James Colville

“ The German overseer in Olive Schreiner's "Story of an African Farm" tells the knave, Blenkins, when introducing him to the Boer woman, Tant Sannie, to call himself a Scotsman. The English she hates.
It is a well-known characteristic of the Boer that he dearly loves to walk in the old ways, and of these not the least cherished is his vernacular. A few of the old-fashioned among ourselves similarly cling fondly to their "braid Scottis," but they are a fast vanishing quantity. The Boer always thinks and speaks of his Taal or speech as die ou'we, his familiar abbreviation of old. ”

“ The favourite Teutonic town, on the other hand, points to a more scattered backwoodsman kind of settlement. The North German plain is one vast monotonous expanse of wood and water, within whose limits the lonely settlers would develop a simpler bucolic society, slow of wit, dreamy, but home-loving. In Lowland Scotland a farm homestead is a town. Even a few houses standing apart and supposed to be, if not actually, enclosed within a hedge fence, form the cotton or cot-toun of the farm. ”

“ The higher consciousness is choice, and the most solemn and impressive symbol for physical pain and religious dread is found in the sensation of choking. The last head reveals to us the boundless region of comparative mythology. Here we read the unconscious literature of the Aryans, the sacred books of the race. It has the same physical basis as the terms for mental operations. The cardinal fact of the Aryan's simple existence was the ever-ending, ever-beginning struggle of the bright sun, eternal type of his own lot. ”

“ The specialist who gropes round the study of his choice and sneers at others is but exploring his own dark chamber to the exclusion of the sunlight of fact and nature. No better illustration could there be of this helpful interdependence than what a glance at the map of England discloses. Down the West Coast extend three well-marked groups of hill country, Cumberland, Wales, and Cornwall, and in each and all the historical, geographical, and linguistic elements are "confusedly mingled," offering that prolonged quest which is so fascinating to the genuine student. ”

“ He is not only a born sportsman, but, as lord over an inferior but treacherous race, man of war from his youth up." Knowing himself to be left as his own master, one of a governing few among many, he instinctively selects the defensive positions which the country affords in abundance. He prefers the advantage of a kopje, and using the stones scattered about in profusion, speedily constructs his schants or breastwork. Here we have the German Schanze, common on the lower Rhine in the sense of a bundle of sticks, such as the Dutch construct so cleverly to fence their waterways. ”

“ Reitz's language, indeed, shows nothing to justify the popular contempt for the Taal as a vulgar hotch-potch of corrupt Dutch, English and Kaffir.
To the Scot the Taal must always sound familiar, for he can turn an intelligent ear to both the Dutch and the German elements in it. The sounds are often exactly his own. The query, "Hae ye faur te gang?" is just the Boer, "He'you vèr te gaan?" The Boer constantly uses kijk, to look, though in Scotland it is but little heard out of the nursery. In South Africa, however, photographic views are kiekjies, and a field-glass is a ver-kiekjer. ”

“ The proofs of the connection between this Asiatic and the former European unity form the very kernel of comparative philology. They are invaluable, not alone in the phonetic aspect of the question (Sanskrit and Zend range themselves, as far as Grimm's law is concerned, under the Classical or southern European group) , but still more, and of far deeper import, in respect of the clue they afford to the difficult problems of comparative grammar and mythology. Suffice it here to say that Sanskrit explains the significance of the name Aryan as an eponym for the whole family. ”

“ The question is one which concerns the continuity of speech not of blood, an inheritance of mental attitude towards the world of spiritual and natural phenomena within and without us far subtler and profounder than any perpetuation of the characteristics of complexion and feature; for an Aryan speech writes its own history in virtue of those inherent principles which govern its growth and decay, or rather regeneration—principles which, by reason of their persistency of type and uniformity of action, alone go far to prove in this case a primitive social unity. ”

“ And yet while the vocables are being ousted by the ootners—the Cumbrian for Uitlanders—of the school and the newspaper, and the quaint idioms and proverbs and folk-lore slink into obscurity, abashed by the inroads of the railway, the tripper, and the tourist, the pronunciation of the locality seems to cling persistently to the very air and soil. Mr. Dickson Brown's work here is worthy of all praise as a valuable contribution to the exploiting of an almost unworked section of the linguistic field. The Cumberland dialect has been moulded by both Anglo-Saxon and Norse influences. ”

“ The term Dopper, applied to Dutch Calvinism in the Transvaal, is in no sense ecclesiastical, though one sees it sometimes interpreted as the Quaker, and again as the Baptist Church. There is really nothing to support either interpretation.
If we are to get along with the Dutch of the Cape we had better try as soon as possible to understand this Taal to which they cling so fondly. For nothing so wins the affections and sympathies of a race with whom our lot may be cast as showing a kindly interest in their homely speech. ”

“ The vrouw takes the long candles from the shrank (cupboard) , and leaves wooer and wooed to sit up together till the grey dawn breaks, a custom which, in one form or another, rural Scotland long looked on kindly. The envied fair one, who has many of such vrijers, may have to sit up four or five nights a week till the eventful choice is made.
There is abundant evidence in language to prove that the ancient Northumbria—that is, Lowland Scotland from Tay to Humber—was a Frisian or Dutch settlement. ”

“ Here we have the German falle, and, curiously, the East Coast of Scotland word also, a mooss-faw (Norse musföll) , with the usual dropping of a final l. A val deure is a trap-door. Even the youthful Boer would understand the Doric, to swei (Du. zwaai, swing) on a gate and to be roopie with a bad cold, for his roep (Sc. roup, an auction) means a call or a hoarse shout. From the sway or swei-cruck, in the old Scottish kitchen, hung the kail-pot. The request of the family doctor is equally familiar: "Laa' een beetje jou tong zien." ”

“ The Boer transferred the name veldt from his northern home. It is the Norwegian and Scottish fell. An obscure survival of it in Scotland is haemit, a peculiarly expressive word for what is homely and familiar. A less contracted form—haemilt—prevails in the North-eastern counties, where it means pasture adjoining an enclosure. In Icelandic it is heimilt, a contraction for the heim-veld. One familiar only with haemit might well take haemilt to be a corruption instead of the purer and older form. ”

“ Aryan, in scientific language, is utterly inapplicable to race. It means language and nothing but language; and if we speak of Aryan race at all, we should know that it means no more than x + Aryan speech." Thus does Professor Max Müller tell us that in attempting to reconstruct an ideal social unity for the Aryan race we must not look for aid to ethnology. ”

“ But we have learned to know and distinguish the various branches of the stock, and to formulate the law under which all comparisons of them, one with another, must be studied. It remains now to apply this knowledge by comparing a few groups of cognate terms in the Aryan dialects in evidence of a linguistic unity, subsisting among the various members of the family, and of a relatively advanced stage of civilisation, reached by the proto-Aryans before their separation. ”

“ Nay more, this very word "stoep" was transferred to the South African veldt. On the Boer homestead or place, as he calls it, the doorway on his raised first-floor has exactly such a stoup as is above described, with a double sloping approach to it, as is still to be seen in many old mansion-houses at home, and public buildings in Holland and North Germany. Such a stoup is shown in views of the old Court-house at the Tron of Glasgow, used alike for hustings, speeches, magisterial functions, and even executions.
Farm life has always been a stronghold of rural conservatism. ”

“ To go on foot is to be a thief and a liar, as are all pedlars and gangrel bodies, such as were those sorners who were hunted off to their own parish in Old Scotland. Every honest Scottish farmer must ride his own nag with sonsy goodwife on the pillion behind, even though that were only a turf seat, the sonks that we read of as doing such service. ”

“ Of course, a room is any empty space, as "your room's better nor your company." Anyone can see that the Dutch-Frisian race that introduced mining and industries generally into Fife and the Lothians was closely akin to the Norse settlers in Cumberland and Westmoreland. ”

“ After his day, under the influence of the English Revolution and the Orange King William, the academic stream flowed towards Holland.
Borrowings from one language by another are either few or many, just as one regards the question of origin. The evidence of this origin, in the case of Scoto-French, is to be found in the literature of the past, but here we come under book and imitative influences, and these are deceptive. I present a few examples from sources that can hardly be called literary. Such evidence has the merit of being contemporary, undesigned, and unbiassed by art. ”

“ An interesting group of vanished Scots can be culled from the dalesmen. To scarce a living Scot is the squirrel known, as he was of old, by the name "con." A Cumberland contributor says, "'Fat as a con' is a simile I used to hear thirty years ago" (1845) . "Hind," the A.S. hyne, a manager of an off-lying farm, is now heard only on the Scottish Border. Two Scoto-French expressions, of old very common in Scotland, are quoted from the dales. "Plague gang wi' them that tooly wi' thee," preserves the Scots tulzie, a quarrel, street-fight. ”

“ The terms under these beads enable us to plant Aryan civilisation deeper, showing as they do a more profound grasp of what is in the best sense culture. They prove the truth of the maxim—"Nil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu." Whatever may be the psychologist's verdict on the scholastic question of primum cognitum and primum appellatum, these primitive concepts tell us that the Aryans reached the abstract through the concrete, and moved in a world of quick sensations. ”

“ The name points to that immemorial custom which loves to dignify a nation or a family by associating its origin with the possession of land, and proves the early existence of that Aryan earth-hunger which reaches its acme in Ireland, the Erin that is said to be just another form of the common race-name.
No one can ever venture to conjecture when all these races existed as a primitive unity, or why they broke up, or in what order, or whence sprung the initiative for that dialectic growth to which they owed their phonetic differences. ”

“ On the move in the waggon he treks, and when he yokes and unyokes he inspans or outspans respectively. There are two very common verbs in Lowland Scotland—trake, to gad about, and troke, to barter—the former of which is probably the Dutch trek, to take the road. In the Cumberland dialect treak is an idle fellow, and as a verb to wander idly about. "What is't ta treaken about this teyme o' neet?" There is no doubt about spang, to stretch, being widely known in Scotland, particularly to boys when playing bools or marbles. ”

“ As the great schism that has permanently separated the Asiatic from the European groups brings us nearest to the proto-Aryan period, whatever throws light upon the significance of that event serves still further to illustrate the stage of culture which the combined stock had reached. We have seen on what points of material, mental, and moral culture they all agree. ”

“ The word mooi (Lat. mollis, soft) is as useful an epithet to the Boer in the Boer taal as bonnie in Scots. Thus he applies it to a river, a horse, a woman (handsome vrouw) .
Reitz weakly omits the strikingly human elements of the story—the miller, the smith, the woman in the kirk-toon "with a past," the "chuffie vintner" and his spouse, and above all the souter, immortal Bacchanal. But moralising attracts him, so he tackles his author's visualising of Pleasure thus: "Pleasure is like a young cucumber. ”