Page:Alexander Macbain - An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language.djvu/30

vi. As already said, the literary language of Ireland and Scotland remained the same till about 1700, with, however, here and there an outburst of independence. The oldest document of Scottish Gaelic is the Book of Deer, a MS. which contains half a dozen entries in Gaelic of grants of land made to the monastery of Deer. The entries belong to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the most important being the first—the Legend of Deer, extending to 19 lines of continuous prose. These entries form what we call Old Gaelic, but the language is Early Irish of an advanced or phonetically decayed kind. The next document is the Book of the Dean of Lismore, written about 1512 in phonetic Gaelic, so that we may take it as representing the Scottish vernacular of the time in inflexion and pronunciation. It differs considerably from the contemporary late Middle Irish; it is more phonetically decayed. We call it here, a term which also includes the MSS. of the M'Vurich seanchaidhean. The Femaig MSS., written about 1688, is also phonetic in its spelling, and forms a valuable link in the chain of Scottish Gaelic phonetics from the Book of Deer till now. The term means Modern Gaelic.

Scottish Gaelic is written on the orthographic lines of Modern Irish, which in its turn represents the orthography of Old Irish. The greatest departure from ancient methods consists in the insistence now upon the rule of "Broad to broad and small to small." That is to say, a consonant must be flanked by vowels of the same quality, the "broad" being a, o, u, and the "small" e and i. Gaelic itself has fallen much away from the inflexional fulness of Old Irish. Practically there are only two cases—nom. and gen.: the dative is confined to the singular of feminine nouns (a-declension) and to the plural of a few words as laid down in the grammars but not practised in speech. The rich verbal inflexion of the old language is extremely poorly represented by the impersonal and unchanging forms of the two tenses—only two—that remain in the indicative mood. Aspiration, which affects all consonants now, (though unmarked for l, n, r), has come to play the part of inflection largely; this is especially the case with the article, noun, and adjective. Eclipsis by n is practically unknown; but phonetic decay is evidenced everywhere in the loss of inflection and the uniformising of declension and conjugation.

There are two main Dialects of Gaelic, and these again have many sub-dialects. The two leading Dialects are known as the Northern and Southern Dialects. The boundary between them is described as passing up the Firth of Lorn to Loch Leven, and then across from Ballachulish to the Grampians, and thence along