2001-11-01 11:04:22 --
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Introduction to Linguistic archaeology for Ireland.

THE OGAM ALPHABET.

It is suggested that Ogam came to Ireland from North Africa with the first Gnostic missionaries who preached the early Irish Christianity. These people believed in magic, just like the pre-Chistian inhabitants did. As Anthony Jackson (1993) discovered, this magic took the shape of numerical wizardry with letters (see the Saharan 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. Around 650 A.D. 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 (see below) and further develop it to accomodate the linguistic and literary activities they had in mind. There is no doubt that these people were linguistic professionals in the best tradition.

The Ogam alphabet, as it is known to us today, is composed of 15 consonants followed by five vowels. 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 700 A.D., in the very early years of Irish Judeo-Christianity, described the Ogam alphabet as follows:

Translation by Calder:

This is their number: five Ogmic groups, i.e., five men for each group, and one up to five for each of them, that their signs may be distinguished. These are their signs: right of stem, left of stem, athwart of stem, through stem, about stem. 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. (Lines 947-951).

McManus clarified this:

"This is their number: there are five groups of Ogam and each group has five letters and each of them has from one to five scores and their orientations distinguish them. Their orientations are: right of the stemline, left of the stemline, across the stemline, through the stemline, around the stemline. Ogam is climbed as a tree is climbed..." (McManus 1.5).

Written horizontally:

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By the time the fifth column of Forfeda symbols had been added, the script was written horizontally, from left to right but the above quote still appears to record the original way of vertical writing, read from the bottom up. I am showing the original 20 symbols 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". Anthropologist Anthony Jackson from Edinburgh University, however, discovered that the arrangement was directly related to the ordinal numbers of the letters in the Latin alphabet:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

A B C D E V G H I Z L M N O NG Q R S T U

The total of the ordinal numbers in the Latin alphabet is 210. The 20 original Ogam characters were divided into four columns, which, arranged according to a cabalistic system of calculation, totalled 50, 50, 61 and 49 respectively:

N 13 Q 16 = (1x29) R 17 I 9 = (2x13) 5x11
S 18 C 3 = (3x7) Z 10 E 5 = (3x5) 3x3x4
V 6 T 19 = (5x5) NG 15 U 20 = (5x7) 3x4x5
L 11 D 4 = (3x5) G 7 O 14 = (3x7) 3x3x4
B 2 H 8 = (2x5) M 12 A 1 = (1x13) 1x23
___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___

50 50 = 100 61 49 = 110 210
10x5 10x5 (10x10) 1x61 7x7 (10x11) 2x3x5x7

B L V S N / H D T C Q / M G NG Z R / A O U E I.
The sequence of the letters within each column appears to be in relation to the primary numbers, however, the calculations go beyond the scope of this article. The interested reader is referred to Jackson's monograph, chapter 7.

As you will have noticed, there are several letters missing from the Latin alphabet shown above: F, J, K, P, V, X and Y. 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 chosing only those Latin letters which made the cabalistic calculations and arrangement possible. The V had replaced the B and the F; the I replaced the J and Y; the C and Q replaced the K; the B, a labial, took the pace of P (also a labial), the character X was used for the later Ogam diphthong EA, but in the Ogam script sometimes is written as KS. It is intesting to note that Q-Celtic has no F, J or P. 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".


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WHAT IS OGAM?
INTRODUCTION.
Ogam is the oldest form of writing in Ireland and Scotland. It can still be seen inscribed on hundreds of large and small stones, on the walls of some caves, but also on bone, ivory, bronze and silver objects. The Ogam script was especially well adapted for use on sticks. Sticks are part of the Basque word for "alphabet": agaka, agglutinated from aga-aka, aga (stick or pole) and akats (notch). The meaning of the word agaka therefore isn't so much "alphabet" as "writing", a stick with Ogam notches conveying a message. The name Ogam likely comes from oga-ama, ogasun (property, wealth) ama (Priestess, mother) property of the Priestess, which indicates that the script may originally have been designed for use by the clergy of the pre-Christian religion.

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