Ogham

Origin

The Ogham alphabet is thought to be named after the Irish god Ogma. One theory of its origins is that it evolved out of a system of tallies used for accounting. Ogham is also known as or ogham craobh, beth luis fearn or beth luis nion.

About 500 Ogham inscriptions have been found in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England dating from between the 4th and 7th centuries AD. There are inscriptions in archaic forms of Gaelic and Pictish, which have not been deciphered. A handful of inscriptions featuring the Ogham script and the Latin alphabet have also been found.

While all surviving traces of Ogham are inscriptions on stone, it was probably more commonly inscribed on sticks, stakes and trees. Inscriptions generally take the form of somebody's name and the name of a place and were probably used to mark boundaries.

Notable features

Type of writing system: alphabet
Number of letters: 25
Writing surfaces: rocks, wood, manuscripts
Direction of writing: inscribed around the edges of rocks running from bottom to top and left to right, or left to right and horizontally in manuscripts.
Letters are linked together by a solid line.
The names and sounds represented by some of the letters are unknown.
The Eite (feather) and Eite thuathail (reversed feather) symbols are used at the beginning and end of sentences respectively.

The Ogham alphabet

Ogham alphabet

Sample text in Ogham

Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/forfeda

Links

Free Ogham fonts
http://www.evertype.com/celtscript/ogfont.html
http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/ogham/

Everything Ogham on the web (in English and Irish)
http://www.evertype.com/standards/og/ogmharc.html

Photos of Ogham stones with transliterations of the inscriptions
http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/ogam/ogsing.htm

Translating Ancient Ogham - an introduction to linguistic archaeology in Ireland
http://www.celticgrounds.com/chapters/ogham_translat.htm

ALPHABETUM is a Unicode font specifically designed for ancient languages that includes Ogham, and many other ancient scripts
http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/~jmag0042/alphabet.html

Other alphabets

Armenian, Avestan, Bassa (Vah), Beitha Kukju, Coptic, Cyrillic, Elbsan, Etruscan, Fraser, Georgian (Asomtavruli & Nuskha-khucuri), Georgian (Mkhedruli), Glagolitic, Gothic, Greek, Hungarian Runes, Irish, Kayah Li, Korean, Latin, Lycian, Lydian, Manchu, Meroïtic, Mongolian, N'Ko, Ogham, Old Church Slavonic, Oirat Clear Script, Old Italic, Old Permic, Orkhon, Pollard Miao, Runic, Santali, Somali, Sutton SignWriting, Tai Dam, Thaana, Uyghur

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