Ogham - Alphabet: The Beith-Luis-Nin

Alphabet: The Beith-Luis-Nin

Strictly speaking, the word ogham refers only to the form of letters or script, while the letters themselves are known collectively as the Beith-luis-nin after the letter names of the first letters (in the same manner as the Greek Alpha and Beta). The fact that the order of the letters is in fact BLFSN led the scholar Macalister to propose that the letter order was originally BLNFS. This was to fit into his own theories which linked the Beith-luis-nin to a form of the Greek alphabet current in Northern Italy in the 5th and 6th centuries BC. However, there is no evidence for Macalister's theories and they have since 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 literally means 'a forked branch' was also regularly used to mean a written letter in general. Beith-luis-nin could therefore mean simply 'Beith-luis letters'. The other explanation is that Beith-luis-nin is a convenient contraction of the first five letters thus: Beith-LVS-nin.

The ogham alphabet originally consisted of twenty distinct characters (feda), arranged in four series aicmí (plural of aicme "family"; compare aett). Each aicme was named after its first character (Aicme Beithe, Aicme hÚatha, Aicme Muine, Aicme Ailme, "the B Group", "the H Group", "the M Group", "the A Group"). Five additional letters were later introduced (mainly in the manuscript tradition), the so-called forfeda.

The Ogam Tract also gives a variety of some 100 variant or secret modes of writing ogham (92 in the Book of Ballymote), for example the "shield ogham" (ogam airenach, nr. 73). Even the Younger Futhark are introduced as a kind of "Viking ogham" (nrs. 91, 92).

The four primary aicmí are, with their transcriptions in manuscript tradition and their names according to manuscript tradition in normalized Old Irish, followed by the their Primitive Irish sound values, and their presumed original name in Primitive Irish in cases where the name's etymology is known:

• Right side/downward strokes
  1. B beith (*betwias)
  2. L luis
  3. F fearn (*wernā)
  4. S saille (*salis)
  5. N nuin
• Left side/upward strokes
  1. H úath ?
  2. D duir (*daris)
  3. T tinne
  4. C coll (*coslas)
  5. Q ceirt (*kʷertā)
• Across/pendicular strokes
  1. M muin
  2. G gort (*gortas)
  3. NG gétal (*gʷēddlan)
  4. Z straif or ?
  5. R ruis
• notches (vowels)
  1. A ailm
  2. O onn (*osen)
  3. U úr
  4. E edad
  5. I idad

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 (e.g., Patrick). Conversely, there is a letter for the labiovelar q (ᚊ ceirt), 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 (McManus, § 5.3, 1991). The others, except for emancholl, have at most only one certain 'orthodox' (see below) 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 (soft 'B'), which appears in the manuscripts only.

• EA ébad
• OI óir
• UI uillenn
• P, later IO pín (later iphín)
• X or Ch (as in loch), later AE emancholl