A. Administrative
1. Requester's name:
Michael Everson, Evertype.
2. Requester type:
Member body (Irish national position)
3. Submission date:
1994-11-16
4. Requester¹s reference:
EGT SC2/WG2 Ogham 940926, JTC1/SC2/WG2 N1103
5. Type of proposal:
This is a complete proposal.
The following two items are to be completed by WG2:
a. Relevant SC2/WG2 document numbers:
b. Status (list of meeting number and corresponding action or disposition):
Meeting in Helsinki, June 1995: Repertoire and names accepted, Category D script. Coding to be decided in 1996.
B. Technical (General)
1. Nature of proposal:
This proposal is for a new script.
Proposed name of script:
Ogham.
2. Number of characters in proposal:
Twenty-seven characters.
3. Proposed category per SC2/WG2 N1116:
Category B or D, depending on how you look at it.
4. Proposed Level of Implementation:
Level 1.
Is a rationale provided for the choice?
There are no combining characters in Ogham.
5. Is a repertoire including character names provided?:
Yes, see §3.0 below.
a. If YES, are the names in accordance with the "character naming guidelines" in Annex K of ISO/IEC 10646-1?
Yes.
b. Are the character shapes legible?
Yes, see the repertoire below.
6. Who will provide the appropriate computerized font for publishing the standard?
Michael Everson, Evertype.
If available now, identify source(s) for the font:
Michael Everson, Evertype.
7. References:
a. Are references (to other character sets, dictionaries, descriptive texts etc.) provided:
Yes, see §2.0 below.
b Are published examples (such as samples from newspapers, magazines, or other sources) of use of proposed characters attached?
Yes, see Exhibits 1-5 below.
C. Technical (Justification)
1. Information on the user community for the proposed characters (for example: size, demographics, information technology use, or publishing use) is included.
Ogham is properly considered an archaic script. It is used by a relatively small community of scholars studying early Irish inscriptions. Computer fonts for Ogham are available from Everson Gunn Teoranta and on the Internet. As more and more computers go into the Irish schools, particularly into the Gaelscoileanna, we can expect to find Ogham fonts there as Ogham forms a small part of the cultural curriculum in many Irish schools Certainly in non-computing contexts, individuals at many levels have learned Ogham and used it for one purpose or another in recent times. (It might be said that schoolchildren writing notes to one another in Ogham script might be producing texts more interesting than the monumental texts in stone which form the corpus of Ogham texts studied by scholars!)
2. The context of use for the proposed characters (type of use; common or rare) is included.
Use of Ogham is relatively rare in terms of numbers, but it is found in many specialized contexts. For instance, one can buy T-shirts, jewellery, and cards which make use of the Ogham script. Computer use of Ogham has already been discussed.
3. Are the proposed characters in current use by the user community?
Ogham enjoys marginal but continued use in Ireland, the Isle of Man, and Scotland.
4. After giving due considerations to the principles in N1116 must the proposed characters be entirely in the BMP?
Yes. Document N947 allocates space for Ogham. There are but a few characters, whose set is well-defined, and which are in modern use.
5. Should the proposed characters be kept together in a contiguous range (rather than being scattered)?
Ogham should have two columns reserved for it as reflected in the repertoire sample given below. We suggest allocating the range 1A00-1A1F for Ogham.
6. Can any of the proposed characters be considered a presentation form of an existing character?
No.
7. Can any of the proposed character(s) be considered to be similar (in appearance or function) to an existing character?
No.
8. Does the proposal include use of composite sequences?
No.
A version of the following proposal was submitted in August 1993 to the Unicode Consortium by Michael Everson and Marion Gunn as a review of Unicode Technical Report #3, the Draft Proposal for Ogham encoding. The UTR was found to be at variance with both accepted belief and the best of recent scholarship.
1.1 It is probable that Ogham (Old Irish Ogam) was widely written in wood in early times. The main flowering of the use of "classical" Ogham in stone seems to be 5th-6th century. Monumental Ogham inscriptions are found in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, and the Isle of Man, mainly employed as territorial markers and memorials. The more ancient examples are standing stones, script being carved into the edge (droim or faobhar) of the stone, which forms a stemline against which individual characters are cut. Text is read beginning from the bottom left-hand side of a stone, continuing upward, across the top and down the right-hand side in the case of long inscriptions. Inscriptions written on stemlines cut into the face of the stone, instead of along its edge, are known as "scholastic", and are of a later date (post 7th century). Notes were also commonly written in Ogham in manuscripts down to the sixteenth century. Even since that time, this tradition of native writing has never really been forgotten.1.2 Structure of the script. The Ogham alphabet consists of twenty-five distinct characters (feda), the first twenty of which are considered to be primary, the last five (forfeda) supplementary. The four primary series are called aicmí (plural of aicme 'family'). Each aicme was named after its first character (Aicme Beithe, Aicme hÚatha, Aicme Muine, Aicme Ailme, 'the B Group', 'the H Group', 'the M Group', 'the A Group'). Some of the names and all of the values of the forfeda are open to question. A possible twenty-sixth character is omitted here, as being inconsistently rendered and as wanting attestation in use; however space has been left for an additional character should it prove to be needed. The use of arrowheads to indicate direction is a very late development accommodated in the encoding. Several of the character names have long vowels in Irish, written with the acute accent (hÚATH, nGÉTAL, ÚR, ÉBAD, ÓR); in a few instances, Damian McManus' normalized Old Irish nomenclature (1991:3) differs from the traditionally-recognized names, and the aliases BEITHE, NIN, UATH, GETAL, and IPHIN/PIN should be recognized.
1.3 Rendering. Monumental Ogham was incised on stone chiefly in a bottom-to-top direction, though there are examples of left-to-right bilingual inscriptions in Irish and Latin. Manuscript Ogham accommodated the horizontal left-to-right direction of the Latin script and the vowels were written as vertical strokes as opposed to the incised notches of the inscriptions. Ogham should therefore be rendered on computers from left-to-right or from bottom-to-top (never starting from top-to-bottom).
2.0 References:
Graves, Robert. 1972. The White Goddess; a historical grammar of poetic myth. Amended and enlarged ed. New York: Octagon Books.
MacAlister, Robert A. Stewart. 1897-1902. Studies in Irish epigraphy. In 2 parts. London: David Nutt.
MacAlister, Robert A. Stewart. 1937. The secret languages of Ireland. Repr. 1976. St. Helier: Armorica Book Co./Amsterdam: Apa-Philo Press.
McManus, Damian. 1986. "Ogam: archaizing, orthography and authenticity of the manuscript key to the alphabet", in Ériu 37:1-31.
McManus, Damian. 1988. "Irish letter-names and their kennings", in Ériu 39:127-68.
McManus, Damian. 1991. A guide to Ogam. (Maynooth Monographs: 4) Maynooth: An Sagart.
Ó Coindealbháin, Tadhg. 1906. Gramadach dhá-theangthach: an Ghaedhilg agus an Béarla ar aghaidh a chéile. An t-ath-chló, agus réamhrádh agus foclóir gramadamhail ó láimh Sheosaimh Laoide. Baile Átha Cliath: Connradh na Gaedhilge.
3.0 OGHAM CHARACTER NAMES
xx01 OGHAM LETTER BEITH
xx06 OGHAM LETTER HUATH
xx0B OGHAM LETTER MUIN
xx10 OGHAM LETTER AILM
xx15 OGHAM LETTER EBAD
xx1A (This position shall not be used)
xx00 (This position shall not be used)
xx02 OGHAM LETTER LUIS
xx03 OGHAM LETTER FERN
xx04 OGHAM LETTER SAIL
xx05 OGHAM LETTER NUIN
xx07 OGHAM LETTER DAIR
xx08 OGHAM LETTER TINNE
xx09 OGHAM LETTER COLL
xx0A OGHAM LETTER CERT
xx0C OGHAM LETTER GORT
xx0D OGHAM LETTER NGETAL
xx0E OGHAM LETTER STRAIF
xx0F OGHAM LETTER RUIS
xx11 OGHAM LETTER ONN
xx12 OGHAM LETTER UR
xx13 OGHAM LETTER EDAD
xx14 OGHAM LETTER IDAD
xx16 OGHAM LETTER OR
xx17 OGHAM LETTER UILEN
xx18 OGHAM LETTER IFIN
xx19 OGHAM LETTER EMANCHOLL
xx1B OGHAM SIGN SAIGHEAD
marks the direction in which a text is to be read (in later Ogham)
XX1C OGHAM SIGN BEARNA
used as a word space or tatweel (in later Ogham)
XX1D (This position shall not be used)
XX1E (This position shall not be used)
XX1F (This position shall not be used)
Ogham banners at Dublin airport.