nGetal

The thirteenth letter carries three incompatible identifications and no way to choose between them on the evidence, which makes it worth an entry of its own.

The candidates

• Reed, which is what this atlas records and what most modern practice uses.
• Broom, the shrub, which appears in the later scholiast glosses.
• Wounding or killing, which is what the linguistics suggest.

McManus connects the name to a root meaning to wound or slay. The briatharogaim support him: the kennings speak of a physician's sustenance and the beginning of slaying, which reads as an association with wounds, and with the healing of wounds, rather than with any plant.

How reed got there

The reed enters through the scholiast layer, and the modern preference for it over broom is largely inherited from Graves, whose calendar needed a plant for this month and who chose reed.

The subsequent divinatory meanings follow from the choice: reeds by water, the arrow shaft, the pipe, direct action, cutting through. Coherent, and downstream of a fourteenth-century guess reinforced by a 1948 poem.

The letter itself

The sound is ng, and it is another of the letters that barely occurs on stone. Several of the rarest ogham letters are also the ones with the least stable names, which is not a coincidence: a character used often is a character whose name gets remembered.

What to keep

The wounding sense has the best philological case and is the oldest reading the kennings support. The reed has the tradition, in the sense that a few centuries of scholiasts and eighty years of practitioners have used it.

Both are recorded here. They are not the same claim and they do not rest on the same evidence.

The third ogham family cuts its strokes across the line at an angle, and nGetal takes three of them.

How the letter is formed

nGetal is the third letter of the third family, Aicme Muine, and is cut as three parallel strokes crossing the line obliquely.

The value is not settled

The manuscript tradition gives this letter the value NG. Whether that was its value in the language of the inscriptions is a separate question, and the answer is not agreed. The letter is rare in the surviving corpus, which leaves very little material on which to test any proposal, and the reconstructions on offer depend on assumptions about the shape of Primitive Irish that are themselves debated.

This atlas records the manuscript value as attested for the manuscript period and records the earlier value as open. What would settle it is new epigraphic material: a stone bearing this character in a word whose etymology is independently known. Such a find is possible rather than likely, since the corpus grows by a handful of stones in a generation.

In the corpus

The orthodox inscriptions are almost all personal names in the genitive, cut on standing stones in Ireland and in Irish-settled parts of Britain, dated on linguistic grounds to roughly the fourth to the sixth centuries.

The reed attached to this letter comes from the manuscript glosses and is treated separately here, as is the modern calendar material.