Aicme hUatha

Aicme hUatha is the second group, named for uath, and its five letters are uath, dair, tinne, coll and cert, giving the sounds h, d, t, c and q. In the script these are cut as one to five strokes to the left of the stemline, or above it when the line is horizontal. The presence of a distinct letter for q, representing the Primitive Irish sound that later became c, is one of the pieces of internal evidence used to date the alphabet's design: it fits a stage of the language earlier than the surviving inscriptions themselves, which suggests the alphabet was devised somewhat before the earliest stones. Damian McManus's A Guide to Ogam (1991) is the standard modern treatment of these questions.

The name uath is itself disputed in a way beithe is not: the letter kennings in the medieval tradition connect it to Old Irish uath, fear or horror, while the Auraicept's separate arboreal gloss instead gives whitethorn or hawthorn, reconciled by later scribes through wordplay on uathmar, fearsome, since thorns were read as a fearsome tree. Damian McManus, in A Guide to Ogam (1991), judged the manuscript tradition's h sound value for the letter a likely later, cosmetic fix over a lost original consonant, tentatively proposing the sound /y/ instead, while treating the letter's true original name and value as genuinely unresolved rather than settled by either the fear or the hawthorn reading.

Sources A Guide to OgamDamian McManus with Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' PrimerGeorge Calder (ed.)

An aicme is one of the four families of five letters that make up the ogham alphabet, each family defined by how its strokes meet the writing line.

The geometry

Aicme hUatha is cut as strokes lying to the other side of the line from the first family, and not crossing it. Its five members carry one to five such strokes: Uath, Dair, Tinne, Coll and Quert, with the values H, D, T, C and Q.

On a standing stone that means the strokes run onto the opposite face from those of Aicme Beithe. In the manuscripts, where the line is drawn horizontally, this family is written above the line and the first family below it.

Two letters worth knowing about

Two members of this family carry the sharpest linguistic evidence in the alphabet. Uath is given the value H, a sound Old Irish did not have as an independent phoneme, and the letter is correspondingly rare on the stones. Quert stands for a sound that Primitive Irish distinguished from plain C and that had merged with it by the Old Irish period, which is why the letter survives in the early inscriptions and is a dead letter in the manuscripts.

Both facts are used in dating inscriptions, since the corpus is dated on linguistic grounds far more often than archaeologically.

The mirror

This family and the first are distinguished only by which side of the line the strokes fall on, so the reading direction of an inscription has to be established before either can be read at all.