ᚘ

Ifín

originally the letter P; later a thorn or gooseberry

A thing invented for a purpose and then reassigned away from it

Ogham glyphs are shown in Unicode, laid out left to right. On a standing stone the letters run bottom to top along the arris, so this row is a convenience rather than a facsimile.

Sound
io originally /p/; later the diphthong io
Position
24
Group
The forfeda
Root meaning
from Latin pinus, pine or thorn — hence its original name Pín
Medieval tree gloss
gooseberry (imposed after the letter was renamed)
Unicode
U+1698
Timing
Superseded
Yes / No
The role has changed

Upright

  • a borrowed sound
  • a role reassigned
  • obsolescence
  • a thorn
  • what was needed and then was not
  • substitution
  • an import

In the rune poems

milsem fedo

sweetest of trees — the same phrase given to Coll, which shows how unstable the forfeda kennings are

Bríatharogam Morainn mac Moín · Ifín
the manuscript readings for this letter are unstable

no reliable second kenning survives

Bríatharogam Maic ind Óc · Ifín

Irish had no P

This is the fact the letter exists to solve, and it is a strange one.

Proto-Indo-European *p was lost entirely in the Celtic languages — it disappeared, leaving nothing where it had been. Latin pater corresponds to Old Irish athair; Latin piscis to Irish íasc. The initial consonant is simply gone.

That left Primitive Irish with no /p/ phoneme at all, and consequently the twenty-letter alphabet had no need of a P and did not have one. For writing Irish, this was not a defect.

Then Christianity arrived, and with it Latin: Patricius, pascha, popul, pennit. Words with a P in them, in constant use, that the alphabet physically could not write.

So a letter was made. It was called Pín, from Latin pinus — pine, or thorn — a name chosen acrophonically, because it starts with the sound the letter needed to carry. A borrowed word to name a borrowed sound.

And then it was taken away

What happened next is the most revealing episode in Ogham's manuscript history.

Medieval scribes wanted the forfeda to form a tidy fifth aicme mirroring the fourth: five letters, all vowels, matching the vowel series. The actual forfeda were nothing of the kind — a mixed collection of consonants and diphthongs created ad hoc for practical needs.

Rather than accept the untidiness, the scribes reassigned them. Ébad, which carried /k/ on real stones, became ea. And Pín, which existed for the sole purpose of writing P, was stripped of that value, given the diphthong io, and renamed Ifín.

The alphabet had solved a real problem and then undid the solution for the sake of symmetry.

Which left it with no P again. So a further letter had to be invented to replace the one just neutralised: Peith, a modified Beithe, called beithe bog, soft birch.

That sequence — need, solution, tidying-up, same need, second solution — is the clearest available picture of what the manuscript tradition was actually doing with this alphabet. Symmetry mattered more than function, because by then nobody was using it to write anything.

The gooseberry

With a new name and a new value, Ifín needed a tree, and it was assigned the gooseberry, ispín or similar forms.

The reasoning appears to be phonetic — Ifín and ispín are close enough to suggest one another — rather than semantic. It is a pun standing in for an etymology.

The kennings are correspondingly unstable. The phrase most often attached, milsem fedo, sweetest of trees, is the same phrase the Bríatharogaim give to Coll, the hazel. Either it drifted, or a scribe filled a gap with a phrase already in the system.

That duplication is worth noting for what it says about the forfeda generally. These letters do not have the three-fold independent kenning tradition the primary twenty have. Their kennings are fragmentary, contradictory and sometimes borrowed from elsewhere, because they were never part of the mnemonic system the Bríatharogaim were built for.

In reading

There is no stable traditional meaning here, and anyone offering a confident one is constructing it.

What the letter's history supports is unusually specific and worth using: something created for a real need and then reassigned away from it. Ifín is a solution that was working, taken off the job for reasons that had nothing to do with whether it worked, and replaced by a second solution that did exactly the same thing.

In a spread that reads as a role redefined by someone else's need for tidiness, or a person or arrangement retired while still functional. It is a real situation, it is common, and no other letter in the alphabet describes it.

The thorn sense from pinus is available as a secondary reading, and the gooseberry is available if you want the medieval one. Both should be labelled.

Questions to sit with

  • What was working, and got reassigned for reasons unrelated to whether it worked?
  • Is something here being tidied at the cost of being useful?
  • They removed the P and then had to invent another one. What are you about to undo and then need again?

Frequently asked questions

Because Irish had lost the sound entirely. Proto-Indo-European *p disappeared in the Celtic languages — Latin pater corresponds to Old Irish athair, piscis to íasc — so Primitive Irish had no /p/ and the twenty-letter alphabet had no need of one. Christianity then brought Latin words like Patricius and pascha that could not be written.

Because medieval scribes wanted the forfeda to form a tidy fifth aicme of five vowels, mirroring the vowel series. They reassigned the letters accordingly, so Pín lost its /p/ value, was given the diphthong io, and was renamed. Symmetry was preferred to function.

A further letter had to be invented to replace the one just neutralised: Peith, a modified Beithe called beithe bog, soft birch. The sequence — need, solution, tidying-up, same need, second solution — shows what the manuscript tradition was doing, since by then nobody was writing anything with the alphabet.

Apparently by pun rather than etymology: Ifín and ispín are close enough to suggest each other. Its kennings are correspondingly unstable, and the phrase most often attached, milsem fedo, sweetest of trees, is the same one the Bríatharogaim give to Coll, the hazel.

No stable traditional meaning survives, so any reading is constructed. What its history supports is specific: something created for a real need and then reassigned away from it while still working. That reads as a role redefined by someone else's need for tidiness, or a functional arrangement retired anyway.

Ogham

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