OGAM 



583 



say an s, for that is the only sibilant known to 

 the language, except sh, which is written * pre- 

 ceding e or ; we most therefore look for a class 

 of words where the actual or attested * of Irish 

 stands for a consonant which was at one time not 

 an s. We have such probably in borrowed words, 

 like srian, 'a bridle,' from the Latin frenum, or 

 scinistir, 'a window,' from the Latin fenentru. 

 Bnt the change from / to * is not confined to 

 borrowed words, as there is a group of words with 

 * in modern Irish corresponding to Welsh Jf, as in 

 Irish sonn, Welsh ffon, 'a staff,' in which the 

 initial combination of consonants seems to have 

 been at first sp or sp-h. This would seem to have 

 been simplified into / or 0, and that ultimately 

 changed in Irish into . We should accordingly be 

 inclined to believe that / or <t> was the value of the 



Ogam //// ; and the phonetic change afterwards 



into s would account for the sibilant value ascribed 

 to this Ogam by Irish tradition. Moreover, a 

 genitive Fanoni in a Devonshire inscription, reading 

 in Roman letters FANONI MAQVIRINI, shows 

 that early Irish had the sound off or 0; and as 

 the Ogam alphabet provided no symbol for it, un- 

 less it was //// > this consideration confirms the 



conclusion already suggested. It is right here to 

 remark that modem Irish has the consonant f in 

 abundance, but in earlier Irish this was to or v, 

 which between vowels has since lieen everywhere 

 elided, while initially it has been strengthened into 

 /; thus, in Adamnan'g Life of St Columba the 

 name Fergna is Virgnoiu, while the ancient Terra 

 Convaleoritm in Lou th appears in the Annals of the 

 Four Masters as Tir-Cotuiille, or rather Tir-Con- 

 aille-Cerd, to distinguish it from the district of 

 Tirconnell in Donegal. As to the Ogam ||||| . 

 which we have transliterated qn, that combination, 

 when written in Latin capitals, is found represented 

 by (JV, as in the MAt/VIKIXI, already cited ; the 

 exact pronunciation of the cannot be ascertained, 

 but it was probably not very far from that of the 

 English w, as in one instance the QV is represented 

 in Ogam by cjo or HIM n , and in one other by qw 

 or HIM |||. In any case, it is worthy of note that 

 no instance of confounding ||||| (qu) with |||| (c) 

 is known to occur in the more res[>ectable class of 

 Ogam inscriptions. Lastly, a character x occurs, 

 which was, as it were, outside the Ogam alphal>et 

 of twenty symbols. In Ireland this x had two 

 values : sometimes it represented one of the sounds 

 of e and sometimes the consonant p ; the latter was 

 also its value in South Wales, where it occurs in 

 the Ogiuic spelling of the genitive of the Koman 

 name Turpilhu. In Goidelic words themselves it 

 cannot have been often wanted, as the p of the 

 Aryan parent speech is nowhere retained in the 

 Celtic languages. It is noticed, however, that in 

 some wonts the place of Aryan p was occupied in 

 Old Irish by h; e.g. huile, 'all,' from the same 

 Dtern as the Greek roXXoi, ' many,' and huathad, 

 ' tin- singular number,' from the same root as Latin 

 pattens, English few. 



A word must now be said of the distribution of 

 Ogam monuments. All the Ogam inscriptions, 

 whether still existing or known to have once 

 existed, number not qnite 300, most of which 

 consist of epitaphs. Of that number aliout 2.W 

 belong to Ireland, mostly the southern counties, 

 .specially Kerry, Cork, and Waterford, though 

 on*' lias been heard of as far north as London- 

 derry. The Ogams in Britain and the islands 

 make rather less than fifty in all, and of these 

 South Britain has none east of Wales and Devon. 

 Within this area the county which has most 



specimens to show is Pembrokeshire (including 



Caldy Island), and next in order come the other 



South Welsh counties and Devon, while Cornwall 



boasts only a single 



instance, and that of 



a somewhat doubtful 



nature. No Ogams 



have been found in 



Mid- Wales, and only 



one is known in 



North Wales to wit, 



near Ruthin, in the 



county of Denbigh. 



The Ogams of Wales, 



however, and Devon 



have an importance 



out of all proportion 



to their numlier, 



owing to the fart 



that most of them 



are accompanied by 



a version in Latin. 



Proceeding north- 

 wards, one comes 



across a highly in- 

 teresting group of 



Ogams in the Isle of 



Man ; but the first 



Scotch Ogam is a 



very doubtful one, to 



be found, as it is sup- 

 posed, in tin' island The Newton Stone, Aberdeen- 



of liigha, between shire, from a photograph 

 appended to the reprint of 

 the Earl of Soutbesk's paper 

 mentioned below. 

 The Ogam inscription, as distin- 

 guished from that in alphabetic 

 characters, in thu> read by the 

 Karl of Sotithmk : (A)IDDAI 

 QNEAX KOHUERI 1UH UA 

 IOSIE, and interpreted aa 'Ada, 

 daughter of Forar, of the race 

 of the sons of Hua*.' 



Cantyre and Islay. 

 There are, however, 

 about fourteen Ogams 

 mentioned as lielong- 

 ing to Scotland, most 

 of which have no 

 doubt attaching to 

 them as to their lieing 

 Ogams, though more 

 doubt than 



enough 



exists as to the import of some of them, or even 

 to the language employed. They occur in the 

 counties of J'ife, Aberdeen, Elgin, and Sutherland ; 

 also in the islands of Orkney, and more frequently 

 in those of Shetland. 



The writer once thought that Ogmic and Kunic 

 writing could be traced to a common origin ; but 

 he no longer thinks so. In his opinion the most 

 probable theory is that which regards the Ogam 

 alphabet as invented during the Homan occupation 

 of Britain, by a Goidelic grammarian who had seen 

 the Brythons of the Koman province making use 

 of Latin letters. The Celts were in the liabit 

 probably of setting up stones to mark the tombs 

 of their great men, but it was presumably from 

 the Romans they learned to inscribe them. It 

 has been supposed that the inventor of the Ogam 

 alphabet took a hint from a habit of scoring for 

 the purpose of counting, and that his group 



' " I'' "'I Hill were the initials of the 

 hate qu 



five first numerals, which in modern Irish are aon, 

 da, trt, ceathair, cuiy, for this only required one to 

 regard aon as if it were haon, with an h prefixed 

 according to a habit by no means uncommon in the 

 case of certain words in Old Irish. Such a theory 

 proves on examination to l>e sulistantially tenable, 

 as the early Goidelic forms of the numerals in 

 question were approximately the following : oinos, 

 iliii'i' n, tru, cetu6'res, que'qqiie. The fourth, cetiid'res, 

 represented an earlier yuetuffres, corresponding to 

 the Latin quntuor and its congeners; but its first 

 u, standing as it originally did in an unaccented 

 syllable, was dropped, so that the word became 

 cctudres. The case of the initial qu of the fifth 



