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These writings are found all over North America. However, there are few who have the linguistic skills to translate them, prominent among which is Professor Catherine Acholonu [see Explanation ]. New discoveries of such inscriptions are being made regularly but the academic community has been negligent in giving them the attention they deserve. This is of course history of importance to all of us. It was only recently that anyone merely suggesting that any form of written language existed in America was labeled a heretic, fool or worse.
However, today we are reading detailed accounts of the Maya and their civilization from numerous inscriptions that were found at archeological sites in Mexico and south. Fell in submitted detailed translations of Ogam inscriptions in America see Report. He compared American inscriptions with those that had been found in Northern Europe dating back to the Bronze Age.
However, very recent linguistic studies have pointed to the possibility that a phonetic alphabet reached North Africa from visitors from North Sea and Baltic Sea civilizations much earlier. Indeed Nyland mentions inscriptions found in Ireland on a Bronze Bowl. Nevertheless, the Gnostic missionaries believed in magic, just like the pre-Christian Irish inhabitants did. As Anthony Jackson discovered, this magic took the shape of numerical wizardry with letters see the Saharan or West African Language.
It is not known if the original Ogam had an organized alphabet but it is likely. The Gnostic missionaries used the script to spread the Gospel by marking their Biblical phrases on Neolithic standing stones to convert the people to Christianity. Benedictine monks and their grammarians came to Ireland with instructions to create a distinct language to replace the "iron" language of the Irish, which they called Cruithin.
They found it necessary to augment the early alphabetic script with five diphthong characters, called Forfeda and further develop it to accommodate their linguistic and literary activities.
There is no doubt that these people were linguistic professionals. To explain how Ogam inscriptions are translated, Nyland has provided a detailed process with examples see Translate. Nevertheless, for most persons not trained in linguistics it is difficult to fully understand. This is the only alphabet known which organizes consonants and vowels in this manner. The Benedictines' operation manual, the " Auraicept ", parts of which appear to have been written as early as A.
These are their signs: Thus is a tree climbed, to wit, treading on the root of the tree first with thy right hand first and thy left hand after. Then with the stem, and against it and through it and about it. Ogam is climbed as a tree is climbed The original 20 symbols are shown in both the original vertical as well as the later horizontal way of writing. Most of the early inscriptions on stone in Scotland and Ireland are written in the vertical form.
The Ogam texts in books such as the Auraicept and on the petroglyphs in West Virginia are written in the horizontal literary tradition. At first sight, the peculiar arrangement of the letters in the Ogam alphabet appears to be completely unrelated to the pre-existing Greek and Latin alphabets. McManus searched elsewhere for the origin and found that "there is a clear connection with the North Etruscan alphabets".
However, anthropologist Anthony Jackson from Edinburgh University discovered that the arrangement was directly related to the ordinal numbers of the letters in the Latin alphabet. The 20 original Ogam characters were divided into four columns, which, arranged according to a cabalistic system of calculation, totaled 50, 50, 61 and 49 respectively: Please see Jackson's monograph, chapter 7. The same letters are missing from the newly re-arranged Ogam alphabet.
This probably means that the linguist who designed the Ogam alphabet was selective in choosing only those Latin letters that made the cabalistic calculations and arrangement possible. Neither is there a P in Arabic. Only a few words in Basque start with F , which letter may be a quite recent addition to this language; the V, C, Y and Q still do not exist in Basque, and the Basque X represents " sh ". The primary organization of their dictionary is according to the consonants. It is mainly this half of the language that the monks used in the construction of the Romance languages and English.
These words were then arranged according to the first consonants in the words, each consonant was then subdivided again into 25 VCV combinations such as under D: Under each such VCV were then listed all those words with their translations which started with these three letters. This arrangement is still the best way for us to decode Ogam writing. The syntax of modern Irish i. Gaelic or Celtic is very unsuited to this VCV system and consequently this language cannot be written in traditional Irish Ogam.
This explains why "Celtic" scholars have been unable to translate even one single Ogam inscription correctly. Ogam was originally designed for record keeping and the sending of short messages, not for literary expression. However, this is what the Benedictine monks of Ireland used it for. One of the primary purposes of the Benedictine Order was the replacement of the ancient pre-Christian, gylanic oriented, language with a church-approved one.
The syntax of the Basque language was ideally suited for the agglutination of new words, which then appeared to have no relationship to the original language. The VCV formula made this possible. However, traditions governing this ancient formula did not allow two vowels to be written side-by side without a space separation, which demanded separate words. This rule created problems and restrictions for those writing in the script. The monks wished to simplify the rules of writing. They created words and names with diphthongs in them, the invention of five new "Forfeda" characters permitting the combination of: The design of the characters they created was totally out of style with the original script.
McManus observed that they "missed the opportunity of completing the symmetry of the system by having the fifth series mirror the third in the way that the second mirrors the first" McManus 1. In the following analysis of "Forfeda", the first " f " has to be a " b ", a common letter shift; the second " f " is correct. Develop that infernal fabrication! This joining is the main characteristic of Ogam writing, is basic to all Ogam inscriptions and is indispensable in deciphering.
Any missing purposely removed vowels in the words analyzed, are represented by a dot until identified. Forfeda symbols are never eliminated. The monks later overstated this word to "Foirfeadha", to make it look as if the word had originated with the "Celtic" language, which is characterized by an excess of unnecessary vowels and h's. Some remarks in the Auraicept pertain to the creation of Forfeda characters such as: Innovate by carefully developing a similar wealth of timeless characters.
Ogam translation requires the following steps: Transliterate the Ogam characters into our Latin letters,. Replace the letters c, q, v, w, y with equivalent Basque letters, c and q become k, v becomes b, the y becomes i. In later centuries when ogham ceased to be used as a practical alphabet, it retained its place in the learning of Gaelic scholars and poets as the basis of grammar and the rules of poetry. Indeed, until modern times the Latin alphabet in Gaelic continued to be taught using letter names borrowed from the Beith-Luis-Nin , along with the Medieval association of each letter with a different tree.
Ogham was added to the Unicode Standard in September with the release of version 3. The spelling of the names given is a standardisation dating to , used in Unicode Standard and in Irish Standard Macalister see above and elaborated on them much further. Graves proposed that the ogham alphabet encoded a set of beliefs originating in the Middle-East in Stone Age times, concerning the ceremonies surrounding the worship of the Moon-goddess in her various forms. Graves' argument is extremely complex, but in essence he argues that the Hebrews, Greeks and Celts were all influenced by a people originating in the Aegean, called ' the people of the sea ' by the Egyptians, who spread out around Europe in the 2nd millennium BC, taking their religious beliefs with them.
Eventually, via the druids of Gaul, this knowledge was passed on to the poets of early Ireland and Wales. Graves therefore looked at the Tree Alphabet tradition surrounding ogham and explored the tree folklore of each of the letter names, proposing that the order of the letters formed an ancient "seasonal calendar of tree magic". In addition, Graves followed the BLNFS order of ogham letters put forward by Macalister see above , with the result that this has been taken up by New Age and Neopagan writers as the 'correct' order of the letters, despite its rejection by scholars.
Acholonu's work on the Internet and started telling all the Ogam researchers he knew including Nyland, Nyland then asked him to get an Igbo dictionary from her. The analysis of the " R " or " RR " is therefore usually kept to the last. The twenty standard letters of the Ogham alphabet and the five forfeda. McManus searched elsewhere for the origin and found that "there is a clear connection with the North Etruscan alphabets". Guessing the mood of the monk who made up the word can be entertaining.
The main use of ogham by modern Druids , Neo-Pagans is for the purpose of divination. In the story, druid Dalan takes four wands of yew, and writes ogham letters upon them. Then he uses the tools for divination. Robert Graves ' book The White Goddess has been a major influence on assigning divinatory meanings for ogham.
The three sets of kennings can be separated into Past-Present-Future or Land-Sea-Sky groupings in such systems, but other organising structures are used, as well. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. History of the alphabet. BCE Hieratic 32 c. BCE Demotic 7 c. BCE Meroitic 3 c.
BCE Proto-Sinaitic 19 c. BCE Ugaritic 15 c. BCE Phoenician 12 c. BCE Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE Samaritan 6 c. BCE Libyco-Berber 3 c. BCE Tifinagh Paleohispanic semi-syllabic 7 c. BCE Aramaic 8 c. BCE Brahmic family see E. CE Devanagari 10 c. CE Canadian syllabics Hebrew 3 c.
Ogham is an Early Medieval alphabet used to write the early Irish language and later the Old Irish language. Ogham: An Irish Alphabet [Cristoir M. Fhearaigh, Tim Stampton] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The form of Irish known as Ogham was.
BCE Pahlavi 3 c. BCE Avestan 4 c. CE Palmyrene 2 c. BCE Syriac 2 c. BCE Nabataean 2 c. BCE Arabic 4 c. BCE Orkhon old Turkic 6 c. CE Old Hungarian c. CE Greek 8 c. BCE Etruscan 8 c. BCE Latin 7 c. BCE Cherokee syllabary; letter forms only c. CE Ogham origin uncertain 4 c. CE Coptic 3 c. CE Gothic 3 c. CE derived from Brahmi numerals. The twenty standard letters of the Ogham alphabet and the five forfeda.
The box on the left shows the consonants, and the box on the right shows the vowels both non- IPA. An additional secondary letter p is shown as 26th character peith. This is the vertical writing of Ogham; in the horizontal form, the right side would face downward. Oxford English Dictionary 3rd ed. Subscription or UK public library membership required.
The later scholastic inscriptions have no definite endpoint and continue into the Middle Irish and even Modern Irish periods, and record also names in other languages, such as Old Norse, Old Welsh, Latin and possibly Pictish. The Three Writing Systems of the Picts. Tuckwell Press , p. Everyday Life of the Pagan Celts. Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. A Grammar of Old Irish pages 9— Macalister, The Secret Languages of Ireland p. The Secret Languages of Ireland , pp. There is also the fact that it would be impossible to change the order of letters in ogham, given that it is a numbered series of strokes.
In other words, to change N from the third to the fifth letter would also mean changing its symbol from three strokes to five strokes. The letters F and S would also have to be changed. This would obviously lead to great confusion, and would only be done if there was some compelling reason for the change. Macalister provides no such reason. With regard to Ailm , in the King and Hermit poem the hermit Marban says caine ailmi ardom-peitet — 'beautiful are the pines that make music for me' This is a reference to the idea that pine makes a pleasing, soothing sound as the wind passes through its needles.
Text by Imelda Kehoe. Retrieved 19 January The British Druid Order. Archived from the original on 4 April Retrieved 28 April Comhar Feasta An tUltach Tuairisc.
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