How to Type with Ogham Cruinn

Within Gaelic culture, there is a long-standing tradition where language is treated as philosophical and imbued with ineffable power. These views translated into the emerging Christian monastic tradition, where monasteries served as centers of learning. This includes the transmission of Ogham, an enigmatic script that has captured the fascination of Celtic scholars from past to present. However, the various Ogham scripts have not changed in conformity with the Gaelic languages. As a collaborative project, Dr. Adam Dahmer and I have constructed a new Ogham script, named Ogham Cruinn, will serve as an introduction towards developing a series of novel ogham variations called ogham ùr-fhasanta – or ‘New Ogham’ – that conform to the standards of how the Gaelic language is written today.

In the article “Ogham Cruinn: An Ancient Writing System for the Modern World,” I had offered a brief history of Ogham development and an introduction on Ogham Cruinn. In this article, usage of the script will be expanded upon in detail providing instructions on the nuances of its use. Due to the difficulties of making the font publicly available, please reach out if you want a copy of the font file.

Alphabet

The alphabet, or beith-luis-nuin, of the Gaelic languages consists of 18 characters – Aa, Bb, Cc, Dd, Ee, Ff, Gg, Hh, Ii, Ll, Mm, Nn, Oo, Pp, Rr, Ss, Tt, Uu – with the exclusion of accented vowels. This accent, called a fada in Irish and a stràc in Scots Gaelic, is used to lengthen vowels. For example, this accent makes the difference between a bata (“stick”) and a báta/bàta (“boat”) in both languages.

Ogham Cruinn uses this alphabet but only includes the miniscule, or lowercase characters, rendering names such as Alba (“Scotland”) as alba as the same. This is a traditional style of writing, derived from Irish monastic scribes called Insular miniscule. Accented vowels are also included, which will be provided in the extended alphabet. One may access these vowels through shortcut keys, though these keys may differ whether one is using Windows or iOS.

Lenition

Lenition is a unique form of sound mutation present in the Gaelic languages, where the initial consonant softens depending on the grammatical circumstances. For example, the word cara/caraid (“friend”) is lenited when paired with the a particle and softens the c rendering it as a chara/a charaid. Letters that lenite include b, c, d, f, g, m, p, s, and t, rendering them as bh, ch, dh, fh, gh, mh, ph, sh, and th respectively. While the letter h does not exist in the Gaelic languages as a typically used letter, it is often used as a particle to lenite words where the initial letter is a vowel.

Ogham Cruinn includes each lenited letter as an individual character for the sake of simplicity. These letters are treated like uppercase letters when typing, where the shortcut key for D will be rendered as a dh instead. The h used for lenition is included as its own character as well which can be used by simply typing the character. In addition, the double letters ll, nn, and rr are also given their own characters where their use is the same as lenited characters using the uppercase shortcut key. While this may seem counterintuitive initially, one can master typing in Cruinn with a little practice.

How to Type Sentences

When typing sentences in Ogham Cruinn, the letters within each word are together through use of a connecting bar. This is a traditional aspect of Ogham, going back to the early stone inscriptions found across Ireland and in early medieval manuscripts. While the characters are connected within a word, each word is separate similar to Middle Eastern writing styles such as Arabic or Farsi.

Punctuation used includes a character for a comma, colon, semicolon, full stop, question mark, exclamation point, hyphen, and accents which correspond to each key on one’s keyboard. There is also a character for the Tironian et, used to represent agus (“and”). Other punctuation characters are not used, which may be included in subsequent versions.

Example

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Scottish Gaelic, in Ogham Cruinn and Gaelic script, and in English: