CuChulainn wrote:
"Early Irish," interesting!
So how do I do this? Hero finds object carved with Ogham script... no one in the world can translate it for him? LOL. Does not suit my narrative very well. Could someone who speaks modern Irish work it out with a dictionary or is that totally unbelievable?
It’s not that no one can translate from Primitive Irish ogham inscription to English – a lot people – those who study history of Celtic languages, with some help of dictionaries, can. Basic structure of Primitive Irish and other Celtic languages are known (but not exact forms of suffixes), vocabulary (basic on later Old Irish texts and other Celtic languages) is somehow known. So when a new ogham inscription is found, it can be understood by a proper scholar who knows how to read it.
The problem is the other way around – you will find no one, who can translate an English text into Primitive Irish, because we do not know enough about the language to reconstruct original usage and create believable new texts. We do not know enough about the language, because most inscriptions are just short with only some personal names on it, and they don’t show much grammar beside simple genitive formation.