Alfabeto Ogham
Alfabeto Ogham
Alfabeto Ogham
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443
AN animated controversy
of the Round respecting
Towers was carried onthe
forage andyears
many uses
amongst Irish antiquaries. Believed by some to be the
work of a highly-civilised but pagan race, who erected them
in pre-historic times, either to serve as fire temples, or as
emblems of a less pure form of oriental worship, they were
referred by others to a much later period, and had a very
different purpose ascribed to them. The antiquaries who
have most carefully studied the general history of archi
tecture, and the ancient documents of various kinds which
exist in the Irish language, have come to the conclusion
that these structures belong to the Christian period, and
were used as belfries in connexion with Christian churches;
nay, even that some of them were built only about a thou
sand years ago. It would almost seem as if a national
spirit had been introduced into the discussion of this ques
tion, and those scholars who denied the great antiquity
and pagan origin of the Round Towers were believed to
take an unpatriotic part in abandoning the claims of their
country to the possession of a high degree of civilisation
when all the other nations of western Europe were sunk in
barbarism. Upon that subject it is not improbable that
additional light may be thrown when further progress shall
have been made in the publication of the ancient Irish
laws, poems, romances, lives of saints, and treatises
of all kinds which* still remain uncopied and untrans
lated in our libraries. But the discussion is no longer
carried on with any activity. Those who assert the compa
2 G 2
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TEE BISHOP OF LIMERICK ON
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THE OGHAM ALPHABET. 445
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446 TEE BISHOP OF LIMERICK ON
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THE OGHAM ALPHABET. 447
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448 THE BISHOP OF LIMERICK ON
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THE OGHAM ALPHABET. 449
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45° THE BISHOP OF LIMERICK ON
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THE OGHAM ALPHABET. 45i
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452 THE BISHOP OF LIMERICK ON
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THE OGHAM ALPHABET. 453
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THE BISHOP OF LIMERICK ON
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THE OGHAM. ALPHABET. 455
XObx*
of these, the two which stand for ea and oi, as may be col
lected from a passage in the Uraicept, were first added,
being probably suggested by, or intended to represent, the
diphthongs a and ce in the Latin alphabet. The last three
appear to have been occasionally employed in other ways.
Thus the symbol for ui was made to stand for y. The sym
bol for ia is said to have been also used for p; and we are
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456 TEE BISHOP OF LIMERICK ON
told that the symbol .for ae denoted likewise x, cc, ch, achy
and uch}
It has been the more necessary to set before the reader
this full account of the powers and forms of the letters in
the Ogham alphabet, inasmuch as errors have crept into
the statements which all the most eminent Irish antiqua
ries and grammarians have made respecting them. O'Fla
herty, Molloy, M'Curtin, Harris, Ledwich, and O'Connor,
not to mention Vallancey, Beaufort, and O'FIanagan, have
fallen into mistakes more or less likely to mislead. Some
modern writers have stated that p was denoted in Ogham
by a short stroke parallel to the stem-line. If this prac
tice was ever adopted, it was probably a recent contrivance,
resorted to by persons ignorant of the manner in which
the sound of that letter was represented by the ancient
Irish scribes. We learn from the Uraicept that the proper
mode of writing p was by b, seeing that p, as they pro
nounced it, was a softened b.
We are also presented in the modern Ogham alphabets
with a spiral character said to denote 2. This,» too, is an
invention growing, like the one just mentioned, out of ig
norance. The ancient Irish, when they had occasion to
write words containing the letter 2, substituted st or sd for
it. Thus in the Liber Hymnorum we find the names Eliza
beth and Zacharias spelt Elistabeth and Stacharias; and
in the copy of the Uraicept in the Book of Lecan, the name
of the Greek letter £ is written Steta. The fourteenth letter
of the Ogham alphabet was certainly intended to represent
2. But the Irish character employed in the manuscripts to
1 So far as the writer knows, the The fifth is used for x or sc in a note
third, fourth, and fifth diphthong sym written in the Ogham character in the
bols have not been found on any of the margin of the S. Gall MS. of Priscian,
monuments. The first is sometimes in the year 875 by the transcriber, who
used to denote p, as well as ea or eo. was an Irishman.
The second is of very rare occurrence.
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TEE OGEAM ALPEABET. 457
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458 THE BISHOP OF LIMERICK ON
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THE OGHAM ALPHABET. 459
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460 the bishop of limerick on
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THE OGHAM ALPHABET. 461
2 It is easy to see that a single change make the order of the indices 4, I, 3, 2
in the order of the letters both in the in all the lines, and would thus sepa
third and fourth horizontal lines, and rate the aicm.es, bringing each out into
-a double change in the fifth line, would a vertical column by itself.
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462 THE BISHOP OF LIMERICK ON
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THE OGHAM ALPHABET. 463
4s
f utho rchni a stbmlo
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464 THE BISHOP OF LIMERICK ON
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THE OGHAM ALPHABET. 465
that group. Thus the symbol for f written thrice stood for
th; two h's for n, and so on. Here again we have an in
stance of the application of the principle on which the
Ogham alphabet was framed.
It ought to be mentioned in this place, though we are
not yet able to bring the fact into relation with others
which bear upon our subject, that an Arabic collection of
alphabets, or more properly speaking, ciphers, by Ibn
Wahshiyah, translated by Von Hammer, contains two tree
shaped alphabets ; of which one is constructed on precisely
the same principle as the Ogham, and the forms of the
character are identically the same as those of the Twig
Runes. Ibn Wahshiyah names this " the alphabet of
Dioscorides the philosopher, commonly called the Tree
Alphabet. He wrote on trees, shrubs, and herbs, and of
their secret, useful, and noxious qualities in this alphabet,
used since in their books by different philosophers." This
work, which for a time possessed some authority, is now
proved to be a forgery. The greater number of the alpha
bets which it contains are merely fictitious ; and its pre
tended explanations of Egyptian hieroglyphics are all
found to be incorrect. But the work, apocryphal as it is,
was written in the ninth or tenth century: and it will be a
curious problem to account for the similarity between the
tree-alphabets represented in it and the Twig-Runes of
Scandinavia.
Perhaps the germ of the method of constructing the
Ogham alphabet was involved in the custom of denoting
the five vowels by points, numbering from one to five,
which had grown up at a very early period. From a single
group of five letters represented in this way, the alphabet
maker may have been led on to frame an entire alphabet,
consisting of four such groups.
In the tract De InventioneLinguarum, at the end of the
works of Hrabanus Maurus, we meet with an example of
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466 THE BISHOP OF LIMERICK ON
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THE OGHAM. ALPHABET. 467
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468 THE BISHOP OF LIMERICK ON
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THE OGHAM ALPHABET. 469
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THE BISHOP OF LIMERICK ON
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THE OGHAM ALPHABET. 471
any case the fact remains that the two alphabets are here
brought into actual contact.
The results to which the analysis of the Ogham alpha
bet itself seems to lead are the following:—
1. It is a cipher, that is to say, a series of signs which
represent letters, as the elements of a real alphabet stand
for sounds. This needs no proof. It is apparent on in
spection.
2. Being a cipher, as thus defined, it was contrived by
those who possessed a knowledge of one or more foreign
alphabets.
3. The alphabets to which it appears to be most closely
related are the Latin alphabet, and a comparatively recent
and fully developed Runic Futhorc.
4. The principle upon which the Ogham alphabet is
constructed, and the form of its characters, connect it as
closely as possible with the Tree-Runes, and it is more
rational to suppose that the Ogham was derived from the
Tree-Runes than to assume the converse; the Tree-Runes
being a particular species of Class Runes, all of which are
developed out of the Runic Futhorc.
5. The Ogham, being a cipher, is essentially cryptic in
its nature, and was used for special purposes by persons
possessing a different alphabet that served for common
use. Its cryptic character is expressly asserted in the
Ogham Tract, and is intimated plainly enough in the
Uraicept, where it is stated that the scholars of Fenius
•desired to be supplied with a means of communication
which should be unintelligible to others.
6. It is far from being stenographic, as some have
supposed. The letters h and b, which are simplest in form,
are least frequent in recurrence on the monuments ; whilst
the letters c and r, which recur most frequently, are the
most complicated characters.
7. The Ogham alphabet is not related, as some have
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472 the ogeam alphabet.
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