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How ogham stones were carved reveals a rough, hands-on craft, not fine monumental lettering. Point chisels for pocking, flat chisels for cleaner V-cuts, and almost no surface prep. A real example from Monataggart, Co. Cork, shows the technique up close.
The MAQI formula is the backbone of ogham inscriptions. X MAQI Y means "X son of Y," and it appears on most of the roughly 400 surviving stones. Here's how it works, how it expands with MUCOI, and where it breaks down in Pictish Scotland.
Feather-marks, the arrow-like > and < symbols shown on almost every ogham transliteration online, barely appear on real inscriptions. Here's where the convention actually comes from.
Most writing systems treat gaps between words as empty. Ogham did something stranger — it gave space its own glyph, Unicode U+1680.