Early Irish Letter-Names

Speculum, Vol. 24, No. 1. (Jan., 1949) EARLY IRISH LETTER-NAMES BY HOWARD MERONEY

THOUGH often fixed in scribal tradition, the ancient form of the Irish letter-names is at times unstable. Thurneysen observed that s (t)raif SR might be a misreading of zaiph; the variant quert Q ought to be transliterated cert, yet ceirt could be more correct; and idad I, perhaps analogical to edad E, may be younger than ida.1 The spelling is less troublesome, however, than the meaning of the names, about which there has prevailed for hundreds of years a strangely erroneous opinion. Dinneen preserves with full assurance the age-old belief that each name desig­ nates a plant -A ailm 'elm,' B beith 'birch,' I todha 'ivy al. the yew tree,' T teiihne 'furze.' Scarcely more hesitant, the editors of the Dictionary of the Irish Language have raised a few doubts in the cause of consistency, e.g., '0 . . . was known by the name onn "furze" (?"ash") .' Greater caution, however, if not in­ decision, is manifest in Hessens Irisches Lexikon, where ailmm is simply 'the letter A,' idad the 'name of an (unidentified) tree,' luis is 'mountain-ash?' and nin, like onn, is the 'name of a certain tree or plant'; here too, nevertheless, the editors assume that all the Irish letter-names are also plant-names, and they return to tradition for ruis 'elder-tree'. A century ago Graves began to attack this interpretation. 'It can be shown with almost certainty of proof,' he urged later, 'that nin, huat, tinne, muin, gort, straif, ur, oir, uillen, and emancoll, are not the Irish names of trees or plants.'2 To his challenge that the contrary to this claim be demonstrated from non-grammatical writings, the response was so feeble that in 1935 Arntz was forced to admit: 'Beithe, fern, sail, daur, coll, [sind] ganz sicher. Aber die Bedeutungen der anderen Namen sind uns in grossen und ganzen nur durch Glossen oder grammatischen Abhandlungen bekannt.'3 This state of affairs was to Thurneysen the cause for occasional scepticism,4 but Vendryes, despite an up-to-the-minute acquaintance with the recent bibliography, underrates the seriousness of Graves' charge and still insists that the beithi-luis-nin is an 'alphabet vegetal.'5 That the evidence for the equations, in gross and in detail, is even poorer than scholars have thought, will now be reasserted and upheld. A greater certainty in 1

Cf. below, the entries SR,

Q,

and I, in the discussion of bria;tharogam; and for the extremes to

which misspellings can go, see the Duil Laitne, ed. Macalister, The Secret Languages of Ireland (Cambridge, 2

19 87), p. 94 .

IV ( 184 7-50), 856 --68 ; this paper was ( 18 75 -76), 44 8-7� (for the quotation, see p. 459) . 3 Helmut Arntz, 'Das Ogom,' PBB, ux ( 19 85) , 8n-418 (for the quotation, see p. 85 �) ; this article is generally a useful supplement to the same author's Handbuch der Runenkunde (Halle, 19 85) , pp. 2 77-98.

Charles Graves, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy,

expanded in Herma;thena,

11

4 Thurneysen's opinion in these matters was expressed in reviews: 'Auraicept na nl!:ces,' ZfcP, XVII

( 1�7) , 2 77-80 8; 'Zum Ogom,' PBB, LXI ( 19 87), 18 8--208 . In both of these he demurred at ce (t}rt 'apple,' and he readily abandoned tradition in the rendering of ailm, beithi, iphin, and emancoU. i J. Vendryes, 'Sur un nom ancien de 1' "arbre"' [etc.], RC, XLIV ( 192 7) , 818-19 ; 'L'ecriture oga­ mique et ses origines,' £tudes OeUiques, IV ( 194 1) , 8 �-116 . 19

Early Irish Letter-Names

�0

the matter is especially desirable, for if Celtic philology has erred, the mistakes are repeated in comparative dictionaries of non-Celtic languages.6 :More than that, since the names have been cited, no doubt admissibly, in arguments about the origin of the runic and oghamic systems of writing, the probham is not without importance in the history of western culture. Our chief sources of information are the Auraicept na nEces ('The Scholars Primer') and two allied tracts, the Duil Feda (ind Ogaim) ('Book of [Ogham] Letters') and the Duil Feda na Forfid ('Book of Extra Letters').7 These treatises, frequently chaotic in their manuscript state, were not brought to order in Cal­ der's modern edition and, as primary evidence, must be viewed with utmost cir­ cumspection. The Auraicept has so often been damned for unreliability- 'Welche Verrlicktheiten und Entfernung von natlirlicher Grundlage!' exclaimed Zimmer -that one wonders why readers have been credulous about this portion of it. The oldest manuscripts date from the fourteenth century, but compilation of the texts began centuries earlier. The authors wrote for students already acquainted with the Latin ABC's and practiced in the insular script of Latin and Irish; to this group they related the mysteries of ogham, and demonstrated its utility as a cipher. The names later given to letters in the Irish minuscule hand are here conferred upon the characters of ogham. Taking for granted that the meaning is not common knowledge, the authors interpret these names serially, in lists of pretended synonyms and metaphors, as well as individually, in glosses such as cert [Q] .i. aball 'apple-tree.' :Modern scholars have accepted this antiquarian, esoteric testimony as if it were the utterance of an active oghamist of the fifth 6

It is highly significant that etymologists were unable to find cognates for the supposititious tree­

names luis, nin, huath, etc., which have thus been kept out of Stokes' Urkeltischer Sprachschatz (Gottingen, 1894) and Walde-Pokorny, Vergleichendes Wiirterbuch der indogermanischen Sprachen (Berlin, 1928

ff.).

Cert

Q is

the test-case; see below. I do not know whether anyone has refused to

accept Vendryes' derivation of tindi T from *tenn-yii or *tenn-yo-, 'un doublet syntactique de dan, a rattacher a l'allemande Tanne,' cf. RC, XLIV (1927), 319. The errors are mostly of omission, e.g., the absence of Ir. ur U from Feist's discussion of Gothic uraz, and Holthausen's failure to mention Ir. eo 'salmon' under OE. ior.

7 George Calder, Auraicept na n-Eces (Edinburgh, 1917). The first tract (Aur, pp. 272

ff.), which

Calder entitles Ogam without manuscript justification, may not be the Duil Peda Mair, referred to in the Auraicept, line 200, and by Cormac and O'Davoren; quite probably, however, it is the Duil Ji'eda (ind Ogaim) specified as a source at Aur 1199=4311. Again, Calder's title De Duilib Peda is too short for the second tract (Aur, pp. 270-71), which deals only with forfeda, here treated as diphthongs. Other native sources are not much help. E.g., we get only a confirmation of the names from the poems Nenafiled feghthar Zinn, ed. Meyer, ZfcP,

XII

(1918), 295, and Beith na haonar dom laimh deis,

ed. Macalister, JRSAI, XXXVI (1906), 178. Based on the Auraicept tradition and briatharogam is 'The Song of the Forest Trees,' Silm Gadelica (ed. O'Grady),

I,

245.

Of great circumstantial importance, however, are the meanings assigned to the characters of other languages. For the runes, cf. below, fn. 12. l