Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/227

Rh behind his schants with roer in hand he is not, as we know too well, easily dislodged.

The waggon is of no less importance to the nomad Boer. It is his house, and, if surprised in the open, his castle too, for he then forms a hollow square, or laagers-up, within the square of waggons placed end to end. On the move in the waggon he treks, and when he yokes and unyokes he inspans or outspans respectively. There are two very common verbs in Lowland Scotland—trake, to gad about, and troke, to barter—the former of which is probably the Dutch trek, to take the road. In the Cumberland dialect treak is an idle fellow, and as a verb to wander idly about. "What is't ta treaken about this teyme o' neet?" There is no doubt about spang, to stretch, being widely known in Scotland, particularly to boys when playing bools or marbles. In Orkney spong is to stride. Stevenson uses it effectively in his "Underwoods,"—

Not the least interesting phase in the study of words is the modification of a radical idea under the influence of race and environment. As every term involves substantially a buried metaphor we thus see how unknown namers looked at the objects to the naming of which they diverted the stock of linguistic material that was the general property of the race. Many Transvaal words are not only in form but also conception identical with our own vernacular, but not a few, while radically akin, are put to new uses. This is specially the case with features of the landscape. It is natural to name the new and strange by reference to the old and familiar. Thus the Norse settlers in Clydesdale, arrested by the striking appearance of the isolated hill, Tinto, named it after a home term, tand, a tooth. So the Boers called those knobs that form the foot-hills of the Drakensberg, Kops or heads (German Kopf). But the radical idea was nothing more than anything rounded and prominent. Chaucer visualises his miller thus,—