Where can I learn old Irish and ogham?

Question

Does anyone know of a website, or other source, that will teach a person old irish as well as the ogham alphebet in conjunction with it? I am not just looking for the ogham alphebet, but the ability to translate the ancient writing. My library sucks, by the way, so that method is out. They are anything but helpful, and ordering a book from another library is a real pain. The name of a book I could order, however, would be helpful if you do not know of a site. Thanks!

Answer 1

Here are a few sites which deal with Ogham, the ancient Celtic form of writing:

The Ogham Stone
An introduction to this ancient Irish/Celtic writing system, complete with numerous images and illustrations.

Ogham:"This site covers aspects of the ogam (ogham), an ancient symbol alphabet used by the celts for secret communication and divination."

Ogham Introduction recommends some books and software

Answer 2

Old Irish won't be that easy if you haven't already studied at least one "ancient" language (something with inflected grammar like Latin or Greek) and the word order is different (verb-subject-object). The Thurneysen link below is my old college textbook, but is decent and reliable (and was old when I used it). Maybe you'll be able to find it at a local bookseller or one online (Barnes and Noble's out of stock, apparently). While looking for it I also found a beginner's book that may help (link included).

Ogam, on the other hand, is ludicrously simple so a website will probably serve you fine. There are some variations on it, but it's basically a direct transliteration of the Roman alphabet broken into four groups of "letters" (without ones not found in Irish or Latin like J) based on their line positon and tilt. Wikipedia has more than you'll ever need to know to transliterate Ogam into recognizable Roman characters for translation into English.

You may not need too much Old Irish to "translate" Ogam anyway. I've only ever seen it on monuments (Ogam stones), but I know paper enscriptions exist --I've heard it often decorated margins of manuscripts as scribes' notes like "corr" as a note of a mistake. Again, I suspect the Wikipedia article has *far* more detail about that.