Renfrew's Celtic Scenario

[Christopher Gwinn]

> Well, my point - perhaps too subtle - was that the Celtic inscriptions on
> ogham sticks might be like the Latin inscriptions on coins and such.  If you
> recall, a number of folks on this list asserted that the Celtic on ogham
> sticks had a great deal of similarity to the Celtic found (also mainly in
> inscriptions I believe) on the continent maMy point was that the inscriptions
> on ogham sticks may have had an artificial uniformity as one finds in
> inscriptional Latin.  To the extent that these ogham sticks had some
> religious or ritual significance and were not meant to be 'littera' -
> communications for more everyday purposes, that seems possible.  Tacitus
> describes Germanic priests carving sacred words on wood sticks and sacred
> words might tend to preserve anachronisms.

You are correct, Ogam inscriptions portray an "official" language learned by
the scribes which does not necessarily reflect the spoken language at the
time (specifically the later Ogmas) - though I would imagine that it DID
reflect "proper" or "learned" Goidelic of the 2nd/3rd centuries (probably
the time that the Irish were recieving enough Latin influence from Britain -
if only through trading/raiding - to base a new alphabet on the Latin one).

-Chris Gwinn