Scottish Gaelic

“ The utility of a Grammar of the Scottish Gaelic will be variously appreciated. Some will be disposed to deride the vain endeavour to restore vigour to a decaying superannuated language. Those who reckon the extirpation of the Gaelic a necessary step toward that general extension of the English which they deem essential to the political interest of the Highlands, will condemn every project which seems likely to retard its extinction. ”

“ Celtic scholars, if they find nothing else in the present Dictionary, will, at least, find a nearly pure vocabulary of Scottish Gaelic, purged of the mass of Irish words that appear in our larger dictionaries ”

“ Again many Irish-American writers on the Scots Plantation of Ulster have assumed that the Scots settlers were entirely or almost of Gaelic origin, ignoring the fact, if they were aware of it, that the people of the Scottish lowlands were "almost as English in racial derivation as if they had come from the North of England." ”

“ In the southern dialect of Scottish Gaelic there seems to be a tendency to retain such vowels in many cases before words beginning with consonants, and to drop them at other times. In the northern dialect the tendency rather is not only to keep them where they existed already, but to affix them wherever it is possible to do so, e.g., deimhinn, O.Ir. demin, is in West Ross-shire deimhinne, and suilbhir, O.Ir. sulbir, is suilbhire there and in North Argyll. In East Perth and Strathspey, and, to a less extent, in Sutherland, the tendency is to drop a final a or e in all cases and circumstances. ”

“ Suffice it to say, that philologists have come to class the Gaelic with the other Celtic tongues among the great family of Aryan languages, having affinities, some closer, some more distant, with almost all the languages of Europe. It is of much interest to scholars in respect both of the time and the place which it has filled, and fills still, and it is gratifying to all Scottish Celts to know that it has become more than ever a subject of study among literary men. ”

“ Just as the dialects of Low German in the middle ages were overshadowed by the more brilliant literary dialect of the south, so Scotch Gaelic was from the outset seriously handicapped by the great activity of the professional literary class in Ireland. We may say that down to the beginning of the 18th century the literary language of the Highlands was the Gaelic of Ireland. During the dark days of the penal laws and with the extinction of the men of letters and their patrons in Ireland, an opportunity was given to the native Scottish muse to develop her powers. ”

“ The Highlands, perhaps for the first time in history, formed a compact whole and settled down to peace and quietude. A remarkable outburst of literary activity ensued, and the latter half of the 18th century is the period which Scottish writers love to call the golden age of Gaelic poetry. But before we attempt to deal with this period in detail, we must examine the scanty literary products of Gaelic Scotland prior to the 18th century. ”

“ Southern Irish thus resembles northern Gaelic and northern Irish resembles southern Gaelic.
Manx Gaelic corresponds, as regards this diphthongisation, not to the dialects of Irish and of Scottish Gaelic that are nearer to it, but to those that are more remote from it. It has, besides, apparently a further development. ‘Thus,’ says Professor Rhŷs, ‘“tromm,” now written “trome,” heavy, is pronounced in a way which sometimes strikes one as being “troum,” and sometimes “trobm” or “trubm,” with a sort of precarious b ”

“ Similarly, we find that in Scottish Gaelic and Manx stressed vowels preceding a palatalized consonant have not undergone palatalization to the same extent as in Irish, e.g. in Ireland duine, “man,” < *dunjo-, is pronounced din’ð, but in Scotland dun’ð (in Manx written dooinney) . A further peculiarity of Scottish Gaelic is that it substitutes lenes or voiceless mediae for the voiced stops, and even l, r, n sounds show a great tendency to give up the voice. Scottish Gaelic goes farther even than Irish in the confusion of vowel-sounds, e.g. ”

“ Flichne, sleet, a derivative of fluich, wet, is flinne in Arran, Islay, and Skye. In West Ross flichneadh-shneachd (dh = g) is used. MacAlpine gives flichne for Cowal and Coll, Armstrong has flichne and flicheann; the latter on the face of it should be a Perthshire pronunciation of the word.
Among Scottish Gaelic dialects loss or absence of slender ch in medial and final positions is peculiarly characteristic of the speech of Arran and, though perhaps in a less degree, of Kintyre and Islay. ”

“ It sent out Aidan to Northumberland, and numerous successors after him, and there is much presumptive evidence that many of these early missionaries took their departure from Scotland, and carried with them their Scottish literature to the Continent of Europe. And the language of the writers is no evidence to the contrary. In so far as the Gaelic was written at this early period, the dialect used was common to Ireland and Scotland. To say that a work is Irish because written in what is called the Irish dialect is absurd. ”

“ Yet it cannot be denied that comparatively few ever arrive at a correct, or even a tolerable knowledge of grammar, without the help of a treatise composed for the purpose. Whoever, therefore, allows that the Gaelic must be employed in communicating to a large body of people the knowledge of revealed Truth and the way of eternal Life, will readily admit the extensive utility of investigating and unfolding its grammatical principles. Impressed with this conviction, I have been induced to offer to the public the following attempt to develop the grammar of the Scottish Gaelic. ”

“ Clans have in some parts settled down together, the Catholic ones keeping their priests and least forgetting the language in which they continue to pray. Many of these exiles not only cherish their Gaelic but, it appears, the particular dialect of their original district, handed down to generations that never set foot on Scottish soil. To-day there is perhaps more Gaelic spoken in Canada than in all Scotland. There is also a clan of French-speaking Macs, descended from Highland soldiers who married and settled among the daughters of Heth. ”

“ The researches of the ethnologist carry us back somewhat beyond that epoch, and confirm many of those conclusions, especially in relation to the close affinity between the native arts and Celtic races of Scotland and Ireland, at which we have arrived by means of archæological evidence. Of the six Celtic dialects known, either as living languages or preserved in books, the Irish and the Scottish Gaelic most nearly approximate, the former being to a great extent only a cultivated and more artificial modification of the other. ”

“ Why, it was the best service I could render to Celtic philology to present a pure vocabulary of the Scottish dialect of Gadelic; the talk of the impossibility of "redding the marches" between Irish and Gaelic may be Celtic patriotism, but it is not science. ”

“ This society holds an annual gathering called the Mòd (= Eng. “moot”) on the lines of the Welsh Eisteddfod, and recently the Scottish Education Department has countenanced the teaching of Gaelic in Highland schools. But the political element plays little or no part in the language movement in Scotland, and the latter is not likely to assume the proportions of the Gaelic League in Ireland. As a rule, however, Highlanders are better able to read their own language than Irish Gaels, for, the majority being Protestants, they are encouraged to read their Bibles. ”

“ All these are genuine productions of the Gaelic popular mind. No stigma or suspicion attaches to them. Some of them are at least as ancient as the time of Dean Macgregor—400 years ago; and they were regarded as ancient then. In character and spirit they resemble—are in many cases only Scottish versions of—the kindred literature of the Gael of Ireland; and possess much definite value to the student of social life and the philologist. ”

“ Language of the Scots. The language of the Scots was undoubtedly the Irish language still spoken there, and which is identic with the Gaelic of the Scotch Highlands and the Manx of the Isle of Man. They form indeed but one language, which may be 194called Gaelic, and show no greater variety among each other than those which characterise the vernacular speech of different provinces of the same nation.
These two languages—the British and Scottish—belong to the same family, and are usually, for convenience sake, classed together as forming the Celtic language of the British Isles ”

“ It seems hardly possible for a lowlander, unless he begins early in life and has abundant practice, to lose all ‘taste of the English’ in his Gaelic talk. Thus a pre-Disruption minister with whom I was well acquainted in Argyleshire, and who was not a native Celt, but had learnt Gaelic in his youth, made mistakes in the language up to the end of his long life. ”

“ The only comforting circumstance is that we thus find in language some indication of a very early division of the Gael from the Brython. On the whole, the Gaelic branch, the Irish and Scotch, seem to agree in stature, and to contrast alike with the Brythonic branch of the Welsh and Cornish. It is permissible to suppose that the absence of contact implied by these ancient linguistic differences might allow of a separate modification of the Scottish wing to the end we have observed. At all events, we have laid bare
Blondish Anglo-Saxon Types. ”

“ It intensified the anglicization that the introduction of an English Bible and the Shorter Catechism (with [31] which England itself so promptly dispensed) had initiated. It progressively severed the Scottish people from their past. The extent to which this has gone is almost incredible—especially if taken in conjunction with the general attribution of an uncommon love-of-country to the Scots. English has practically vanquished Scots (which is not a dialect but a sister language to English, with different but not inferior, and, in some ways, complementary, potentialities) and Gaelic. ”

“ We do not mean to institute any comparison between the Irish and Scottish mode. The difference clearly arises from the peculiarity of each dialect, the Irish almost uniformly, in words of two syllables, laying the accent on the last, and the Scottish upon the first syllable.
[41] The Dean’s Finn is the Fingal of some writers. “Fionn,” pronounced “Fiŭghn,” genitive, “Fhinn,” pronounced “Ighn,” is the present Scottish and Irish form of the word, and we have preserved this in M’Gregor’s own orthography. Scottish writers have, however, been unjustly accused of manufacturing the term “Fingal.” ”

“ Gaelic, with a further division of the former into two sub-dialects. The differences upon which the sub-division has been based are not on a par with the broad distinctions between Southern and Northern Gaelic. An equally good case could be made out for sub-dividing Southern Gaelic which has in Arran, Kintyre, and Islay Irish and Manx affinities not found further north. Nothing is gained by going beyond two divisions and stopping at three. ”

“ To speak Gaelic, however, without making slips in the pronunciation is difficult. Some of the sounds are hard for Saxon tongues to accomplish, and unless they are accurately given, the uneducated peasant has often too little imagination to divine the word that is intended. Thus, a lady whom I knew on the west side of Cantyre, told me that when she first came to live there, being a stranger to Highland manners and customs, she was desirous at every turn, to increase her knowledge of them. One day she asked her cook, a thorough Highlander, ‘Kate, what is a philabeg?’ ‘A what, mam!’ ‘A philabeg ”

“ The literature that the two Gaelic peoples possessed till then was also to a great extent common property. As to their writing, what is called “Irish hand,” or vulgarly Erse, or “Irish character,” is nothing more than what was once common throughout the whole of Europe. It was in it Gaelic writers once wrote in Scotland; and thus is how some of our early MSS. have been assigned an Irish origin.
With the reign of Malcolm III., or Ceann-Mor, in the eleventh century, and his marriage with an English Princess, Scottish institutions and habits began to be radically affected. ”

“ In uaisle, uaillse, etc., the vowel—diphthong—is already long and does not change, but ll is long in the latter form.
In Northern Gaelic, or at all events in several of the northern dialects, m often changes places with a following l or r. Imleag, navel, is ‘ilimeag,’ and imlich, to lick ‘ilimich’ in Badenoch, Strathspey, North Argyll, West Ross, North Sutherland and Lewis; and imrich, removal, is irimich in all except Lewis. Iomraidh or imridh, must, is irimidh in Badenoch and firimidh in North Argyll and North Sutherland. ”

“ While the Irish have accomplished more than the Scottish Gael, the Welsh [21] have done more than either to preserve their language and cultivate their literature. Under systematic efforts to suppress it entirely the Kymry have adhered to their ancient tongue with unwearying pertinacity. While the Gael of Ireland and Scotland have not yet been successful in supporting one purely Gaelic newspaper, the Celt of Wales has his Welsh newspaper in every town of importance in the Principality. ”

“ Carsewell’s Prayer-book appeared before any work in Irish Gaelic was printed. The ministers of the Synod of Argyle were surely Scottish Highlanders and not Irishmen. Mr Kirk of Balquhidder was a lowland Scot who acquired the Gaelic tongue. Now these men, so far as we know, were never in Ireland, and there were no Irish-Gaelic books from which they could acquire the tongue. There might be manuscripts, but it is not very probable that men would inspect manuscripts in order to enable them to write in a dialect that was foreign to the people whom they intended to benefit. ”