Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 10.djvu/165

 10 s. x. AUG. 15, 1908.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

133

sleeve or skirt), Fr. fente; "mitten" (a glove without fingers), Fr. mitaine ; " bowie " (cask), Fr. buie ; " Provost," Fr. (Provost) Prevot ; and hundreds of other words scarcely less familiar.

Place- or street-names were a class of words that Francisque Michel left untouched, but there, too, the French influence survives in Scotland. Many old Scotch towns have streets bearing " Row " as part of the name, Fr. Rue ; thus in Aberdeen two of our very oldest streets are the Ship-Row and the Guest- (Ghaist) Row. Again, we have no

wharves in Scotland ; they are all quays

Fr. quai. More interesting than either is the name " vennel," for a small, narrow, winding street. Perth, the ancient capital, has the Cow Vennel, the Fleshers' Vennel, the Guard Vennel, and the Meal Vennel ; Ayr has them ; Dumfries and others of the older towns as well. As far north as Hugh Miller's birthplace, Cromarty, there is still the Big Vennel. Aberdeen had one, the most wretched of the " slum " pro- perties of its later years, till it was cleared away in 1841. This is the French la venelle, a small by-street, which has been used in France and Scotland continuously for centuries to signify the same thing. This, too, is interesting about the name that for many years in Scotland it has also had a generic significance. One may still hear a Scotch housewife, who wishes to speak contemptuously of a place, describe it as " a vennel of a place," when otherwise, limited to the Teutonic, she might speak of a pigsty. There is no space to speak of a more general class of place-names, but I like to make a special note of one when I come across it, viz., " Cunninghar Hill." I know of one near Dunrobin, another at Alloa, a third at Aberdeen. There must be many more. It is the Old French coniniere, a rabbit warren, which, however, may have come to us only indirectly from the French.

One more example may be permitted from this city. The title of the civic dignitary next in order to the Provost as everywhere in Scotland is the " Baillie." And this curious thing is to be noted that in Aberdeen alone is the old French double I retained in the title. Everywhere else even in official documents received here from people who might be presumed to know it is " Bailie." I was interested in noting the other day a very apt example too long to quote in Anatole France's new ' Vie de Jeanne d'Arc,' of the use of the Old French title, where the document

spoke of the cruel zeal of the " Bailli " at the execution of the damsel, in throwing her ashes into the Seine.

G. M. FBASER. Public Library, Aberdeen.

The Scottish word " unco " does not come from the Latin unquam through French one or onques, but is a direct repre- sentative of the English " uncouth." It is variously used as an adjective, an adverb, and a substantive. " Nae safe wading in unco waters " is one of the Scottish proverbs in Ramsay's collection, " unco " in its

Eosition clearly meaning unknown or un- miiliar. In ' Guy Mannering,' chap. xiiL the old maidservant told the Colonel that " the Laird was something better. . . .and r as the day was fine for the time o' year, they had carried him in his easy chair up to the green before the auld castle, to be out of the way of this unco spectacle." Burns has many examples of the word both as adjective and adverb, his ' Address to the Unco Guid y and Tarn o' Shanter's " getting fou and unco happy " adequately illustrating its signi- ficance in the latter capacity. In the fifth stanza of ' The Cotter's Saturday Night * we have the substantive use exemplified in the line,

Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears. " The uncos," of course, are the things that have just come under notice, the news of the country-side. THOMAS BAYNE.

It is not clear what is suggested as the French equivalent of " mutch." The latter is short of the first syllable of Fr. aumusse (late Lat. almucia), which = probably, the Arabic al (the), approaching more nearly the cognate Ger. Mutze. For transference of meaning compare the allied words cap and cape.

A superficial resemblance between O. Fr. oncques and " unco " is no justification for attempting to equate an adverb with an adjective, one from Latin and the other pure English. H. P. L.

A list of twenty-five French words in Scotch is given at p. 49 of Scott Dalgleish's ' Higher-Grade English,' a well - known school-book. ALEX. RUSSELL.

Stromness, Orkney.

G. M. T. will find a fairly comprehensive list of such words in Max O'Rell's * Friend MacDonald' (Bristol, Arrowsmith), pp. 131- 132. FREDERICK D. READMAN.

Stockton-on-Tees.