Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/106

82, the Cow-caddens. One young lady admires what she chooses to call jookery-packery, while another bids adieu, more Scottico, thus: "But I min win away." She emerges badly from the ordeal of a Scottish song, giving "snow drapping primrose" for snowdrop and primrose, and explaining the "Auld Quarry Knowe" lilt as something about the present time.

The liquids, link between vowels and consonants, seriously disturb radical vowels, as seen in the Englishman's Mary, marm, drorin-room, strawrat (straw hat), dawnce, sarvent. The treatment of l and r by Northern and Southron seems to balance, for each chooses a different one for elimination. We might put the English faam (farm) against the Scots faˈ (fall). The strange thing is that the omission of l, so characteristic of Scots, did not appear much before 1500, and for long after we find such a word as nolt instead of the spoken nowt (cattle), the English neat. In Cumberland conversely old is still oud. The vocalising of r in English words has been of recent and very rapid growth; and here again the Englishman, unlike the Scot, is strongly insular. Though essential to good fawm (form), it puts him out of touch with both the Latin and Germanic races, in both of which r is a strong trilled consonant. The icence of aspiration is now coming to be very properly tabooed as a vulgar and ignorant departure from the written language. It would be well if similar attention were given to the retention of r. But here, too, we are capricious in even obtruding this consonant where it has no business to be. On the stage and in the pulpit we hear it, and there "the very idear of such a thing" is excessively irritating. Here and in sofar, and "Asiar and Africar among continents" (heard from a recent traveller), the presence of r seems due to a strong dislike to the flat sound of a. The intrusive letter exerts its usual effect of flattening the neighbouring vowel, which is what is wanted here. Another English loss is the weakening of initial wh to w, as when one hears even a Cabinet Minister speak of "the great Wig leader." Here the Scot proceeds, in strongly sounding wh, on true archaic lines. For a time after the introduction of printing—that is to say, during the sixteenth century—he pedantically wrote it quh, but he has always stuck orally to the hw of his remote Gothic ancestors, making the h a strong