Ogham

Ogham is an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the early Irish language, and later the Old Irish language. There are roughly 400 surviving orthodox inscriptions on stone monuments throughout Ireland and western Britain, the bulk of which are in southern areas of the Irish province of Munster. The Munster counties of Cork and Kerry contain 60% of all Irish ogham stones. The largest number outside Ireland are in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
The inscriptions usually consist of personal names written in a set formula.
Many of the High Medieval Bríatharogaim are understood to reference various trees and plants. [|This interpretation was popularized] by Robert Graves in his book The White Goddess; for this reason, Ogham is sometimes known as the Celtic tree alphabet.
The etymology of the word ogam or ogham remains unclear. One possible origin is from the Irish og-úaim 'point-seam', referring to the seam made by the point of a sharp weapon.

Origins

It is generally thought that the earliest inscriptions in Ogham date to about the 4th century AD, but James Carney believed its origin is rather within the 1st century BC. Although the use of classical ogham in stone inscriptions seems to have flourished in the 5th and 6th centuries around the Irish Sea, from the phonological evidence it is clear that the alphabet predates the 5th century. Indeed, the alphabet has letters representing archaic phonemes which were clearly part of the system, but which were no longer spoken by the 5th century and never appear in inscriptions, suggesting an extended period of ogham writing on wood or other perishable material prior to the preserved monumental inscriptions. They are: úath and straif, and gétal.
It appears that the Ogham alphabet was modelled on another script, and some even consider it a mere cipher of its template script. The largest number of scholars favour the Latin alphabet as this template, although the Elder Futhark and even the Greek alphabet have their supporters. Runic origin would elegantly explain the presence of "H" and "Z" letters unused in Irish, as well as the presence of vocalic and consonantal variants "U" vs. "W", unknown to Latin writing and lost in Greek. The Latin alphabet is the primary contender mainly because its influence at the required period is most easily established, being widely used in neighbouring Roman Britannia, while runes in the 4th century were not very widespread even in continental Europe.
In Ireland and Wales, the language of the monumental stone inscriptions is termed Primitive Irish. The transition to Old Irish, the language of the earliest sources in the Latin alphabet, takes place in about the 6th century. Since ogham inscriptions consist almost exclusively of personal names and marks possibly indicating land ownership, linguistic information that may be gleaned from the Primitive Irish period is mostly restricted to phonological developments.

Theories of origin

There are two main schools of thought among scholars as to the motivation for the creation of ogham. Scholars such as Carney and MacNeill have suggested that ogham was first created as a cryptic alphabet, designed by the Irish to hide their meaning from writers of the Latin alphabet. In this school of thought, it is asserted that "the alphabet was created by Irish scholars or druids for political, military or religious reasons to provide a secret means of communication in opposition to the authorities of Roman Britain." The serious threat of invasion by the Roman Empire, which then ruled over neighbouring central and southern Britain, may have spurred the creation of the alphabet. Alternatively, in later centuries when the threat of invasion had receded and the Irish were themselves invading western Britain, the desire to keep communications secret from Romans or Romanised Britons would still have provided an incentive. With bilingual ogham and Latin inscriptions in Wales, however, one would suppose that the ogham could easily be decoded by at least an educated few in the post-Roman world.
The second main school of thought, put forward by scholars such as McManus, is that ogham was invented by the first Christian communities in early Ireland, out of a desire for a unique alphabet to write short messages and inscriptions in Irish. The sounds of Primitive Irish may have been difficult to transcribe into the Latin alphabet, motivating the invention of a separate alphabet. A possible such origin, as suggested by McManus, is the early Irish Christian community known from around AD 400 at latest, attested by the mission of Palladius by Pope Celestine I in AD 431.
A variation is the idea that this alphabet was first invented, for whatever reason, in 4th-century Irish settlements in west Wales after contact and intermarriage with Romanised Britons with knowledge of the Latin alphabet. In fact, several ogham stones in Wales are bilingual, containing both Irish and British Latin, testifying to the international contacts that led to the existence of some of these stones.
A third hypothesis, put forward by the noted ogham scholar R. A. S. Macalister was influential at one time, but finds little favour with scholars today. He believed – because ogham consists of four groups of five letters with a sequence of strokes from one to five – that ogham was first invented as a secret system of finger signals in Cisalpine Gaul around 600 BC by Gaulish druids, and was inspired by a form of the Greek alphabet current in Northern Italy at the time. According to this idea, the alphabet was transmitted in oral form or on wood only, until it was finally put into a permanent form on stone inscriptions in early Christian Ireland. Later scholars are largely united in rejecting this hypothesis, however, primarily because a detailed study of the letters shows that they were created specifically for the Primitive Irish of the early centuries AD. The supposed links with the form of the Greek alphabet that Macalister proposed can also be disproved.
A fourth hypothesis, proposed by the scholars Rudolf Thurneysen and Joseph Vendryes, is that the forms of the letters derive from a numerical tally-mark counting system of the time, based around the numbers five and twenty, which was then adapted into an alphabet.

Legendary accounts

According to the 11th-century Lebor Gabála Érenn, the 14th-century Auraicept na n-Éces, and other Medieval Irish folklore, ogham was first invented soon after the fall of the Tower of Babel, along with the Gaelic language, by the legendary Scythian king, Fenius Farsa. According to the Auraicept, Fenius journeyed from Scythia together with Goídel mac Ethéoir, Íar mac Nema and a retinue of 72 scholars. They came to the plain of Shinar to study the confused languages at Nimrod's tower. Finding that they had already been dispersed, Fenius sent his scholars to study them, staying at the tower, coordinating the effort. After ten years, the investigations were complete, and Fenius created in Bérla tóbaide "the selected language", taking the best of each of the confused tongues, which he called Goídelc, Goidelic, after Goídel mac Ethéoir. He also created extensions of Goídelc, called Bérla Féne, after himself, Íarmberla, after Íar mac Nema, and others, and the Beithe-luis-nuin as a perfected writing system for his languages. The names he gave to the letters were those of his 25 best scholars.
Alternatively, the Ogam Tract credits Ogma with the script's invention. Ogma was skilled in speech and poetry, and created the system for the learned, to confound rustics and fools. The first message written in ogam was seven b on a birch, sent as a warning to Lug, meaning: "your wife will be carried away seven times to the otherworld unless the birch protects her". For this reason, the letter b is said to be named after the birch, and In Lebor Ogaim goes on to tell the tradition that all letters were named after trees, a claim also referred to by the Auraicept as an alternative to the naming after Fenius' disciples.

Alphabet: the

Strictly speaking, the word ogham means 'letters', while the alphabet is called beith-luis-nin after the letter names of the first letters. The order of the first five letters, BLFSN, led the scholar Macalister to propose that a link between a form of the Greek alphabet used in Northern Italy in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. However, there is no evidence for Macalister's theory, and it has been discounted by later scholars. There are in fact other explanations for the name Beith-luis-nin. One explanation is that the word nin, which means 'forked branch', was used to mean letters in general. Beith-luis-nin could therefore mean simply beith-luis letters. Another suggestion is that beith-luis-nin is a contraction of the first five letters, ie, beith-LVS-nin.
The ogham alphabet originally consisted of twenty letters, divided into four groups according the stroke angle and direction. The groups were

, right side/downward strokes
, left side/upward strokes
, oblique crossing strokes
, notches or perpendicular crossing strokes

Five additional letters were later introduced, the so-called forfeda.
A letter for p is conspicuously absent, since the phoneme was lost in Proto-Celtic, and the gap was not filled in Q-Celtic, and no sign was needed before loanwords from Latin containing p appeared in Irish, such as Patrick. Conversely, there is a letter for the labiovelar q, a phoneme lost in Old Irish. The base alphabet is, therefore, as it were, designed for Proto-Q-Celtic.
Of the five forfeda or supplementary letters, only the first, ébad, regularly appears in inscriptions, but mostly with the value K, in the word koi. The others, except for emancholl, have at most only one certain 'orthodox' inscription each. Due to their limited practical use, later ogamists turned the supplementary letters into a series of diphthongs, changing completely the values for pín and emancholl. This meant that the alphabet was once again without a letter for the 'P' sound, forcing the invention of the letter peithboc, which appears in the manuscripts only.

Image	Image	Unicode	Name	Trans.	IPA	Meaning of name
		ᚁ	beith	b		birch
		ᚂ	luis	l		plant rowan
		ᚃ	fearn	f		alder
		ᚄ	sail	s		willow
		ᚅ	nion	n		fork; loft ash
		ᚆ	uath	h		horror; fear whitethorn
		ᚇ	dair	d		oak
		ᚈ	tinne	t		ingot holly
		ᚉ	coll	c		hazel
		ᚊ	ceirt	q		bush; rag apple
		ᚋ	muin	m		neck; ruse; love vine
		ᚌ	gort	g		field ivy
		ᚍ	ngéadal	ng		killing broom; fern
		ᚎ	straif	st		sulphur blackthorn
		ᚏ	ruis	r		red broom; elder
		ᚐ	ailm	a		pine; fir
		ᚑ	onn	o		ash; furze
		ᚒ	úr	u		earth; clay; soil heath
		ᚓ	eadhadh	e		unknown aspen
		ᚔ	iodhadh	i		unknown yew
		ᚕ	éabhadh	ea		unknown aspen
		ᚖ	óir	oi		gold ivy
		ᚗ	uilleann	ui		elbow honeysuckle
		ᚘ	pín; ifín	p; io		spine; thorn
		ᚙ	eamhancholl	ch; x; ae	;	twin of coll
		ᚚ	peith; beithe bog	p		soft beith

Ogham script can also be expressed schematically as follows:

B group
H group
M group
A group
Forfeda