[Regia-NA] Ogham Alphabet

[Jeanne]

 http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ogham.htm
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.

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.

An Ogham-like inscription known as the Horse Creek Petroglyph was discovered
in the early 1980s in West Virginia, USA. Dr. Barry Fell of Harvard
University believes the inscription is written in Basque, though does not
explain why the Irish monks, whom he believes were responsible for the
inscription, wrote it in Basque rather than Gaelic. Further information can
be found at: http://www.islandnet.com/~edonon/horse.html

Also known as:
ogham craobh, beth luis fearn or beth luis nion

Notable features

Each letter is named after a tree or other plant and has a number of other
associations.


Letters are linked together by a solid line, which represents the trunk of a
tree, while the letters themselves represent branches or twigs.


Ogham was usually written vertically (bottom to top) in inscriptions and
horizontally (left to right) in manuscripts


The Eite (feather) and Eite thuathail (reversed feather) symbols are used at
the beginning and end of sentences receptively.

Soffya Appollonia Tudja
http://www.aeonline.biz/Links.htm
Argent, a patriarchal cross between three crescent gules on a chief sable
three fleur-de-lys Or