Page:The Celtic Review volume 4.djvu/185

172 teagamh, and the ordinal numerals ceithreamh, coigeamh, etc., are sounded with v by MacAlpine, and the first five also in Kintyre. ‘Mh sounds v, never u,’ MacAlpine tells us, and again ‘mh serves very often only to give a nasal sound to a or o; not so in ràmh, tàmh, ràv, tàv, an oar, rest; it is silent always in the prefix comh, but giving the nasal sound; also in dhomh, ghó, etc.’ Apart from words like comhairle, coimhearsnach, into which the prefix comh, coimh, enters, the instances in which the sound of v is not given where mh is written are very few in number in those southern districts. A tendency indeed to introduce the v sound mistakenly is discoverable in the case of mh, and also, as we shall see, in the case of bh. MacAlpine maintains explicitly that the true orthography of words like mothar (loud sound, mòthar Mac Bain), when the vowel is nasalised, is momhar, and accordingly writes momha and momhaide for motha and mothaid, greater. Coinnseas, conscience, also, which is pronounced coiseas with oi nasal, in Arran and the North Highlands he writes coimhseas. Damhsa, dance, in which he gives mh the v sound, has that sound also in Kintyre and in Arran. ‘Dausa,’ au diphthong and nasal, is the pronunciation in East Perthshire, where damhsa but not dannsa would be so pronounced, and in Northern Gaelic, where dannsa with a diphthongised au before long nn, and nn assimilated to s as in ‘rausaich’ for rannsaich, would be so pronounced. Dannsa, the original form of the word, from English dance, might very readily be written damhsa, therefore, in the northern dialect, but how it could become either ‘dausa’ or ‘davsa’ in the southern dialect is not clear. In Arran and Kintyre the noun indeed is damhasa, and the verb is damhais there and with MacAlpine. Shaw gives damhasam, to dance, and damhasaire dubh an uisge, water-spider, literally, black dancer of the water.

The v sound is equally prominent in the case of final mh in North Argyll, and occurs in at least a number of the examples in Skye. In West Ross it is found after broad vowels in monosyllables, as damh, gnìomh, etc., but not dàimh, aireamh, talamh, etc.