Ogham thoughts – Frank McNally on a new artwork, an old alphabet, and the longest word in Irish

The longest word in modern Irish, I’m told – or at least the longest you might meet in the wild, as opposed to one created in laboratory conditions – is grianghrafadóireachta, an adjective meaning “of photography”.
But at a lecture in the Royal Irish Academy on Tuesday night, some of us were introduced for the first time to an older term that outstretched that one be several characters: anrocomraircnicsiumairne.
It’s mentioned in an ancient treatise on grammar, Auraicept na n-Éces (“Instruction of the poets”), thought to date from the eighth century but the only known copy of which is in the Book of Ballymote from circa 1391.
The word may never have featured in conversation since, except among scholars. And yet, meaning as it does “all the mistakes we have committed”, it would still be useful today as a one-word prophylactic against hubris.
Perhaps it’s about to make a comeback, because as of Tuesday it is the title of a new artwork, now in possession of the RIA, by Belfast-born Thomas Keyes.
Commissioned by the people behind a joint Glasgow-Maynooth research project on the old ogham alphabet, the painting develops a theme from the Book of Ballymote, in which the biblical Tower of Babel is used as a warning to writers.
In Keyes’s version, the tower is rising again in a dystopian Dublin, whose citizens are represented by a range of anthropomorphic ogham letters.
Featured characters include the legendary authors of the Auraicept. As a former graffiti artist, Keyes also somehow managed to pack in a modern history of that genre, referencing many practitioners from Belfast and Dublin.
And speaking of grianghrafadoireachta, one of the modern mistakes his piece warns against is excessive absorption in smartphones, as citizens record themselves and scroll the internet obsessively.
A potential obstacle to the revival of anrocomraircnicsiumairne for everyday use is that it’s not easy to say. Even David Stifter, professor of Old and Middle Irish at Maynooth, palpably struggles with it.
As Tuesday’s master of ceremonies, he had to say it several times. And linguistic thoroughbred though he is, he approached it like a nervous showjumper negotiating a triple-jump at the RDS in slippery conditions In fairness, while he rattled a few bars, he didn’t knock any off.
Mistakes were a running theme of the RIA event. Clearly the scribes of medieval Ireland, unlike Frank Sinatra, never found their regrets too few to mention, even if they sometimes had to disguise them in ogham.
Hence a piece of marginalia by a ninth-century monk. He was working on a copy of Priscian’s Latin grammar but added the Irish word latheirt, meaning “excessive drunkenness” or “hangover” at the top of a page, in ogham.
As Deborah Hayden, head of Maynooth’s Department of Early Irish, joked, this may have been an apology for any shortcomings in his work transcribing the text. His copy, containing 3,500 glosses (and the coded confession) in Old Irish is now preserved at a Library in St Gall, Switzerland.
Hayden also explained the significance of the Tower of Babel in the Irish language’s origin legend. According to Auraicept na nÉces, it arose from the vacuum that followed the tower-building debacle, when scholar Fénius Farsaid was commissioned to produce a new language from the remains of all previous ones.
This not only implied that Irish was superior to its predecessors, it also neatly absolved it from any blame for the tower-building project’s multilingual mix-up.
The language’s supposed superiority extended to ogham, which the Auraicept included alongside the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets. It was claimed that ogham was the best and most exact of the quartet, because it was “invented last”.
Alas, the writing system is not widely used today, although it retains a certain cachet among designers. Hayden’s slide show included the sign for a “hot yoga” studio in Boston, whose name Analaigh (Irish for “Breathe”) is also rendered in ogham.
Another example, nearer ogham – sorry, home – is a solicitors’ office in Cork, McCarthy Teahan on Father Matthew Quay. Red and black blocks of colour on the logo are divided by a white ogham stave. On closer inspection, apparently, the characters translate as “Bob Rote This”.
But the one of Hayden’s slides that struck a chord – for me personally – featured part an old poem in the RIA manuscript collection, written in ogham, called An Clampar.
This clampar was not to be confused with clampers of the kind you encounter in dystopian Dublin, although the Irish word means “clash, quarrel, discord, etc,” so there may be an overlap.
Anyway, it reminded me that the night before, I parked a rental car on a city street and paid in an advance for an hour’s parking next day.
But in the Department of Early Tuesday, I was slightly late getting up – possibly due to some lingering lathairt from the weekend – so that by the time I remembered the car, the paid parking and traditional 15 minutes’ grace had both elapsed.
Rounding the corner urgently, I found my rental all alone in the bay, apart from a “parking services” van alongside, ready to strike. As I drove away smugly, under the clampers’ noses, that too felt like poetry.