omicron than for omega in this time period, and as the sound values of omicron and omega had already merged by this time.) (r), (s) and (f) appear to be derived from their Latin equivalents rather than from the Greek, although the equivalent Runic letters (, and ), assumed to have been part of the Gothic futhark, possibly played some role in this choice. However, Snædal claims that "Wulfila's knowledge of runes was questionable to say the least", as the paucity of inscriptions attests that knowledge and use of runes was rare among the East Germanic peoples. Some variants of (s) are shaped like a sigma and more obviously derive from the Greek Σ. (x) is only used in proper names and loanwords containing Greek Χ (xristus "Christ", galiugaxristus "Pseudo-Christ", zaxarias "Zacharias", aiwxaristia "eucharist"). Regarding the letters' numeric values, most correspond to those of the Greek numerals. Gothic takes the place of Ϝ (6), takes the place of ξ (60), that of Ο (70), and that of ψ (700). Diacritics and punctuation Diacritics and punctuation used in the Codex Argenteus include a trema placed on i, transliterated as ï, in general applied to express diaeresis, the interpunct (·) and colon (:) as well as overlines to indicate sigla (such as xaus for xristaus) and numerals. Unicode The Gothic alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in March 2001 with the release of version 3.1. The Unicode block for Gothic is U+10330– U+1034F in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane. As older software that uses UCS-2 (the predecessor of UTF-16) assumes that all Unicode codepoints can be expressed as 16 bit numbers (U+FFFF or lower, the Basic Multilingual Plane), problems may be encountered using the Gothic alphabet Unicode range and others outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane. Notes See also Ring of Pietroassa Help:Gothic Unicode Fonts References Braune, Wilhelm (1952). Gotische Grammatik. Halle: Max Niemeyer. Cercignani, Fausto, "The Elaboration of the Gothic Alphabet and Orthography", in Indogermanische Forschungen, 93, 1988, pp. 168–185. Dietrich, Franz (1862). Über die Aussprache des Gotischen Wärend der Zeit seines Bestehens. Marburg: N. G. Elwert'sche Universitätsbuchhandlung. Friesen, Otto von (1915). "Gotische Schrift" in Hoops, J. Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, Bd. II. pp. 306–310. Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner. Haarmann, Harald (1991). Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt: Campus. Jensen, Hans (1969). Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften. Kirchhoff, Adolf (1854). Das gothische Runenalphabet. Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz. Mees,