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nGéadal

This article contains Ogham text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Ogham letters.

nGéadal (NgéadalorNgeadal) is the Irish name of the thirteenth letter of the Ogham alphabet, ᚍ.

The Bríatharogam (kennings) for the letter are:

• lúth lego "sustenance of a leech"
• étiud midach "raiment of physicians"
• tosach n-échto "beginning of slaying"

Its meaning is probably "[the act of] wounding". In Old Irish, the letter name was Gétal. It may be a verbal noun of gonid 'wounds, slays'. in which case is related to Welsh gwanu 'to pierce, to stab', which comes from the root was *gʷhen- 'to pierce, to strike'. Its original phonetic value in Primitive Irish was [ɡʷ], the voiced labiovelar. In Old Irish, this phoneme merged with g (gort), and the medieval manuscript tradition assigns it Latin ng [ŋ], hence the unetymological spelling of the letter name with initial n-.

References[edit]

• Damian McManus, Irish letter-names and their kennings, Ériu 39 (1988), 127-168.