Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/215

Rh the antique vernacular which he has inherited from his forefathers. He calls it lovingly die ou'we or oude Taal, using, to name it, the root we have in tell and tale. In German still, and in English of old, it meant to count, but the operations of reading and counting in many languages appear readily to overlap and commingle. The Taal scarcely deserves the hard words that have been applied to it as a barbarous and uncouth polyglot. The Scot can well sympathise with such treatment, for the Englishman, disdaining to try to understand his dialect, calls it unintelligible, vitiated English, and when he does condescend to make a lever de rideau out of it, mangles it through his perverse habit of mispronunciation. The Dutchman looks upon the Taal in much the same light. An intelligent Hollander writes me thus: "I hate and detest the Boer idiom, which is a repulsive amalgam of old and modern Dutch, with traces of Platt-Deutsch and English, and only good, or rather bad enough, to disappear from among the races of mankind." This is of value, merely as emphasising my point, that the appreciation of vernacular is incompatible with the attitude of what arrogates to itself a claim to progress and culture. The Taal has merely undergone natural changes on old lines, but less rapidly than Dutch. It has borrowed a little from English, and almost less from Kaffir, for no people ever learns much from a race on a lower plane of culture than its own, though the two may be commingled. The Highlander and Lowlander have always had very close intercourse at many points, but English and Scottish borrowings in Gaelic vastly outnumber Gaelic terms in Scots or English.

The Taal, or Kaapsche, as the Hollander calls it, has closer affinities with Lowland Scots than with any other European tongue, except Dutch. Its resemblance to German is mainly superficial. Certainly the philologist is constantly reminded of German in studying the Taal, but the uneducated Boer or German speaker would quite overlook this, for their consonantal systems are entirely different. On the other hand, the Frisian speech was, in very early times, common to the eastern and