Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Cutting Tinne: Three Strokes in the Second Family

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Cutting Tinne: Three Strokes in the Second Family

A letter of ogham is fixed by two facts: its family, and how many strokes it carries.

How the letter is formed

Tinne is the third letter of the second family, Aicme hUatha, and is cut as three strokes on that family's side of the line, the side opposite the first family's.

The order of the alphabet is not the Latin order

The ogham sequence begins B, L, F, S, N, then H, D, T, C, Q. That is not alphabetical order in any Latin sense, and it is not obviously phonological order either. The arrangement is one of the standing problems of the subject: proposals range from a deliberate scrambling of a Latin model, to a grouping by articulation, to an order inherited from a source that has not survived. No proposal has carried the field.

The atlas records the order as attested and the explanations as competing, because that is the state of the scholarship rather than a gap in the record.

The sound

Tinne carries the value T. It appears throughout the surviving inscriptions, which are overwhelmingly personal names in the genitive case, cut on standing stones in Ireland and in Irish-settled parts of Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man, dated on linguistic grounds to roughly the fourth to sixth centuries.

The holly attached to this letter comes from the later manuscript tradition and is treated separately here.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.