Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/65

Rh day intercourse, and the very formulæ under which our thought must find expression, all lived in the mouths of our remote Gothic ancestors in their rude tuns and burgs by the banks of the Danube, while this land of ours was still a Roman colony. Do such records not awaken a deeper interest than a blurred footprint in the Red Sandstone, or even an inscribed brick from a Chaldæn mound? Jacob Grimm, the father of comparative philology, found in Gothic the clue to many of his researches, and based upon his study of it those principles which have illuminated the whole field of linguistics. During the seventy years that have intervened since he completed his great Grammar, in 1837, philologists have never lost sight of the value of Gothic. The Wulfilic remains have appeared in various forms, but the field has been almost entirely left to German scholars, and this in spite of the fact that their language is, for many reasons, the farthest removed from the true type of a Teutonic speech. The English Universities are strong in classical philology, but in every other department the German easily holds the field. The best Celtic dictionary and grammar, the most complete collection of Anglo-Saxon literature, the only concordance to Shakspere worthy of the name, the most complete English grammar—these, among many other works, have been left to the foreigner. Bosworth gave us a text of the Gothic Gospels, Professor Skeat has done much to popularise the study, and quite recently Mr. Douse has published a very elaborate and very scientific treatise of about three hundred pages, which may be an "Introduction to Gothic," though it must be barely intelligible to anyone who has not worked long and well at the subject. But the surprising feature is that, whereas German scholars, many of them much like our secondary schoolmasters, have so successfully prosecuted such studies, and Englishmen only in a fragmentary fashion and generally under the mantle of the universities, Scotsmen have contributed nothing to the subject, yet they possess an unbroken stream of literature from the twelfth century to the days of Burns and Scott, and, what is of more importance, they have, not from books or the mistaken theories of teachers, but as a living product, native to the soil that bore them, a rich system of phonetics, a homely, pithy vocabulary, and a genuine Teutonic