Indo-European, Celtic (Goidelic) · Ogham
Primitive Irish
ᚋᚐᚊᚔ MAQI, “of the son (of)”
- Spoken
- c. AD 300–600
- Where
- Ireland, with settlements in Wales, Cornwall and Scotland
Primitive Irish is the earliest stage of the Irish language, known almost entirely from a few hundred stones carved in ogham, an alphabet of strokes and notches cut along a stone's edge. The inscriptions are short and almost always say the same thing: a man's name, the word for 'son', and his father's name, all in the genitive case. That sounds dull, but those endings let linguists watch a Celtic language changing just before Old Irish emerged.
Where and when
About 400 ogham stones survive in Ireland, most of them in the southern counties of Kerry, Cork and Waterford. Others stand in Wales, Cornwall, Devon, the Isle of Man and Scotland, places where Irish settlers lived in the fifth and sixth centuries. Many stones were later moved into churches, gateposts or museums.
The stones probably date from the fourth to the sixth centuries AD, although dating is hard. The script itself may have been invented somewhat earlier, by someone who knew the Latin alphabet and grammar but designed a system that could be cut quickly on wood or stone. Dating relies mainly on the language itself.
How it fell silent
Primitive Irish did not die so much as turn into something else. In the sixth century the language went through rapid sound changes: endings fell away, and consonants softened between vowels. The genitive MAQI, 'of the son', became Old Irish maic, and the kw sound turned into plain c. By around AD 600 the result was Old Irish, the language of the early monasteries.
Its script faded at the same time. Christian missionaries brought Latin and the Latin alphabet in the fifth century, and monks were soon writing Irish on vellum in Latin letters. Ogham survived as a learned curiosity in medieval manuscripts and in a few later inscriptions, and a fourteenth-century treatise, the Book of Ballymote, explains the alphabet.
How it may have sounded
-
ᚋᚐᚊᚔ ᚋᚒᚉᚑᚔ
MAQI MUCOI
Say it roughly MAH-kwee MOO-koy/ˈmakʷiː ˈmukoi̯/
“son of the tribe of”
A recurring formula on the stones; Q is thought to be a kw sound, which later became plain c in Old Irish maic, and the exact vowel of MUCOI is uncertain.
-
ᚐᚃᚔ
AVI
Say it roughly AH-wee/ˈawiː/
“of the grandson, descendant”
Probably the ancestor of Old Irish aue and Ua, the Ó in surnames such as O'Brien; the letter written F or V here most likely stood for a w sound.
Your name, set in stone
Ogham is an alphabet of notches and strokes that reads upward along the edge of a stone. It has twenty letters, no letter for p in its original set, and a v or f letter that probably stood for w.
A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.
Three things
- Ogham reads upward along the edge of a standing stone, using the corner itself as the line.
- Several ogham stones in Wales carry the same name in Latin letters, a built-in check on the readings.
- Medieval tradition named each ogham letter after a tree or plant, such as beith (birch) and fearn (alder).