Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/67

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In treating of the language of the most interesting of the Low-German races, the Goths of Moesia on the Lower Danube, during the fourth century of our era, I have aimed at presenting merely an introduction and in no way an exhaustive treatise. I have had the further object of demonstrating to the student of Lowland Scots the value and the extent of his inheritance in that forgotten speech. I know of no other treatment of the subject from this point of view. Professor Skeat, so long ago as 1868, rendered the study immensely interesting to the merely English scholar in his "Moeso-Gothic Glossary," of which I have made the most ample use in the following pages. He has put this English standpoint fairly and forcibly: "To study Moeso-Gothic is, practically, more the business of Englishmen than of anyone else—excepting perhaps the Dutch. Though it is not strictly an older form of Anglo-Saxon, it comes sufficiently near to render a study of it peculiarly interesting and instructive to us, and a thing by no means to be neglected." This exception of Dutch, one of the most modernised and cosmopolitan of the Teutonic stock, is not a very happy one, nor can Anglo-Saxon in the mouth of the Englishman of to-day be mentioned in the same breath with the still living hold of the Lowland Scot on his Gothic original through his Northumbrian and Frisian ancestry. Professor Skeat has made Gothic still more accessible through his "Gospel of St. Mark in Gothic" (Clarendon Press, 1882). More exhaustive is the "Introduction to Gothic" of Mr. T. le Marchant Douse, 1886. For a complete text, grammar and philological examination we must look to German writers. Of these by far the most practical and accessible are F. L. Stamm and Dr. Moritz Heyne, 1872 (text, grammar, glossary), and Wilhelm Braune (Gotische Grammatik, 1887). Needless to say, neither makes any use of Lowland Scots.

The version I have placed alongside of Wulfila for comparison through the following extracts is taken from "The New Testament in Scots, being Purvey's Revision of Wycliffe's Version turned into Scots by Murdoch Nisbet, c. 1520," ed.