OGAM WRITING SYSTEM 1 *
Erich Fred
Legner
University
of California
Various authors investigating different ancient writings
have referred to them as "Ogam
Script," which has led to some confusion. Probably the most ancient and first true Ogam is the
"Stick Writings" of the West African Igbo culture studied by
Catherine Acholonu. These are a sequence of dots, dashes
and symbols carved onto bamboo and stone.
More recent forms of Ogam were found on petroglyphs, animal bone and
other substrates.
----Please CLICK on desired underlined categories [to search for Subject Matter, depress Ctrl/F ]:
THE OGAM ALPHABET
Beginning in the last half of the 20th
Century, archeological discoveries have revealed the existence of
Pre-Columbian contacts that were made in America by explorers from Europe,
Asia and Africa. Many of these
explorers left written pectographic inscriptions of their experiences in
America using a phonetic “Stick
Writing” that is often called Ogam, with its origin in West Africa.
These writings are found all over North America. However, there are few who have the
linguistic skills to translate them, prominent among which is Professor
Catherine Acholonu [see Explanation]. New discoveries of such inscriptions are
being made regularly but the academic community has been negligent in giving
them the attention they deserve. This
is of course history of importance to all of us. It was only recently that anyone merely suggesting that any
form of written language existed in America was labeled a heretic, fool or
worse. However, today we are reading
detailed accounts of the Maya and their civilization from numerous
inscriptions that were found at archeological sites in Mexico and south.
Fell in 1982
submitted detailed translations of Ogam inscriptions in America (see Report).
He compared American inscriptions with those that had been found in Northern
Europe dating back to the Bronze Age.
The Horse Creek Petroglyph of West Virginia
is the most recent translation of the largest Petroglyph known to exist in
North America. The author, Edo
Nyland, suggested that Ogam came to Ireland from North Africa with the first
Gnostic missionaries who preached the early Irish Christianity. However, very
recent linguistic studies have pointed to the possibility that a phonetic
alphabet reached North Africa from visitors from North Sea and Baltic Sea
civilizations much earlier. Indeed Nyland mentions inscriptions found in
Ireland on a Bronze Bowl. Nevertheless, the Gnostic missionaries believed in magic, just
like the pre-Christian Irish inhabitants did. As Anthony Jackson (1993) discovered, this magic took the shape of
numerical wizardry with letters (see the Saharan or
West African Language). It is not known if the original Ogam had an
organized alphabet but it is likely. The Gnostic missionaries used the
script to spread the Gospel by marking their Biblical phrases on Neolithic
standing stones to convert the people to Christianity. Around 650 A.D.
Benedictine monks and their grammarians came to Ireland with instructions to
create a distinct language to replace the "iron" language of the
Irish, which they called Cruithin.
They found it necessary to augment the early alphabetic script with five
diphthong characters, called Forfeda and further
develop it to accommodate their linguistic and literary activities. There is
no doubt that these people were linguistic professionals.
To explain how
Ogam inscriptions are translated, Nyland has provided a detailed process with
examples (see Translate). Nevertheless, for most persons not trained
in linguistics it is difficult to fully understand. Nyland’s explanation is as follows:
“The Ogam
alphabet is … composed of 15 consonants followed by five vowels. This is the
only alphabet known which organizes consonants and vowels in this manner. The
Benedictines' operation manual, the "Auraicept", parts of which appear
to have been written as early as 700 A.D., in the very early years of Irish
Judeo-Christianity, described the Ogam alphabet as follows:
Translation by Calder:
“ This is their
number: five Ogmic groups, i.e., five men for each group, and one up to five
for each of them, that their signs may be distinguished. These are their
signs: right of stem, left of stem, athwart of stem, through stem, about
stem. Thus is a tree climbed, to wit, treading on the root of the tree first
with thy right hand first and thy left hand after. Then with the stem, and
against it and through it and about it. (Lines 947-951).”
McManus clarified this:
"This is
their number: there are five groups of Ogam and each group has five letters
and each of them has from one to five scores and their orientations
distinguish them. Their orientations are: right of the stem line, left of the
stem line, across the stem line, through the stem line, around the stem line.
Ogam is climbed as a tree is climbed..." (McManus
1.5).”
“By the time the
fifth column of Forfeda symbols had been added, the script was written
horizontally, from left to right but the above quote still appears to record
the original way of vertical writing, read from the bottom up. The original 20 symbols are shown in both
the original vertical as well as the later horizontal way of writing. Most of
the early inscriptions on stone in Scotland and Ireland are written in the
vertical form. The Ogam texts in books such as the Auraicept and on the
petroglyphs in West Virginia are written in the horizontal literary
tradition. At first sight, the peculiar arrangement of the letters in the
Ogam alphabet appears to be completely unrelated to the pre-existing Greek
and Latin alphabets. McManus searched elsewhere for the origin and found that
"there is a clear connection with the North Etruscan alphabets".
However, anthropologist Anthony Jackson from Edinburgh University discovered
that the arrangement was directly related to the ordinal numbers of the
letters in the Latin alphabet. “
1
2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20
A B C D E V G H I
Z L M N O
NG Q R S T
U
“The total of the ordinal numbers in the Latin alphabet is 210. The 20
original Ogam characters were divided into four columns, which, arranged
according to a cabalistic system of calculation, totaled 50, 50, 61 and 49
respectively:
N 13 + Q 16 = (1x29) R 17 + I 9 = (2x13) 5x11 S 18 + C 3 = (3x7) Z 10 + E 5 = (3x5) 3x3x4 V 6 + T 19 = (5x5) NG 15 + U 20 = (5x7) 3x4x5 L 11 + D 4 = (3x5) G 7 + O 14 = (3x7) 3x3x4 B 2 + H 8 = (2x5) M 12 + A 1 = (1x13) 1x23 ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ 50 + 50 = 100 61 + 49 = 110 210 10x5 10x5 (10x10) 1x61 7x7 (10x11) 2x3x5x7 B L V S N / H D T C Q / M G NG Z R / A O U E I.
“The sequence of the letters within
each column appears to be in relation to the primary numbers, but the
calculations go further than is presented here. (Please see Jackson's monograph, chapter 7.)
“ It may
be seen that there are several letters missing from the Latin alphabet shown above:
F, J, K, P, V, X and Y. The same letters are missing from the newly
re-arranged Ogam alphabet. This probably means that the linguist who designed
the Ogam alphabet was selective in choosing only those Latin letters that
made the cabalistic calculations and arrangement possible. The V had replaced
the B and the F; the I replaced the J and Y; the C and Q replaced the K; the
B, a labial, took the pace of P (also a labial), the character X was used for
the later Ogam diphthong EA, but in the Ogam script sometimes is written as
KS. It is interesting to note that Q-Celtic has no F, J or P. Neither is
there a P in Arabic. Only a few words in Basque start with F, which letter
may be a quite recent addition to this language; the V, C, Y and Q still do
not exist in Basque, and the Basque X represents "sh".
Written horizontally:
Note that the "f" in the horizontal script should be a
"v" as it is in the vertical script.
“The reason why all 15 consonants are
listed first in the alphabet and the 5 vowels following, has to do with the
special arrangement of the words in the monk's dictionary. The primary
organization of their dictionary is according to the consonants. Half of the
Basque language is made up of words starting with vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV, sometimes VCCV). It is mainly this half of the
language that the monks used in the construction of the Romance languages and
English. These words were then arranged according to the first consonants in
the words, each consonant was then subdivided again into 25 VCV combinations
such as under D: ada, ade, adi, ado, adu; eda, ede, edi, edo, edu; ida, ide
..... etc. Under each such VCV were then listed all
those words with their translations which started with these three letters.
This arrangement is still the best way for us to decode Ogam writing.”
“From this it
must be apparent that such a special arrangement applies only to a language
that is organized in the VCV style and Basque is
the only language that fits the type. The syntax of modern Irish (i.e. Gaelic
or Celtic) is very unsuited to this VCV system and
consequently this language cannot be written in traditional Irish Ogam.
Therefore, all Ogam writing anywhere must have been in the Basque language,
which means that the "iron" language of pre-Roman-Catholic Ireland
was the universal language we call Ogam (=
West African) today. This explains why "Celtic" scholars have been
unable to translate even one single Ogam inscription correctly.”
“The Forfeda revision
made by the Benedictines, the addition of the five extra diphthong
characters, was almost certainly accomplished in Ireland. Ogam was originally
designed for record keeping and the sending of short messages, not for
literary expression. However, this is what the Benedictine monks of Ireland
used it for. One of the primary purposes of the Benedictine Order was the
replacement of the ancient pre-Christian, gylanic oriented, language with a
church-approved one. The syntax of the Basque language was ideally suited for
the agglutination of new words, which then appeared to have no relationship
to the original language. The VCV formula made this
possible. However, traditions governing this ancient formula did not allow
two vowels to be written side-by side without a space separation, which
demanded separate words. This rule created problems and restrictions for
those writing in the script. The monks wished to simplify the rules of
writing. They created words and names
with diphthongs in them, the invention of five new "Forfeda"
characters permitting the combination of: ea, oi, ui, io and ae, the use of
which then also allowed these to be part of the creation of new words
starting with eha, ohi, uhi, iho and ahe. The design of the characters they
created was totally out of style with the original script. McManus observed
that they "missed the opportunity of completing the symmetry of the
system by having the fifth series mirror the third in the way that the second
mirrors the first" (McManus 1.2).
“To consider
what "forfeda" really means, the monks obviously were not very
happy to be forced to use the "heathen" Ogam script, but found
nothing quite as clever, brief and useful to replace it with, until they had invented their new Celtic language. In the following
analysis of "Forfeda", the first "f" has to be a
"b", a common letter shift; (the second "f" is correct).”
FORFEDA, .bo-or.-.fe-eda;
.bo
ebo eboluzionatu to develop
or. ori ori
that
.fe
ife ifernuko infernal
eda eda edabe
potion, fabrication
Develop that infernal fabrication!
“The word
"forfeda" breaks up into four three-letter VCV roots,
ebo-ori-ife-eda, each composed of vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV), with the
vowels interlocking to form a chain of interdependent roots. This joining is
the main characteristic of Ogam writing, is basic to all Ogam inscriptions
and is indispensable in deciphering. Any missing (purposely removed) vowels
in the words analyzed, are represented by a dot until identified. Forfeda
symbols are never eliminated. The monks later overstated this word to
"Foirfeadha", to make it look as if the word had originated with
the "Celtic" language, which is characterized by an excess of
unnecessary vowels and h's. Some remarks in the Auraicept pertain to the creation of Forfeda characters such as:
IN LEBOR OGAIM. in.-.le-ebo-oro-oga-ahi-im.;
(5465 etc)
in.
ina inauguratu
to innovate
.le
ale alegiñez
carefully
ebo
ebo eboluzionatu
to develop
oro
oro orobateko
similar
oga oga ogasun
wealth
a.i
ahi ahituezin
timeless
im. imi imitazio
character
Innovate by carefully developing a similar wealth of timeless characters.
(Note: there is
no break in the interconnected vowels, even though the text is broken into
three "words".
Ogam translation requires the following steps:
Step 1. Transliterate
the Ogam characters into our Latin letters,
Step 2. Replace the
letters c, q, v, w, y with equivalent Basque letters, c and q become k, v
becomes b, the y becomes i.
Step 3. Arrange these
corrected letters into the VCVCV format, placing dots where vowels are
missing,
Step 4. Fit these
letters into the VCV formula,
Step 5. List the
various meanings underneath each VCV,
Step 6. Arrange the
hidden sentence.
EXAMPLE TRANSLATIONS
“One way to explain the process is with a few examples of real
Ogam inscriptions, take for instance:
"Cunovato".(Macalister #11.)
Step 1. The middle
part of the inscription was badly damaged, but after much study Dr. Jost
Gippert at Frankfurt University
decided that it should read:
"Cunavato"
Step 2. All Ogams in
Ireland are based on the Basque language, however, Basque does not have a
"C" or a "V", so the inscription will now read
"Kunabato"
Step 3. When fitting
the letters in the VCVCVCVCV format, it appears that only one, the first
vowel, is missing, which must therefore be represented by a dot. The
inscription to be translated now reads:
".kunabato".
Step 4. There are
four consonants so this VCVCVCVCV line is then broken up by hyphens into four
three-letter VCV's in which the V's on either side of the hyphens are the
same (called interlocking): VCV1-V1CV2-V2CV3-V3CV, which therefore represents
four words:
.ku-una-aba-ato
Step 5. With the
preliminaries out of the way, the next step in decoding an Ogam inscription
is to list the possible meanings underneath each VCV.
In the case of the one missing vowel, all five possibilities must be tried
(aku, eku, iku, oku, uku) as follows:
(aku)
una
aba ato
to
incite boredom
priest
tow
to stimulate annoyance
occasion
tug boat
to rent, lease cowherd
slingshot
to arrange
acoustics fatigue
advantage to seize
(eku)
dull
rower embellish
equator, worried
almost
to solve
peace of mind
shade come!
(iku)
branches
shirt
to touch, to visit
flag, motto, watchful
(oku)
fertile field
(uku)
stable, falsify
go bad, smelly
Step 6. To discover
the hidden sentence we must match up the words that obviously belong
together, starting with the complete VCV's. For instance take the pair aba and ato
and immediately out pops priest and
come!, "the priest says: Come!". Why would he say come!? "To
stimulate" (aku) your "boredom" (una). The translation of
CUNAVATO is therefore
"The priest will stimulate your boredom; come!"
“The completed words
are: akuilatu (to stimulate) unadora (boredom) abade (priest) ator! (Come!). That is exactly what one would expect a missionary to
say, it's his job.”
“Infrequently
more than one reasonable meaning appears in which case there is a problem.
Postpone this and return to it later as often new insight will be obtained
and the proper translation might be obtained. From the following it
will be apparent that this is not an exact science. Guessing the mood of the
monk who made up the word can be entertaining.”
Example #2
Following is the decoding of an Ogam inscription that has two
vowels missing (Macalister # 364):
Step 1. barcuni
Step 2. barkuni
Step 3. .bar.kuni
Step 4. .ba-ar.-.ku-uni
Step 5. Three VCV's have a vowel missing. Each of those represents five
VCV's e.g. .ba can be
aba, eba, iba, oba or uba.
”Go to the VCV
dictionary and list the possible meanings under each of these five VCV's. Do
the same with
.ar and .ku
The last one, uni,
is complete and only has a few possible meanings.”
Step 6. When
assembling the sentence built into the inscription, keep in mind who the
people were that carved it. The words that pop out immediately are "evangelist"
and "priest" under eba, which goes together with "prayer"
under are: "the evangelist's prayers" . What do they do? They give
peace of mind, under eku. The sentence therefore reads: "The
evangelist's prayers (give you) general peace of mind". The four words
completed are then: ebanjelari (evangelist) arren (prayer) ekurutasun (peace of mind) unibertsal (general).
Example #3
“The decoding of
the more complicated Ogam inscriptions is difficult to fit into the internet
restrictions. However, the reader now has the idea how decoding is
accomplished. A third example is considerably larger and will therefore be
presented in a different manner, which has the disadvantage of not being able
to show how the missing vowel is recovered.”
Step 1.
Bladnach cogradedena
and
Bladnach cuilen
“McManus (page 132) and Maclister
(#1086, 1949) show the second word as Cogracetena, which is incorrect.
Both inscriptions are found on a bronze-hanging bowl,
likely an incense burner, dug up from a swamp in County Kerry. "They are
inscribed along the upper surface of the rim and on one of the
escutcheons" (McManus7.6)”
Step 2. Bladnak kogradedena and Bladnak kuilen.
Step 3. .B.lad.nak. .kog.radedena and .B.lad.nak. .kuilen
Step
4.
.B.-.la-ad.-.na-ak. .ko-og.-.ra-ade-ede-ena, and .B.-.la-ad.-.na-ak.
.ku-ile-en.
Step 5. This time the given VCV's are placed along the left border:
Bladnak: .B. abe abe cross .la ela ela story ad. ade adelatu to prepare .na ena ena that ak. aka akabu ultimate, superior kogradedena: .ko ako akorduan euki to remember og. ogi ogizatitze breaking of the bread .ra ira iragan to suffer ade ade adelatu to prepare ede ede edergi to confide in dena dena Deuna Lord
Step 6. The story of the Cross prepares us for that ultimate
remembrances while preparing for the
breaking of the bread (for His) suffering (while we) confide in
the Lord.
kuilen: .ku eku ekurutasun peace of mind ile ile ilezin everlasting en. ene eneganatu to come over me
The story of the cross prepares me for that ultimate everlasting
peace of mind (which will) come over me.
Discussion
“All words and many names in any invented language have known meanings. This is not
the case with the words written in Ogam and this fact does not make the job
of decoding any easier. In addition, no effort was made to allow easy
pronunciation. On the contrary, all ingenuity was aimed at insuring that the
writing looked as awkward as possible so that only specialists would be able
to interpret it. This disguising was done mostly by applying the VCV Code and the removal of as many vowels as possible.
This followed the example of Hebrew where often no vowels are left at
all; such as the name Talmud (Oral Law) being written as "lmd",
originally from tala-muda, tala (watch out) mudatu (to alter): "watch out for alteration", or freely translated:
"pass on unaltered", which is what an oral law is all about. The
meaning of the word Talmud today has been accepted as something like
"instruction".
“In Scotland,
several of the Christian Ogams were inscribed aggressively over pre-existing
animal- and geometrical symbols/totems which had been carved in the 7th
century. These symbols organized marriages and other co-operative
arrangements between groups of (usually) four tribes (Jackson) and ever since
had been regarded with great respect by the population. The over-writing was
probably done to destroy the "magical powers" of the
"heathen" symbols. Deciphering the Ogams usually poses no real
problem as long as the inscription is complete and legible.”
“In analyzing Ogam inscriptions and
names or words, especially those from which too many vowels have been
removed, it may be helpful to know which consonants are easier to decode than
others. Nyland devised a rating system that he
found helpful. It involves writing down all the possible VCV
combinations and then counting only those that are found in Aulestia's
dictionary. For instance take "F":
AFA efa IFA ofa UFA afe efe IFE ofe ufe afi efi JFI OFI ufi afo efo ifo ofo ufo afu efu ifu ofu ufu
“Out of the 25 VCV possibilities of
"F", only the six capitalized VCV's in red are the first letters of
existing Basque words: afa (pleasing, supper), ifa (north), ife (infernal,
hell), ifi (from ibi, to be, to go), ofi (craftsman, official), ufa (panting,
blowing, scornful). The rating of the consonant "F" is therefore 6,
making it the second easiest of all letters to find meanings for. The ratings
of all the consonants are as follows:
Ñ-5, F-6, J-7, NG-13, Z-17, B-18, M-18,
D-20, G-20, S-21,
K-22, L-22, N-22, P-22, T-22, H-23, R+RR-46.
“The use of the
letter "R" in the inscriptions poses somewhat of a problem because
no distinction is made between "R" and "RR", each having its
own set of 23 VCV combinations. Also the large number of words associated
with each combination of this letter makes it sometimes difficult to select
the appropriate word. The analysis of the "R" or "RR" is
therefore usually kept to the last.”
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
IGBO / OGAM VCV
DICTIONARY
Catherine Acholonu's Explanation of The Ogam Language
"All the
words that Nyland and Fell transcribed
were Igbo words, which Dr. Catherine Acholonu
could easily read and translate. She told Edo Nyland that she had translated
the words he transcribed from Ogam stones, but he didn't believe her at
first. When Hugo Kennes found Dr. Acholonu's work on the Internet and started
telling all the Ogam researchers he knew including Nyland, Nyland then asked
him to get an Igbo dictionary from her.
It was only after her meeting with Pellech in Belgium when she
"read "all Acholonu's books and convinced her to write for her
site, that it was decided to do the "Igbo Ogam VCV Dictionary
Nyland's use of the word Saharan
might not be too far off the mark. He just didn't bother to check West
Africa, which has language links with North Africa because the direction of
migrations from the Niger has been North-South as well as South-North through
the Ages. For example the Berber etymology of 'Barbarian' is
related to Igbo in the sense that (according to Herodotus) the word means
'stranger'.
(The Igbo word for "stranger" is Obiarabia)
"Catherine Acholonu's
thesis is that Egypt was the main outpost from where West African Kwa
(Kwush/Kush) culture was exported to the rest of the world. Igbo is the
Mega-Kwa language - the Kushite mother-language. Kush is the major bearer of
this civilization. Ethiopia was not just an East Africa location, but lay
West too. According to Homer, it was in Sunset Ethiopia that the Gods
congregated, and the people were called "the Blameless Ethiopians in
whose land the gods held banquets". Dr. Acholonu's group discovered the
lost city of this Pre-historic Civilization, with its array of beautiful
bronze and pottery works lost to living memory and posing an enigma to
African and world History."
"Catherine
Acholonu's analyses of the early archaeology of Sumer and of the
Akkadian/Sumerian/Canaanite (Semitic) languages shows that all of them
without exception were children of the Igbo language and that the earliest
inhabitants of Sumer had Igbo lifestyles in religion, architecture, clothing,
etc., even in the recipe for soap-making (wood-ash/potash boiled in oil).
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