All the Indo-European languages are more or less related to one another. We Irish must acknowledge a relationship, or rather a very distant connecting tie, with English. But, to trace this home, Irish must be followed back to the very oldest form of its words, and English must be followed back to Anglo-Saxon and when possible to Gothic. The hard mutes (p, t, c) of Celtic (and, for that matter, of Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Lithuanian) will be represented in Gothic by the corresponding soft mutes (b, d, g), and the soft mutes in Celtic by the corresponding, hard mutes in Gothic. Thus we find the Irish _dia_ (god) in the Anglo-Saxon _tiw_, the god of war, whose name is perpetuated for all time in Tiwes-däg, now "Tuesday", and we find the Irish _déad_ in the Anglo-Saxon "toth", now "tooth", and so on. But of all the Indo-European languages Old Irish possesses by far the nearest affinity to Latin, and this is shown in a great many ways, not in the vocabulary merely, but in the grammar, which for philologists is of far more importance,--as, for example, the _b_-future, the passive in-_r_, the genitive singular and nominative plural of "o stems", etc. Thus the Old Irish for "man", nom. _fer_, gen. _fir_, dat. _fiur_, acc. _fer n_--, plur. nom. _fir_, gen. _fer n_--, is derived from the older forms _viros, viri, viro, viron_, nom. plur. _viri_, gen. plur. _viron_, which everyone who knows Latin can see at a glance correspond very closely to the Latin inflections, _vir, viri, viro, virum_, nom. plur. _viri_, etc. So much for the language. When did this language begin to be used in literature? This question depends upon another--When did the Irish begin to have a knowledge of letters; when did they begin to commit their literature to writing; and whence did they borrow their knowledge of this art? The oldest alphabet used in Ireland of which remains exist appears to have been the Ogam, which is found in numbers of stone inscriptions dating from about the third century of our era on. About 300 such inscriptions have already been found, most of them in the southwest of Ireland, but some also in Scotland and Wales, and even in Devon and Cornwall. Wherever the Irish Gael planted a colony, he seems to have brought his Ogam writing with him.