Ogham translator

Feather marks wraps the output in ᚛ ᚜, the signs that open and close an inscription, or leaves them off if you pick Letters only. Swap the boxes to read Ogham back.

The output is real Unicode, so it copies into a document and stays text. Any letter the alphabet has no sign for gets listed under the box rather than dropped.

Ogham is cut along a line instead of sitting on one. On a standing stone that line is the edge of the rock, and each letter is one to five strokes placed right of it, left of it, across it at an angle, or straight through. You start at the bottom left and read upwards, turning the corner if the text runs long.

Strokes are fast to chisel and can be counted by touch in bad light, and using the stone's own edge means no ruled line to lay out first. On screen that edge becomes a character of its own, so Ogham needs a font that knows to draw it.

The letters have names, and some of the names are trees: beith is birch, luis is rowan, coll is hazel. Medieval scholars gave every letter a tree, helped by the letters being called feda, "trees". That's where "the tree alphabet" comes from.

About 400 inscribed stones survive, most in Ireland with a scattering in Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man. Nearly all carry the same thing: a name, and whose son the person was. They were boundary markers and memorials.

Why it was invented is still argued over. One suggestion is that it grew up deliberately out of reach of Latin readers. The alphabet appears while Roman Britain is next door, it fits early Irish rather than Latin sounds, and it can be cut by someone who never learned Roman letters. Other scholars read the same evidence as ordinary borrowing.

Runes come from the same impulse: an alphabet shaped by the chisel rather than the pen. Both converters transliterate, so your words stay English underneath.

Morse counts too, in units of time sent down a wire.