Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/216

192 western shores of the North Sea, and these shores were more nearly opposite, and united therefore more closely by trade, on the side of Scotland than of England. In addition, the two peoples enjoyed substantially the same Calvinistic type of Church, a type which has been even better preserved in South Africa than in either Scotland or Holland. Certainly, during the first half of the eighteenth century, a Scotsman would find himself vastly more at home in Leyden, Rotterdam, or Amsterdam than he would in London, or even Newcastle. The Boers themselves are well aware of this bond of union. The German overseer in Olive Schreiner's "Story of an African Farm" tells the knave, Blenkins, when introducing him to the Boer woman, Tant Sannie, to call himself a Scotsman. The English she hates.

It is a well-known characteristic of the Boer that he dearly loves to walk in the old ways, and of these not the least cherished is his vernacular. A few of the old-fashioned among ourselves similarly cling fondly to their "braid Scottis," but they are a fast vanishing quantity. The Boer always thinks and speaks of his Taal or speech as die ou'we, his familiar abbreviation of old. Like the Scot he is fond of dropping l. Thus in a version of "The Cottar's Saturday Night," by Reitz, devoted henchman to Kruger, he makes "the sire," die ou man, read een sions lied (song) in d'Ouwe Taal, when "he wales a portion of the big ha' Bible." This Taal is the Dutch of a century ago, modified by the phonetic corruptions natural to the changed surroundings and languid life on the Southern Veldt, and mingled with such English and Kaffir as is necessary for intercourse with the Uitlanders, to whom the old burgher's attitude is as proudly conservative as that of any Prussian junker or Highland duine-wassel, the over-lord whom the Norse imposed upon Celtic communistic life. This type of the full-flavoured Transvaaler is the Dopper Boer, an epithet that has sadly fallen in English, suggestive as it is of that Simon Tapper-tit who was the redoubtable hero of "Barnaby Rudge." In Dutch, however, it still retains all the dignity of its German cognate, tapfer, brave and valiant. From Dutch New York we have got it in the very modern toff. But it is still a Scottish dialect word. In Dumbartonshire as a note of admiration one hears, "My!