ogham irish directly ancestral to old?

[wyeuro]

g'day everyone,  :)

this thread continues the discussion that began on 'Techt do Róim' where beith questioned some things i said.  

beith said:

I don't understand the sense of some of your sentences above...

Quote:
that the genuine ancient language traces megli refers to as primitive irish, quite apart from hypothetical reconstructions, are actually ancestral to the language of texts called old irish, is not established and cannot be established - not by the most meticulous use of developed techniques.  


I don't understand what you mean here - ?? Primitive Irish is absolutely attested as the precursor to Old Irish. There is no doubt, no uncertainty about that

and

They're not my "most strongly held notions"  - they're academic facts and validated information from hundreds of years of scholarship not to mention a continuous lineage of language progression in this country, where Irish is still spoken.

and here's my response:

i’m talking about provable fact as distinct from firm belief.  

to say that irish is spoken in parts of galway is provable fact.  you can go there and listen.  to say that primitive irish evolved directly into old irish is a concensus of the most highly respected scholarly opinion, the firm belief of highly respected scholars with the best credentials and of their students and admirers, but is not a fact.  

that’s not a matter of opinion, that is to do with the definition of fact as distinct from belief, opinion, and conjecture.  in my opinion, scholars have no business with belief, except off the record.  it should  never be a part of their teaching.  they should be acutely conscious of and keep their students conscious of the gap between fact and high-likelihood, high probablity, however small it might be.  

but in this issue, the gap is significant – other possibilities exist which are arguably more probable.  

1. the ogham inscriptions are very brief and full of abbreviations, despite the ogam’s five vowels (even without the forfedha) they use no vowels, and there are often illegible portions in an inscription, so transliteration and expansions are often tentative – information derived from them is almost all phonological, not much grammar or vocabulary, and most vocabulary only personal and place names.  

this is not enough information to identify the exact dialect spoken of many closely related and therefore similar dialects that must have been contemporary with it.  of these perhaps only one made ogham inscriptions.  it is quite possible that the ‘direct’ ancestor of old irish was not the dialect of the one which made the ogham inscriptions, but a related dialect.  

2. many writers comment that between the irish of the ogham and old irish there was a lot of change in a very short period of time, and surely this is more sensibly interpretable as a change to a different dialect, rather than as a lot of sudden spontaneous changes within the one single dialect supposed to have been destined to become the old irish of the texts.  the eclipsing of one dialect by another as a result of a change of government, a conquest or a migration is a common occurrence.  the sudden mutation of large numbers of the features of a language in situ has probably never been observed.

then i said

and since selene's explanation of the use of inri on crucifixions is an iteration of church belief, and the origins of church belief are lost in the mists of antiquity, all anyone can say with accuracy - and surely punctilious accuracy is a hallmark of scholarship - is that it is believed by the church, indeed, is official church dogma, so the decided tone of megli's remark quoted above is inappropriate.

and beith replied:

sorry! this just perplexes me completely! what is it you are saying here?!

what don’t you understand about this, beith?  i’m only saying that church dogma is not fact.  

so basically, i’m saying that it’s unsound scholarship to talk of facts when all you’ve got is a consensus of opinion, no matter how competently it may have been arrived at.  


wyverne /|\

[Beith]

ye Gods wyv,

What on earth are you on about?!
Ok let me try briefly to explain with an educated response:

This has nothing to do with "Church dogma" and nothing to do with "strongly held notions" or "consensus" or "belief" - it has to do with Fact.  Evidence Based Fact. The evidence is standing all around the country as well as in manuscripts as well as in the still spoken and traceable lineage of language in addition to verifiable linguistic studies. Not conjecture, speculation or "unsound scholarship" (unlike I'm afraid to say, yours above).

Vyvan -
Ogam inscriptions are dateable to 5th C AD and extend up into the later middle ages. You can attest their letter values from the following:
(1) the fact that the language is still spoken and living - just in a later form
(2) the changes in consonantal sounds, word structure and evolution are well known and have been well known for centuries.
(3) the presence of dual-language ogam inscriptions in Wales that bear latin letters corresponding to the ogam ones
(4) Manuscript records
(5) the fact that we have both early and later ogams and scholastic ogams where evolution of new letter forms and sounds can be seen, therefore decidedly later than the original earlier language, hence datable to different periods.

Vyv - when I say I don't understand you it's because in english sometimes you write very strange sentences eg.  

the ogham inscriptions are very brief and full of abbreviations, despite the ogam’s five vowels (even without the forfedha) they use no vowels

Now what on earth are you trying to say here? vowels or no vowels? -which is it? You contradict yourself even in the same sentence and it makes it very hard to understand you. [similarly Re: the sentence I queried originally ~ your comments about the INRI inscription...it makes absolutely no grammatical sense. You may know in your head what you intend to say, but sometimes Vyvan it doesn't translate into clear english. Thank you for the clarification on the msg above]

the ogham inscriptions are very brief and full of abbreviations, despite the ogam’s five vowels (even without the forfedha) they use no vowels, and there are often illegible portions in an inscription, so transliteration and expansions are often tentative – information derived from them is almost all phonological, not much grammar or vocabulary, and most vocabulary only personal and place names.  

To address the points made in that paragraph:
Firstly, background:  Ogam inscriptions are all formulaic. They contain no verbs. They contain only names in the genetive (albeit a very few nominative exceptions) and "son of, son of, descendant of " familiar linkages. Embedded within the titles of some names are their job descriptions - king, poet, etc.

1.Yes the inscriptions are relatively brief, ogam was never a script used for "essay writing" purposes.
2. No they do not generally contain abbreviations (I think one inscription has a truncated familial name, due to weathering of rock, not due to abbreviation) - would you like to offer some examples ?
3. They absolutely have vowels - vowels are very much a feature of Irish language - in the past as much as now.
4. Grammar and vocab are very much in evidence on the stones but as I said above, largely in funerary inscriptions, so vocab is limited to that.
5. The linguistic changes seen on the ogam stones well characterized:
apocape, syncope, orthographical changes over different periods of history.
6. Translation of any inscription has to take into account the possibility of "typological errors" in the inscription - eg. omission of letter strokes/ addition of extras, too little space betw letters/ too much, etc. All these factors are taken into account when translating and transcribing an inscription.
7. Information derived from them is pretty clear Vyv- names, ancestral lineage - not "almost all phonological", but I accept the point that several name inscriptions are unclear (but this is largely due to the spelling of the name due to rock weathering/damage and the odd "typo") but the context of the inscription is clear.

this is not enough information to identify the exact dialect spoken of many closely related and therefore similar dialects that must have been contemporary with it.  of these perhaps only one made ogham inscriptions.  it is quite possible that the ‘direct’ ancestor of old irish was not the dialect of the one which made the ogham inscriptions, but a related dialect

You totally misunderstanding the point Vyv and hit the wall here, in addition to mixing up your terminology. Ogam and change from primitive Irish into Early/Old has NOTHING to do with DIALECT. Changes in inscription and language over time is to do with features of linguistic evolution - apocape, syncope, etc. visible in Ireland from 6th C onwards. Those are what delineate the periods of dating Irish Vyvan and they are very clearly verifiable from text and stone if you take the time to learn about it. You can find ogam stones which show features of both and features of neither, and texts likewise, therefore you can tell what happened to the language over time and date inscriptions .

What is it you cannot understand about there being factual evidence available Vyvyan? It is as much proven fact as your idea in this quote:

to say that irish is spoken in parts of galway is provable fact.  you can go there and listen

Therefore: To say that verifiable evidence of language change, evolution and orthographic convention datable to different historical periods is available in Ireland is proven fact. You can go there and see it.


Vyvyan, you are banging your head off a brick wall of fact and are never going to come out on top with your arguments as they make absolutely no sense. The only bad-scholarship here is your own I'm afraid. You can keep decrying good scholarship and evidence-based facts as "bad" if you like but you are just wasting your time. You'd be much better off hunkering down with a few books (as the rest of us have had to do over the years) and learning the basics in order to have serious and educated discussions instead of just saying "black is white" over and over again.

cheers,
 
.... ..... lll l
l

[Megli]

Wasn't going to get involved in this one but suffice it to say that everything Beith has written above is absolutely accurate. I second the 'ye gods, woman, what are ye on?!' thing.

[Abhaill]

wyeuro said:

1. the ogham inscriptions are very brief and full of abbreviations, despite the ogam’s five vowels (even without the forfedha) they use no vowels, and there are often illegible portions in an inscription, so transliteration and expansions are often tentative

I just wanted to offer a possible clarification to this, in case it's helpful to everyone, however if I'm way off track ignore me or correct me as you see fit.

When I read this it seemed as though wyeuro was saying that the inscriptions themselves are often missing vowels, not that the alphabet did not include vowels.  I can't confirm or deny the truth of this assertion, but that was my interpretation of the statement at any rate.

~ Abhaill

[Megli]

Thanks Abaill - the inscriptions do, however, have vowels.
M

[Beith]

Hi Abhaill,

I guess Wyv can confirm what she meant by her statement. My point was exactly that:  it needs to be qualified with a meaning. It makes no sense as is and one cannot respond accurately to something that is from the outset, unclear.

Regarding the latter point, the inscriptions show a mish-mash of things but I don't think it's fair to say they are "missing vowels". On some there are (as pointed out in my reply above) missing letter strokes for a given vowel or too many strokes or spacing in between the vowel letters which raises a query over what was the correct letter. But this can be deduced from the broad and slender consonants on either side of it and to metaphony - the raising or lowering of back or front vowels for pronunciation of a word and correct inscription, not to mention the proper ending that should be written for names in a specific case (generally gen.case)

eg. MOQI instead of MAQI for "son of"
    AVITTORIGES for AVITTORIGEAS  

neither of these change the sense of what's being written but in both cases, an error in vowel stroke has occurred, which can be corrected by those interpreting it.

Ogam letters have vowels no matter what way you look at them! It's just that occasionally a vowel (or even a consonant for that matter) is incorrectly transcribed. In some cases, the carver goes back and corrects himself by putting in an omitted letter beside the inscription where it should have been written.

The days before spellcheck eh?!

best wishes
Beith

ps. I just want to say that there's no bad blood between those of us on this thread for anyone reading this. Vyv and myself and Megli lock horns on these things now and then. It's in good spirit of discussion but sometimes it's very hard to have a clear discussion and know what a respondant's point is, when a statement is very strange and hard to understand or if facts are continually disputed as speculation. That's all!
B

oh - and edited here just to say, in the case of the forfeda, only one is as far as I know, attested on rock. the one that looks like X with the druimm through it. Initially it seems value /k/ but later Ea for Emancholl.
The rest are MSS -attested only. Right. I'll shut up now!