This page covers utilities and codes for Old English characters. See the Scandinavian page for Old Norse and the Dutch page for information on modern Frisian.
Thanks to Maurice Reed for techincal and testing assistance.
Old English, like most medieval languages, shows a wide range of diacritic marks and unusual characters, not all of which may be represented in Unicode. However, most of the more commonly encountered issues such as long ash, wynn can be displayed within Unicode.
The language of Scottish poets like Robert Burns (Auld Lang Syne) is called Scots or Lallans. It is a descendant of Old English and a close relative of Modern English. Scots preserves some archaic features of Old English including some consonants "ch" /x/ and some pre vowel shift pronunciations.
Note: Modern Scots uses English spelling, but older texts may use Old English letters.
Click link in list to view configuration instructions. You will be asked to match a script with a font.
Note on Internet Explorer: Users who prefer Internet Explorer for Windows should set the Latin font to Arial Unicode MS. Otherwise, some characters may not be displayed properly.
Note on System 9: Because Unicode support is incomplete in System 9, it may be beneficial to upgrade to OS X if you need to work with Unicode.
In order to use these codes you must activate the international keyboard. Instructions are listed in the Keyboards section of this Web site.
Note: Some characters like wynn, yogh, and the long vowels must be inserted with the Character Map utility. or Word 2003 Alt codes.
| Character | Code |
|---|---|
| æ, Æ | RightAlt+Z, Shift+RightAlt+Z (You must use the Alt key on the right) |
| ð,Ð | RightAlt+D, Shift+RightAlt+D |
| þ, Þ | RightAlt+T, Shift+RightAlt+T |
If you are using Word 2003 for Windows XP , you can use the following ALT key plus a numeric code can be used to type a Latin character (accented letter or punctuation symbol) in any Windows application. If this is not available, you can use the Character Map to insert the characters in a master document, then cut and paste as needed.
Some recommended fonts include Arial Unicode MS (Win), TITUS Cyberbit, Junicode and Gentium
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Apple has provided additional keyboards which allow you to enter Old English characters via Unicode. If you are working with a Unicode aware application such as Microsoft Office 2004, Text Edit (free with OS X ), Dreamweaver or Netscape 7 Composer /Mozilla Composer you can one of several keyboards to input the characters.
You can switch to the Extended Roman keyboard (10.2) or the U.S. Extended keyboard (10.3) and use these additional accent codes.
| Character Name | Character | Code |
|---|---|---|
| Ash | æ, Æ | Option+' (singequote) |
| Thorn | þ,Þ | Option+' (singequote) |
| Eth | ð,Ð | Option+' (singequote) |
| Macron (Long Vowel) | ǣ | Option+A, V |
| Superscript Dot | ċ,ġ | Option+W,C |
You can switch to the Unicode Hex Input keyboard and use these Option numeric codes. Once entered, these letters can be cut and pasted as needed.
| Consonants | |
| Ƿ | Option+01F7 Cap Wynn |
|---|---|
| ƿ | Option+01F7 Lower Wynn |
| Ȝ | Option+021C Cap Yogh |
| ȝ | Option+021D Lower Yogh |
For print work, there are a number of freeware and shareware phonetics and classics fonts. You can check the Summer Institute for Linguistics Fonts in Cyberspace for more details.
For the Web, you can use the Unicode numeric codes listed below.
Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags. Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page.
See Using Encoding and Language Codes for more information on the meaning and implementation of these codes.
Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you want to type ġeþwǣre, you would type ġeþǣre. These numbers are also used with the Word 2003 Alt codes listed above.
NOTE: Your page should declare utf-8 encoding or else the characters may not display in older browsers. Because these are Unicode characters, the formatting may not exactly match that of the surrounding text depending on the browser.
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In some cases, your best options may be to use PDF files or image files. See the Web Development Tips section for more details.
Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are meta data tags which indicate the page of a language, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
Both Microsoft and Apple provide fonts with Old English support, but they are sans-serif fonts. These fonts include the characters and are serif fonts, which tend to be more readable for medieval languages.
