The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet used for writing the Gothic language. Ulfilas (or Wulfila) developed it in the 4th century AD for the purpose of translating the Bible. The alphabet essentially uses uncial forms of the Greek alphabet, with a few additional letters to express Gothic phonology: Latin F and G a questionably Runic letter to distinguish the glide from vocalic the letter hwair () to express the Gothic labiovelar. Origin 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 pagan beliefs and customs. Also, the Greek-based script probably helped to integrate the Gothic nation into the dominant Greco-Roman culture around the Black Sea. Letters Below is a table of the Gothic alphabet. Two letters used in its transliteration are not used in current English: thorn þ (representing ), and hwair (representing ). As with the Greek alphabet, Gothic letters were also assigned numerical values. When used as numerals, letters were written either between two dots (•• = 12) or with an overline ( = 12). Two letters, (90) and (900), have no phonetic value. The letter names are recorded in a 9th-century manuscript of Alcuin (Codex Vindobonensis 795). Most of them seem to be Gothic forms of names also appearing in the rune poems. The names are given in their attested forms followed by the reconstructed Gothic forms and their meanings. Most of the letters have been taken over directly from the Greek alphabet, though a few have been created or modified from Latin and possibly (more controversially) Runic letters to express unique phonological features of Gothic. These are: (q; derived either from a form of Greek stigma/digamma (), or from a cursive variant of kappa (), which could strongly resemble a u, or by inverting Greek pi (𐍀) /p/, perhaps due to similarity in the Gothic names: pairþa versus qairþa) (þ; derived either from Greek phi (Φ) /f/ or psi (Ψ) /ps/ with phonetic reassignment, or Runic ) (j; derived from Latin G /ɡ/) (u; possibly an allograph of Greek Ο (cf. the numerical values), or from Runic /u/) (; derived from Greek Θ /θ/ with phonetic reassignment; possibly the letterform was switched with ) (o; derived either from Greek Ω or from Runic , or from a cursive form of Greek Ο, as such a form was more common for