Page:EB1911 - Volume 05.djvu/642

MANX LANGUAGE] under the literary dominion of Ireland, so much so that Bedell’s Irish version of the Scriptures was circulated in Scotland with a glossary from 1690 to 1767, and Bishop Carsewell’s version of Knox’s Prayer-book (1567) is pure Irish. The language of the people is poorly represented in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the orthography is not fixed until we reach the 18th century.

Irish and Scottish Gaelic differ considerably in point of vocabulary, but there are also important divergences in phonetics and inflections. In the first place, Scottish Gaelic as written has entirely given up the nasal mutation (eclipse), e.g. Scottish ar bò, “our cow,” Irish ar m-bó; Scottish nan tìr, “of the countries,” Irish na d-tír. It should, however, be observed that in Skye and the Outer Isles the nasal mutation has been partly restored and in some places there are even parallels to the Welsh nasal mutation of c, p, t to ngh, mh, nh. Secondly, post-vocalic c, p, t are commonly preceded by a breathed sound not represented in writing, thus mac “son,” is pronounced mahk; slat, “rod,” as slaht. Again there is a tendency to insert a sibilant in the group rt, thus ceart, “right,” is sounded kearšt, and the distinction between palatalized and non-palatalized sounds is not so rigidly observed as in Irish. The group cht is in Scotland pronounced as if chk. We may also mention that Scottish Gaelic preserves an old ě in a number of words where Irish now has ă, thus, Old Ir. fer, Scottish G. fěr, Irish făr, but in both cases the spelling is fear (in this respect Scottish Gaelic goes hand in hand with Manx and the almost extinct Irish of Down). 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. Lat. coxa, Ir. cos, “foot,” Sc. cas; Ir. codal, Sc. cadal. When we turn to the inflections we find that analogy has here played a much greater part than in Irish. There is a tendency to make the plural of all substantives except masculine monosyllables end in -an. In the conjugation the synthetic forms have with one or two exceptions entirely disappeared and the present forms have become momentary in force. Hence in ordinary grammars it is stated that the present has become a future, thus ni mi means “I shall do.” The past participle chiefly ends in -te as against Irish -the, -te, or -tha, -ta, according to the quality of the preceding sound. The present (future) and past subjunctive (conditional, representing both the imperfect indic. and secondary future of Irish) supply the place of the Irish consuetudinal forms. In idiom also Scottish has diverged very considerably from Irish, e.g. in the use of tha (Ir. tá) for is.

It seems now to be agreed that the various dialects of Scottish Gaelic fall into two main divisions—northern and southern. Mackinnon states that the boundary between the two passes roughly up the Firth of Lorne to Loch Leven, then across country from Ballachulish to the Grampians. The country covered by the northern dialect was of old the country of the Northern Picts, whilst the portion of Argyllshire south of the boundary line, together with Bute and Arran, made up the kingdom of Dalriada. The Gaelic district south of the Grampians belonged to the Southern Picts. The southern dialect is commonly regarded as the literary language. It approaches more nearly to Irish and preserves the inflections much better than the speech of the north.

The following characteristics of the northern dialects may be mentioned:—(1) The diphthongization of open ē to ia is carried much farther in the north than in the south. (2) The vowel ao in the north is more regularly the high-back-narrow-unrounded vowel-sound, whereas the south in many cases has a low-front-wide-round sound. (3) The north has str in initial position where the south prefers sr. Further, the northern dialects go very far in dropping unaccented final vowels. It may be remarked that in the reduction of derivative endings containing long vowels Scotland goes hand-in-hand with Ulster Irish, thus Connaught arān, “bread,” is in Ulster and Scotland arăn. Again, Scottish agrees with North Irish in the loss of synthetic verb-forms and in using as negative cha, Mid. Ir. nico, nocha. But, on the other hand, Scotland, with the exception of South Argyll and some of the Isles, diphthongizes accented a, o, e, in monosyllables, before ll, nn, m, thus resembling the speech of Munster. In South Argyll the original short vowel is half lengthened.

As to the southern limits of Gaelic speech in Scotland, the boundary between Gaelic and English in medieval times was the so-called Highland line, and at the War of Independence it is probable that it extended to Stirling, Perth and the Ochil and Sidlaw Hills, the Inglis being limited to a very narrow strip along the coast. Dr J. A. H. Murray traced the linguistic frontier in 1869–1870 with the following results. The line started about 3 m. west of the town of Nairn on the Moray Firth and ran in a south-east direction to the Dee, 4 m. above Ballater. On the other side of the Dee it began 4 m. above Balmoral and followed the boundary of Perth and Forfar as far as Glen Shee, where it went off to the south-west as far as Dunkeld. After passing Birnam Hill it turned due west until the upper part of Glen Almond was reached, where it bent to the southward, passing through Comrie and along the braes of Doune to the Teith, 3 or 4 m. below Callander. Thence it ran along the north shore of Lake Monteith to Gartmore, and from there to Rowardennan on the east side of Loch Lomond. On the west side it passed through Glen Douglas down Loch Long and the Firth of Clyde, leaving Bute and Arran to the west. At the present day this boundary has probably receded to the extent of several miles, and even in 1870 there were districts such as Bute and the region round Dunoon where Gaelic was only spoken by the oldest natives and the immigrant population. The language is not found in the north-east of Caithness, the boundary running, according to Murray, roughly from a little north-east of Lybster to the mouth of the Forss. Celtic was driven out of Shetland and Orkney by Scandinavian some time during the middle ages. (See further J. A. H. Murray, The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, London, 1875; Revue celtique, vol. ii. pp. 180-187.)

Until the 18th century Gaelic was spoken in Galloway and on the uplands of Ayr and Lanark. The following figures from the census returns illustrate the decrease in the number of persons who speak Gaelic:—

In the last-mentioned year it appears that nearly one-half of the speakers of Gaelic are reported from the counties of Inverness and Ross (23,893 monolinguists and 82,573 bilinguists). From about 1300 we find Scottish emigrants filtering into the glens of Antrim, where the Gaelic that is spoken is still unmistakably Scottish. There have long been local societies of Highlanders for the cultivation of their native tongue, the most important one being An Comunn Gàidhealach (founded 1891). 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. There are only two periodicals which devote half their space to Gaelic. The one is An Deo-Greine (“the sunbeam”), founded October 1905; and the other is the Catholic propagandist quarterly Guth na Bliadhna (“the voice of the year”), started in 1904. Up to 1905 a fortnightly newspaper printed wholly in Gaelic appeared in Prince Edward Island, under the title of An Mac-talla (“the echo”), and efforts have been made to revive it. A weekly newspaper wholly in Gaelic was started in 1908 by R. Stuart Erskine under the title of Alba.

.—The first grammar of Scottish Gaelic was compiled by W. Shaw (An Analysis of the Galic Language, 1778). The most useful one was that published by Alexander Stewart, Elements of Gaelic Grammar (Edinburgh, 1801). A revised edition of this work with many additions and corrections was published by H. C. Gillies, London, 1902. This book is rather spoilt by the author’s attitude, and requires to be supplemented and corrected. G. Henderson and C. W. Robertson have published important papers on the modern dialects in the Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, the Celtic Review and the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness. The most useful work on Gaelic philology is Alexander Macbain’s Etymological Gaelic Dictionary (Inverness, 1896) (a later edition by W. J. Watson). The chief dictionaries are Dictionarium Scoto-Celticum, published by the Highland Society of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1828); R. A. Armstrong, Gaelic Dictionary in two parts (London, 1825); N. McAlpine, Pronouncing Gaelic Dictionary (Edinburgh, 1847) (this book gives the pronunciation of Islay); Macleod and Dewar, Gaelic and English Dictionary (latest edition, Edinburgh, 1901); Faclair Gàidhlig, published by E. Macdonald, Herne Bay, appearing in parts since 1902.

(c) Manx.—Our sources of information with regard to the language of the Isle of Man are even more scanty in the early period than they are in the case of Scotland. There are a number of references to the island in Irish literature, but the earliest monument of the vernacular we possess is the version of the Book of Common Prayer made by Bishop Phillips in 1610. In this translation the traditional Irish orthography is not followed. The spelling resembles the orthography which was employed in Scotland by the compiler of the Book of the Dean of Lismore. How far this system was used is a question which it is difficult to decide. In Scotland the Irish orthography has prevailed in a slightly modified form, but Manx writers adhered to a mode of spelling which was as phonetic as any system based on English, or, probably more correctly Anglo-Scottish, orthography could be. This fact, combined with the rapid phonetic decay of the