Stone with ancient writing system unearthed in garden | Hacker News Reader

Stone with ancient writing system unearthed in garden

bbc.co.uk

119 pointsgadders22 comments

One of my favourite Time Team episodes ever was when they found an Ogham carving on a stone when digging up a golf course on the Isle of Man.

The whole episode is a corker!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW3UQEDQ0zQ

Thanks very much for this recommendation!

If you watch this episode, bear in mind that Ogham was badly mistranslated. (And even when they're giving the mistranslation, they point at the wrong words.)

A followup can be read here:

https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Blog/2008/05/throng-of-fifty-wa...

Related, there’s a Unicode block for Ogham.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham_(Unicode_block)

> Ogham was highly unusual among world writing systems, consisting solely of parallel lines in groups of one to five.

I guess that makes it easier to carve into stone (or wood, for less durable writing).

Tom Scott has a nice video on Ogham: https://youtu.be/2yWWFLI5kFU?si=EQccsJo6zHcyB1RB

This is a great find- Ogham’s been in the news a bit this week, mostly thanks to Eurovision (!)

It surprisingly similar to Morse code.

How so?

(Genuinely curious)

.-. - ..-. --

In Morse more frequent characters are represented by shorter codes. You can also see here that A is only one dash.

Tldr; it is probably a grave marker for someone named Mael Dumcail written in Ogham

Not a bad guess, but I didn't spot that in the article.

The name was mentioned in an image description. Most of these are grave markers, the small size is strange but probably superfluous.

It's binary.

It's joke, lay off the downvotes. Yeesh

I wonder how many "ancient" stones are the result of bored kids, 20 years before someone else digs up the stone.

My uninformed suspicion is that this is not a language or a script but a timekeeping or calendar system of some kind.

The article says it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham

>The vast majority of the inscriptions consist of personal names.

You are correct, in that your suspicion is uninformed.

Ogham is an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the early Irish language, and later the Old Irish language.

I don't know why you would feel the need to publicly cast aspersions on actual experts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham

"I don't know why you would feel the need to publicly cast aspersions on actual experts"

You new here? /s

But but you're doing the fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam! /s

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