᚛ᚈᚑᚋ ᚄᚉᚑᚈᚈ᚜ and ᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜
Ogham is an old Irish script made by carving notches into stones. It fell out of use more than a millennium ago – but it’s an interesting exception to a linguistics and computer-science rule that I’d never even realised existed. Let’s talk about the Ogham Space Mark.
Thanks to all the team at the British Museum! You can visit their YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/britishmuseum
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@TomScottGo
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
An alternate title for this video was "The Space That Isn't A Space", but that's a bit more difficult to translate into Ogham. Thanks again to all the team at the British Museum!
@itslgd
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Hello there 👋
@saoirb98
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
UCC has some 😊
@ApsalarShade
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
This looks a lot like women's script from the stormlight archive
@welcb8733
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
My Welsh/Celtic Ancestors, broke the rules !? Mwahahahaha they are laughing their socks off 🤣😈🤣😈🤣😈🦇
@NaşurDevân
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
ancient turkic people used ":" as a space mark in writing
@deetoher
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Looking back at this – its quiet funny to think about the space being the issue, given that the use of a space to denote separation between words is attributed to Irish monks.
@kurbads74
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
That is irrelevant.
@rildoemidiobernardo5556
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Ogram alfabet is a medieval alfabet
@alterablebark54
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Isn't that space deleting Unicode what made iPhones crash a few years ago?
@svihl666
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
really cool
@Фир_Ять
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
᚛ᚃᚒᚉᚉ ᚒᚑᚒ᚜
@kynixie
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Its worth noting that ogham is not a language just the alphabet, and its not really a code either… it is an alphabet.
@ambergibson9559
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
I understood essentially nothing in this video but I like it anyway 😂
@moogenn
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
I appreciate languages like japanese where there's just no space used in normal writing because the way the language is written you don't really need one
@AllisimaProductions
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
2:56 for some reason my brain interpreted this image as a screenshot of a really bizzarely designed website instead of a photograph
@r1friends344
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
ꓦ
ꓫ
8
≡|
ꓥ
>-"'-◆◆-/-<
@Jeanieinabottle89
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Anyone I can hire to translate English into this language?
@debdrikdebnath9995
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Imagine being so GOATed that your videos are being recommended 6 years later! Miss you man.
@frisbeetarian34
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
We don't understand what the Irish were saying.
@Idkwhyimhere456
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
IRELAND MENTIONWED 🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪
@buddhabrot
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
im gonna stick with ascii.
@lgude
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Ogham also appears in the Iberian Peninsula where Celts lived and I have read in a book America BC by Barry Fell that New England farmers have been unearthing rocks with Ogham on them and donating them to Harvard since colonial times. I grew up on a farm in New Hampshire and have spent many days picking up rocks after ploughing and never encountered any Ogham. Fell is accused of pseudoscience, but I think there is more to it than just speculative theorizing. Like a lot of phenomena that independent researchers propose there seems to be a protective reaction from academics to debunk anything people outside the profession propose. I could see that tension when I read Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki book in the late 40s as a boy. Somebody ought to go look at the rocks.
@wulfmaer8919
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
That's great. Now, what did the rock say? What was written in Ogham on the bloody rock!?
@Anei-w3n
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
I was attempting to create a simple way to communicate to myself, and this resembles the exact thing…guess I got a primal feel for what I needed.
@ЮрийКовалев-х3э
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Yesterday Aliens from the Deepest Space
come to me and said that space is not a Space
That I have to find another place
Where I can to face with Real Space
@OrpheusSonOfCalliope
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
@TomScottGo I can't believe that you're discussing the use of spaces and not the fact that this language almost looks like a binary system!
@billtorr4900
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
In computers, a space is ASCII code decimal 32, 0X20 hex. Even when there's nothing, there's something.
@WhatWhy42
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
What's it Say?
@aadd3538
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
When marked on stone the marking fade. Those white markings are recent
@ALehrer-s8f
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
And conversely, Ogham…
@kalinkavelinova2529
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Worst script ever
@Imhexed
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Some of the best content on the Internet, thanks Tom
@KiyashIsAPracticalJoker
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Right
@SuperBartet
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Well I translated the name of this video to "Ton Scott and Ogham"
@impunitythebagpuss
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Doesn't Musk have spawn named using this language? 😂😂
@frogbear02
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
in runes, using ᛬ or ᛫ as a space was very common. When i made my runic keyboard to type with my modern-swedish-adapted runes, i couldnt remap the spacebar to "anything but space".. really ticked me off
@jerrebrasfield4231
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
So if you learn the code as it currently is you won't understand the old code.
@myriaddsystems
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
Er…
@TheLibraryChamber
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
its O-em … the g is silent.
@Daybreak_System
March 24, 2026 at 2:15 am
I face many struggles making a font for a script we use in our system, the space should look like a colon :
but the space should look empty at the end of a line when automatically replaced by a line break.
But turns out if you make the space visible (not empty looking) it actually does render visually at the end of a line, or at least it does in MS Word, and it SUCKS
Comments are closed.