Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/89

Rh in every dispute involved in the payment of rent in kind. When, again, Burns holds up his waukit loof to witness the sincerity of his appeal, he is making probably the last allusion in literature to the ancient industry of the dressing of homemade woollen cloth. Dialect here asserts itself, and a familiar survival in one county may be unknown in another. Thus the terms for the homestead are curiously localised. In such Norse districts as Caithness and Islay the names of farms often end in -ster and -bus, while over the West Highlands generally the favourite term is gortchin, the Anglo-Saxon garth or garden, and the gart of Mid-Scotland. In Fife and the Lothians the ferrm-toon marks the homestead, the cot-toon the row of labourers' cottages near by. A sheep-pen again is a buicht on the Border, a fank in the west, a pumfle (corruption of pen-fold) in the north-east. Fife and the Lothians, never much given over to sheep-farming, know little of these terms. A yard for cattle, however, is there called a reed, itself an odd survival of the Pictish rath, a fortified enclosure. It is still heard in many place-names. To Jamieson it is known only as a sheep-ree, and marked "West Fife." But as Fife is not a sheep-rearing county, this does not say very much. On a specification for alterations on a farm in the Lothians not very long ago, measurements were given for a reed. First the factor and then the laird wrote inquiring what was meant by this obscure term. This incident says much for the decreasing interest in Scottish dialects. Burns seems to have known a word still surviving in Galloway, awal, for a sheep tumbled over on its back, or the moon on the wane, if the second version of "Meg o' the Mill," be his, but Dr. William Wallace pronounces it too poor a thing to have been written by him. It is a Romance word of much dignity (French avaler, to descend, gulp down; Lat. ad vallem). Spenser uses it of the falling Nile—"When his later spring 'gins to avale."

The farm labourer (Anglo-Saxon hyne) has distinctive dialect names. On the Border he is known as a hind, in Aberdeenshire a gudge, itself a word occurring in the "Gothic Gospels" of the fourth century:—"Jah bedun ina allai gaujans thize Gaddarene galeithan fairra sis"—and all the peasants of the Gadarenes begged him to depart from them (Luc. viii. 37). Rh