and Gothic. Old Permic is the one most likely to need a Noto font. In Microsoft Word you can type any of them by code: type 10300 and press Alt+X for 𐌀, 10330 Alt+X for 𐌰, 10350 Alt+X for 𐍐. No phone keyboard offers these scripts, so copying from this page is the practical route.

Two pitfalls. Writing a name in Etruscan letters is a letter-for-letter substitution, not a translation, and Etruscan had no b, d, g or o: use 𐌐 for b, 𐌕 for d, 𐌂 for g and 𐌖 for o, as the Etruscans did with foreign names, and remember that a real inscription would run right to left. And do not mix up the Gothic 𐌸 thiuth with the Latin þ or the rune ᚦ: they look alike and all write th, but they are three different characters, and a search or a font will treat them as such.