Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/55

Rh hears singing and larking (laikins). Dugan, to avail, is Ger. taugen, common in O.Sc. as dow. Bums has, "Some swagger hame as best they dow" (are able), and, again, as a negative, downa. The derivative doughty, Ger. tüchtig, has the guttural sounded in Scots. The root lives in a mutilated form in, How d' you ''do? Anan, to breathe, a very old verb, is lost in Eng. Uz-anan'' is said of Our Lord giving up the ghost on the Cross. Scotch long preserved the word,—

Eend, breath, now obsolete, was common in Scotch of the seventeenth century. The derivative, ansts, grace, favour, Ger. Gunst for ge-unst, is a pretty metaphor in Gothic.

Some of these Gothic verbs are more obscure than others, but the difficulty vanishes on closer acquaintance. German easily accounts for such as fraihnan, to question (fragen), mitan, to cut (Messer, a knife), niman, to take (Ger. nehmen, Eng. be-numb), thaurban, to be in want (Ger. be-dürfen, to need). Of the first there is an odd example in the ballad, "As I went on ae Monday,"—

In A.S. dearn, secret, is common. It is Go. ga-tarnjan, to conceal, lost in English but familiar in Scots. Its usual sense of hiding, listening, varies somewhat in the Fifeshire, "he dernd a wee," that is, paused to think. When, in the synagogue at Nazareth, the unclean spirit in the poor man called out, the Master said, "Silence! come out of him." Here the Go. word for "Silence" is thahai, the imperative of thahan, cognate with Lat. taceo, to be silent.

German is in a much more archaic and homogeneous condition than modern English, and, therefore, one is quite prepared for many points of connection between it and Gothic. But they belong to different branches of the Teutonic family. Gothic, a Low-German speech, is closely allied to the Scandinavian group of Teutonic tongues, and therefore akin to Lowland