Stuart L Harris

Pictish Ogham Decipherment Stuart L Harris

For the first time, Decipherment of Pictish Ogham translates Pictish Ogham, an alphabetic script derived from Irish Ogham. These texts add life and meaning to lavish Symbol Stones recovered from grave sites throughout Scotland, whose ogham inscriptions describe an aspect of the deceased. Pictish inscriptions do not follow the Latin formula 'XXX son of YYY'; instead they sound like quotations or ruminations from someone at the funeral or preparing for the funeral. They can be lauditory or deprecating, expecially if the deceased was responsible for losing a battle. The breakthrough to decipherment was to recognize that complex designs on Symbol Stones were a kind of written language practiced in Val Camonica in Italy, whose inhabitants spoke Finnish. Picts adapted Irish Ogham to suit their own needs: they kept five vowels, added two more vowels, changed all but two consonants, and introduced several ways to shorten the length of an inscription. As a result, there are almost as many words as there are letters.