#gothic posts — Ben Crowder https://bencrowder.net/blog/tag/gothic/ Feed for blog posts tagged with #gothic. Fri, 17 Apr 2026 23:19:59 GMT en-US https://bencrowder.net/ Ruby glosses https://bencrowder.net/blog/2010/ruby-glosses/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2010/ruby-glosses/ Wed, 01 Dec 2010 12:00:00 GMT A while ago I came across the CSS3 Ruby spec, but it seemed to only apply to East Asian texts. Then today I ran across it again (see User Agent Man’s post) and realized it’s perfect for glossing texts.

For example, here are the first few verses of the Chapter 2 exercise in Bennett’s An Introduction to the Gothic Language:

  1. In ( in, into ) dagam ( days ) Hērōdis ( of Herod ) þiudanis ( king ) qēmun ( came (3 pl.) ) Iōsēf ( Joseph ) jah ( and, also ) Maria ( Mary ) in ( into ) Bēþlahaím ( Bethlehem ) .
  2. jah ( and, also ) jáinar ( there, yonder ) gabar ( bore (3 sg.) ) Maria ( Mary ) Iēsu ( Jesus ) .
  3. jah ( and, also ) haírdjōs ( herdsmen ) wēsun ( were (3 pl.) ) jáinar ( there, yonder ) ana ( on, upon, in ) akra ( field )

The syntax:

<ruby>
    <rb>In</rb>
    <rp> (</rp>
    <rt>in, into</rt>
    <rp>) </rp>
</ruby>
<ruby>
    <rb>dagam</rb>
    <rp> (</rp>
    <rt>days</rt>
    <rp>) </rp>
</ruby>
<ruby>
    <rb>Hērōdis</rb>
    <rp> (</rp>
    <rt>of Herod</rt>
    <rp>) </rp>
</ruby>

Kind of verbose, though. If I end up using this a lot, I’ll probably write a preprocessor that lets me use abbreviated syntax — something like this:

In::(in, into) dagam::(days) Hērōdis::(of Herod)

Sidenote: I was originally using a combining macron for the macrons (U+0304), but Georgia doesn’t do the combining correctly. Times New Roman does, though. Weird. I ended up just going with the precomposed characters. Oh well.

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