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In its earliest known form, as evidenced by our surviving ogham stones of the approximately 5th to 7th centuries AD, the ogham alphabet consisted of four groups of five characters or letters, giving a total of twenty characters representing the sounds of the Irish language of this early period. The characters are made up of between one and five lines or scores relative to a stemline, generally vertical on stone using its natural angle or edge, with two of the groups distinguished by the orientation of the scores to the stemline. The third group transverses the stemline diagonally and the fourth group consists of one to five scores or notches on the stemline as follows:
[n] | ᚅ | Nin | [kw] | ᚊ | Cert | [r] | ᚏ | Ruis | [i] | ᚔ | Idad |
[s] | ᚄ | Sail | [k] | ᚉ | Coll | [st]? | ᚎ | Straif | [e] | ᚓ | Edad |
[w] | ᚃ | Fern | [t] | ᚈ | Tinne | [gw]? | ᚍ | (n)Gétal | [u] | ᚒ | Úr |
[l] | ᚂ | Luis | [d] | ᚇ | Dair | [g] | ᚌ | Gort | [o] | ᚑ | Onn |
[b] | ᚁ | Beithe | [j]? | ᚆ | hÚath | [m] | ᚋ | Muin | [a] | ᚐ | Ailm |
A fifth group of five 'supplementary characters' or forfeda is included in the manuscript tradition on ogham. However, only the first of these occurs frequently in the inscriptions on stone and appears as two diagonal scores crossing each other on the stemline in the shape of an X.
This character is used with two values: consonantal /k/ or /x/ (usually transliterated K) and vocalic /e/. In the former usage it is most commonly found in the formula word KOI 'here' (corresponding to HIC IACIT on British inscriptions). It is only found used as a vowel (/e/) in the relatively recent inscriptions. The fact that this additional forfid appears in some earlier inscriptions demonstrates that ogham was already well established as a script by this time. This would suggest that the alphabet is at least a few centuries older the earliest surviving inscriptions. Although the practice of carving ogham inscriptions on stone largely died out once writing in manuscripts became established (by the 7th century), the ogham alphabet continued to be used, although with new functions, adaptations and new additions (forfeda), in manuscripts such as the 14th-century Book of Ballymote (see Irish Script On Screen - Meamram Páipéar Ríomhaire).
In the manuscript tradition, each of the ogham characters or letters had names, which were meaningful words in the language (unlike in the Latin alphabet where the letter names have no other meaning). It is mainly with regard to these letter names that the ogham alphabet survived and formed the basis of training for poets and scholars evidenced in texts such as Auraicept na n-Éces 'The Scholars' Primer'. The groups of characters/letters are called aicmi (pl. of aicme 'family, class, group') in Irish and are named after the initial letter giving Aicme Beithe, Aicme hÚatha, Aicme Muine and Aicme Ailme. The characters or letters are generally termed feda (pl. of fid 'wood, tree'), the stemline druim 'ridge, edge, back' and a single score is called flesc 'a twig'. The letter names were likely originally coined for the Primitive Irish sounds to be represented by the ogham alphabet and are our most important source of information on the primary values of the characters. However, changes in the language over time inevitably led to the loss of some of the original values of the letters and the meanings of their names. The manuscript sources, Auraicept na n-Éces 'The Scholars' Primer' and In Lebor Ogaim 'The Ogam Tract', supply a key to the alphabet in which all of the letter names are interpreted as names of trees. In the early days of modern ogham scholarship, these meanings were taken at face value, which led to the belief that the ogham alphabet was based solely on the names of trees. However, more recent work by Damian McManus (1991, A Guide to Ogam and 1988, Ériu 39), on the letter names and their keenings (clues or riddles to meanings) has shown that while some of the letters and their names have survived more or less in tact, others were either misinterpreted or lost and replaced by artificial forms. The fact that many of the letter names which survived into later stages of the language were names of trees (dair 'oak', beithe 'birch', coll 'hazel', sail 'willow', fern 'alder') undoubtedly encouraged the compilers of the alphabet key to attach names of trees to the rest of the letter names, a number of which were no longer understood. Fortunately, our earliest and least contaminated source on the form and meaning of the letter names (Bríatharogaim 'word ogham') helps us to establish many, though unfortunately not all, of the original values and meanings. The following is adapted from McManus' (1991, 36-9; 1988, 127-68) list of letter names and their original meanings, in so far as they can be established:
Among the numerous theories on the origins of Ogham are the following:
Many scholars view Ogham as a cipher to an alphabet (usually Latin) rather than as an alphabet itself. However, there are many features of Ogham which cannot be explained by a simple encoding of the letters of another language, such as Latin. The likelihood is that Ogham was developed in Ireland to represent the sounds of primitive Irish. Although the manuscript record of the Ogham characters is invaluable in many respects, we must keep in mind that the manuscript tradition is too far removed from the period of the orthodox Ogham inscriptions (ogham stones) to be completely reliable. It can be argued, for example, that the characters H, NG and Z, sounds which, to our knowledge, did not exist in initial position in primitive Irish, are 'cosmetic and Latin-based and were chosen on the basis of the contemporary forms of their letter names' (McManus 1991, 33-4). Unfortunately, these three characters are so poorly attested in ogham inscriptions on stone that it is impossible to say with any certainty what the original values may have been.