Tinne

Tinne is a letter of ogham, the earliest form of writing in the Irish language, cut as sets of strokes across a central line. It stands for the sound T and belongs to the second (Aicme hUatha) of the four aicme, the groups of five into which the twenty principal letters are divided.

Letter, tree and later meaning

Ogham is a genuine antiquity: some four hundred inscriptions survive, most on standing stones in Ireland and western Britain, cut between roughly the fourth and sixth centuries. Each letter also bears a name, and medieval Irish scholars glossed many of those names with trees and with word-kennings; Tinne is linked to the holly, from which its letter-name derives.

The divinatory use of ogham, here the sense of balance and the warrior, is not attested in the early inscriptions. The reading of ogham as an oracle, and much of the elaborate tree-lore attached to it, belongs to the medieval glossary tradition and, above all, to the modern neo-druidic revival of the twentieth century. It is presented here as that later tradition, laid over a script whose first purpose was to record names in stone.

A letter of ogham is fixed by two facts: its family, and how many strokes it carries.

How the letter is formed

Tinne is the third letter of the second family, Aicme hUatha, and is cut as three strokes on that family's side of the line, the side opposite the first family's.

The order of the alphabet is not the Latin order

The ogham sequence begins B, L, F, S, N, then H, D, T, C, Q. That is not alphabetical order in any Latin sense, and it is not obviously phonological order either. The arrangement is one of the standing problems of the subject: proposals range from a deliberate scrambling of a Latin model, to a grouping by articulation, to an order inherited from a source that has not survived. No proposal has carried the field.

The atlas records the order as attested and the explanations as competing, because that is the state of the scholarship rather than a gap in the record.

The sound

Tinne carries the value T. It appears throughout the surviving inscriptions, which are overwhelmingly personal names in the genitive case, cut on standing stones in Ireland and in Irish-settled parts of Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man, dated on linguistic grounds to roughly the fourth to sixth centuries.

The holly attached to this letter comes from the later manuscript tradition and is treated separately here.