Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/103

Rh and accent and pause will produce the effect, when we hear it, of a foreign tongue. This is well put by Sir Robert Christison. When studying in Paris in 1820, a time of political unrest, police spies were in all public places. At the Thèâtre Français, with his fellow-student and brither Scot, Cullen, they were cautioned by a French friend to be on their guard. "Let's kittle our freen's lugs," said Christison, "wi' a wee braid Scots." It worked well. "I have often noticed," he continues, "how thoroughly the mingling of a little Lowland Scots and genuine English renders it unintelligible to the foreigner, however familiar he may be with it in its purer form."

Apart from these general effects of separate environment, there are fundamental differences between the phonetic systems of English and Lowland Scots. The latter is more archaic, but both have developed with respective gains and losses. The Southron has grown to be excessively fond of the open, name sound of the vowels, and especially a (witness the Cockney "lidy"). The Cockney makes the most of it as a sweet morsel, and in academic circles it has severed England from all educated nations in the pronunciation of Greek and Latin. Long ago Punch hit off this point neatly in the lines,—

So they sounded, read Anglicè, but every word was good Latin,—

This preference leads the Englishman also to shun the Italian pure a, so characteristic both of the Romance and Germanic tongues as it is of Lowland Scots. Thus in words like had, hat, this vowel becomes a thin, affected e. This typical Lowland vowel, as in man, the Englishman fails to catch, his rendering of a by the impossible mon being the nearest approach to it. In the life of the famous brothers Erskine we are told that Thomas,