Primitive Irish or Archaic Irish (), also called Proto-Goidelic, is the oldest known form of the Goidelic languages. It is known only from fragments, mostly personal names, inscribed on stone in the ogham alphabet in Ireland and western Great Britain between the 4th and the 6th century AD. Characteristics Transcribed ogham inscriptions, which lack a letter for , show Primitive Irish to be similar in morphology and inflections to Gaulish, Latin, Classical Greek and Sanskrit. Many of the characteristics of modern (and medieval) Irish, such as initial mutations, distinct "broad" and "slender" consonants and consonant clusters, are not yet apparent. More than 300 ogham inscriptions are known in Ireland, including 121 in County Kerry and 81 in County Cork, and more than 75 found outside Ireland in western Britain and the Isle of Man, including more than 40 in Wales, where Irish colonists settled in the 3rd century, and about 30 in Scotland, although some of these are in Pictish. Many of the British inscriptions are bilingual in Irish and Latin; however, none show any sign of the influence of Christianity or Christian epigraphic tradition, suggesting they date from before 391, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Only about a dozen of the Irish inscriptions show any such sign. The majority of ogham inscriptions are memorials, consisting of the name of the deceased in the genitive case, followed by , "of the son" (Modern Irish mic), and the name of his father, or , "of the grandson", (Modern Irish uí) and the name of his grandfather: for example , "[the stone] of Dalagnos son of Dalos". Sometimes the phrase , "of the son of the tribe", is used to show tribal affiliation. Some inscriptions appear to be border markers. Grammar The brevity of most orthodox ogham inscriptions makes it difficult to analyse the archaic Irish language in depth, but it is possible to understand the basis of its phonology and the rudiments of its nominal morphology. Nominal morphology With the exception of a few inscriptions in the singular dative, two in the plural genitive and one in the singular nominative, most known inscriptions of nouns in orthodox ogham are found in the singular genitive, so it is difficult to fully describe their nominal morphology. The German philologist Sabine Ziegler, however, drawing parallels with reconstructions of the Proto-Celtic language morphology (whose nouns are classified according to the