I am looking to take my parents surnames from english to gaelic to ogham for a tattoo any help would be greatly appreciated.thank you

I think this is how it goes from what i could figure out?
I looked at some of the ogham alphabet pages not sure what i have come up with is correct. I would love some advice. Thank you

Hogan O hOgain

McCue Mac Aodha

Maeve Meabh last one here for my daughter

O hOgain = ᚑ ᚆᚑᚌᚐᚔᚅ

Mac Aodha = ᚋᚐᚉ ᚐᚑᚇᚆᚐ

Meabh = ᚋᚓᚐᚁᚆ

Thank you so much your time spent doing this is greatly appreciated. How do you type that on the computer? Do you have a special language program or app?

A while back I went a step further and asked for help getting the "ancient" version of my family name and going from there. You can see the process of that here: viewtopic.php?f=28&t=6626&hilit=Catháin

You can transliterate anything into Ogham script at this site: https://ogham.co/

You have to be careful with these, particularly if you're not familiar with Ogam. This one, for example, transliterates x to ᚕ possibly because of the graphical similarity, but it's definitely not corrext.

Other letters are just missing, so w won't be transliterated for example. If you're not familiar with Ogam, and you don't know to watch out for this, you could think you've transliterated something but accidentally be missing letters.

If it doesn't work properly, the transliteration will be incorrect. Have they stopped the project or will they develop it? Maybe they haven't added the right letters yet.

I find all of this very interesting One other thing I have noticed how come the vowels are sometimes a dot and sometimes a line?

I think it's working as intended. They have no way to transliterate roman letters which simply don't have equivalents in Ogam. It seems the choice they made in such cases is to just omit any such letters silently rather than trying to get their system to approximate the phonetics of the otherwise missing letter.



On computers that's just a matter of font. Like when you write the same letters but they look different in Times New Roman and Comic Sans.

Historically, Ogam on stones generally used a small notch directly on the stemline to indicate vowels. This is approximated as a dot in some 2D fonts, including the one used by Unicode. When Ogam started being used in manuscripts around the 7th century scribes used long strokes through the stemline to indicate vowels. As these vowel strokes are perpendicular to the stemline they are distinct from consonants like M and R, which are diagonal. They may have done this because they found it too difficult to approximate the dots of the stone tradition using a quill and ink, however, there is evidence that ogam was being inscribed on flat surfaces, with a stemline drawn in, from much earlier than the 7th century. So, by the time Ogam started being used in manuscripts, it may have already been common practice to indicate vowels with long strokes when written on 2D surfaces.

If you're interested in reading more about Ogam this website is a reliable source of information, and is up to date with modern academic understanding of the script. They have a number of blogs discussing various aspects of Ogam and its various uses over time. This blog in particular addresses the topic of manuscript Ogam, if you'd like to know more about the differences between this and the stone inscriptions.

I will take a look at the sites. Thank you.