WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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This is an Ogham stone,

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or "ogg-em" stone, depending on
whose pronunciation you follow.

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The carvings on here are from an alphabet
unlike anything else in the world,

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an alphabet that is literally
an exception to modern rules.

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I’m not talking about the Roman letters
on the face:

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I’m talking about the markings
carved into the corner.

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Those markings are in Ogham -- it’s a way
of writing down the early Irish language

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with marks like these.

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There are only about 400 surviving stones
like this,

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found in Ireland and
the western parts of the UK.

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This particular one is about 1500 years old,

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and it comes from Devon
in the south west of England.

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It’s on display here at the British Museum.

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The inscription is a name. Ogham stones
are mostly used to record names,

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either as a tombstone or
as a marker of land ownership.

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You read this along the stemline,
along the corner.

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Each character is made of one to five markings,
which will all be on

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one side of the line, the other side of the line,
through the line, or on the line.

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When modern scholars started to analyse this
script, they wanted to write it down on paper,

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and they adapted it a little
to make it easier for them:

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they changed it so it always went left to right,

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and each phrase was drawn on
a horizontal line so you could easily tell

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which marks were on which side.

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Some Ogham inscriptions, on later stones or
on other artefacts, do actually carve their

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own stemline into a flat surface, so adding
that line in print wasn't too much of a stretch.

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And after all, trying to fold a bit of paper
and sketch markings on the corner

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wouldn't be easy to work with
for academic papers.

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And that left us, years later,
with an interesting technology problem.

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When it came time to encode Ogham characters
as 1s and 0s, to fold them into Unicode,

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the international standard for
how to display text on a computer:

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Ogham became the only language in Unicode
where a space is not a space.

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A space character, to a computer, has three
properties: it has a certain width,

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you don't display or print anything in that width, and

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if your text has run out of room on a line,

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you can go back to the previous space character
and replace it with a line break.

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Now, there have been well-understood variations
on those for years.

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Two of those rules are flouted
all the time.

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You can have a non-breaking space, like the one
between a word and a French quotation mark.

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That space has width, it has nothing displayed
in it, but you can't put a line break there.

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The word and punctuation must travel together.

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You can also have a zero-width space, which
sounds like a ridiculous idea,

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but it's a good way to tell a computer that,
if there isn't room,

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it's OK to break a long string of characters
somewhere that it otherwise wouldn't.

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These are all commonly used.

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But until Ogham was added to Unicode, the
rule that a space character must be empty

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had never been broken.
Why would it? It's a space.

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Well, an Ogham space includes that stemline.

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The line doesn’t stop between words, because
the corner doesn’t stop between words.

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The space is not a space...
but it behaves like one.

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It can be replaced with a line break.

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If you spread an Ogham inscription
over two lines,

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the space character vanishes,
same as in English.

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Now, Ogham isn't the only language that uses
a separator like this.

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Ancient Latin used an interpunct,
a middle dot, the same way.

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But in modern usage that is not a space,
and modern usage wins.

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Ogham is the only case where
modern folks have gone,

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yeah, okay, it's a space that also
involves drawing something.

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It's a space that isn't a space.

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There's been an actual argument about it,

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down in one of the mailing lists for
linguists and computer science nerds

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at the Unicode Consortium.

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The Irish contingent had some
very strong opinions.

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And the final ruling: yep.

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It's a space that's also a line.

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This is one of the things I love about linguistics:
an ancient script,

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carved into stones more than
a millennium ago,

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is an exception to a rule that
I never even realised was there.

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A space doesn’t have to be a space.