Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/66

42 idiom, vastly more archaic than the academic and conventional printed speech of the English scholar. To the Scot, therefore, the language and idiom of our old writers and of Wulfila have a freshness, a directness, and a meaning which are scarcely possible to any but an exceptionally favoured Southron. In proof of this contrast take two such works as Barnes's Poems in the Dorset dialect and the Banffshire tale of "Johnny Gibb." Whereas the one must be almost a foreign tongue to the average Englishman, no intelligent Scot, especially if born and reared in a country district, need miss in the other one point of its inimitable humour, its pithy, pawky turns of idiom and expression, and the real genius that created its character and incident. But, alas! in spite of such native advantages of Scottish scholarship. Dr. Johnson might still say of it that everyone here gets a mouthful but no one may make a meal of learning. Such works as "Johnny Gibb," the late Dr. Gregor's "Banffshire Glossary," Edmonston's work on Orcadian, the Scots contributions to Professor Wright's "English Dialect Dictionary," and Dr. Murray on the dialects of the South of Scotland, are invaluable for the study of our fast-decaying vernacular. To the philologist a vernacular is vastly more instructive than any mere book-speech, for in the field of dialectic growth and decay the real problems of language must be studied. In such fields there is almost everything to] be done for our own vernacular. Who will do for the north-eastern counties, for Fife and the Lothians, for Lanark and Ayr, what Dr. Murray has so well done for the Scots of the Border counties? Is Jamieson, even in his latest form, a scientific record of our vocables? Is there not room for some scholarly account of Gaelic, Norse, and French influence on Scots? Who will treat philologically the relics of the oldest vernacular in burgh and parliamentary records, the diction of our folk-lore and ballad minstrelsy, and even of Burns and Scott, or popularise our national epic, Barbour's "Brus"? Whoever should attempt to cultivate any one of these spheres of linguistic research will render his labours more valuable by a previous acquaintance with the Gothic of Wulfila.