On Thu, 24 Oct 2002 23:44:55 -0000, "ardfilidh" <ardfilidh@...> wrote:

>i was referring to two things. scotts gaelic, in it's earlier form
>has 17 letters, (now 20, but they keep having spelling reforms like
>ogham, or at least old ogham, some celtic revivalist are using an
>ogham of more letters, usually a good hint they they have no idea
>what they are doing) 5 vowels, each with two pronounciations and
>twelve consonants.
>
>in addition the letters often alter in pronounciation depending where
>they are in a word. r at the beginning is usually a rolled r or a
>french slightly gutteral r, depending on the dialect. in the middle
>of the word it can become a w or simple r, and at the end is
>pronounced as a th. d is a j if followed by a long vowel and a d or t
>if short(usually a t if short). at the end of a word it can be silent
>or occasionally a soft y like sound. in the middle of a word a d is a
>t in english. there are other such oddities. i have often thought
>this might reflect the ogham alphabet.

All these things are far later developments than Ogham. Generally, if one
invents one's own script, it tends to be phonetic (at least as phonetic as the
particular model chosen allows). It's only later, when spelling traditions
fossilize, that letters start being pronounced in different ways (a good example
is Latin, where C was invented to stand for /k/ [as it still does in the
Latin-derived Celtic scripts], but later acquired alternate reading (/ts^/,
/ts/, /s/, /T/, etc., depending on context).

The Ogham alphabet seems very appropriate for the early Insular Celtic languages
it was probably devised for. It omits F, (K), P, X (Y) from the Latin model,
for which it had no use, and adds /W/ (later Irish /f/) and /NG/ (which is
slightly surprising, unless it originally stood for /gW/). More surprising is
the inclusion of Z (which is not actually attested in any real incription). My
own pet theory is that the first position in each (consonantal) aicme was once
occupied by a labial, i.e. B (L W S N), _P_ (D T C Q), M (G, NG, Z?, R). That
would put the origins of Ogham slightly further back, to a time when PIE *p was
still Celtic *p or *h (the place of theoretical *P in Ogham being occupied by
H). Together with the sursprising presence in Ogham of symbols for NG (unlesss
/gW/) and Z, this perhaps suggests that Ogham was in fact only indirectly
inspired by the Latin alphabet, and more directly by Germanic Runic (which
shares with Ogham the important and unique grouping into aicme/aettir, and which
has symbols for /ng/ and /R/ (> /z/)).


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...