Preserving Ireland's Ancient, Mysterious Tree-Based Alphabet
Preserving Ireland's Ancient, Mysterious Tree-Based Alphabet
Across Ireland, hundreds of millennia-old Ogham stones are slowly weathering away.
by Cara Giaimo
May 19, 2016
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A 3-D scan of the Ballymorereagh Ogham stone. The inscription translates to "Cellach son of Mac-Áine." (Photo: Nora White/Ogham in 3-D)
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White studies Ogham—a mysterious Irish alphabet found on hundreds of scattered stones all over the country. Also called the "Celtic Tree Alphabet" due to its unusual letter scheme, Ogham dates back to at least the 4th century, when Gaelic speakers created it in order to translate the unique sounds of their language into written form. Today, they're fonts of linguistic knowledge and scholarly mystery, and lightning rods for cross-millennial empathy. "There is no doubt that you get a feeling of connection with the past," says White. "You can't help but wonder about the person commemorated and the one commissioned to carve the stone."
There are about 400 known Ogham stones in the world—360 in Ireland, and the rest scattered between Wales, the Isle of Mann, and Scotland. Most are monuments or border markers, engraved with the evocative names and genealogies of their owners—"Belonging to the Three Sons of the Bald One," or "He Who Was Born Of The Raven." More are almost certainly lurking—hidden stones can (and do) pop up occasionally, built into churches, unearthed at construction sites, or hiding out disguised as decorative stonework.
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A key to the Ogham alphabet—on the sides of stones, the main "stem" is vertically
oriented instead of horizontal. (Image: Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary
of the English Language/Public Domain)
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On a purely linguistic level, Ogham isn't too hard to master. Each of its 20 characters, or "trees," is made out of a reference line, or "stem," crossed by one or more slashes, or "twigs." Depending on the number and direction of these twigs, the letter codes for a particular sound. To aid in memorization, each letter also has a name—often, though not always, a tree that starts with the sound the letter represents. The "B" sound, for example, has one twig sticking out on the right, and is called "Beithe," or birch tree.
When scholars memorized the letters, they'd group them by twig direction, and count up by twig number. The right-sided twigs go "Beighe, Luis, Fern, Sail, Nin" ("birch, herb, alder, willow, letters"
. The horizontal slash-throughs go "Ailm, Onn, Ur, Edad, Idad" ("pine, ash, earth, wild cherry" . It's like the alphabet song, but with groups of trees instead of melodic clusters—not that difficult for those who like puzzles.
More:
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/preserving-irelands-ancient-mysterious-treebased-alphabet
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