Page:The dialect of the southern counties of Scotland - Murray - 1873.djvu/107

 THE DIALECT OF THE SOUTHERN COUNTIES OF SCOTLAND.

PRONUNCIATION. comparing cognate words in kindred languages or dialects, the chief differences which present themselves to our notice concern the vowels; even in idioms which have been long severed from each other, and have had quite different histories, the consonantal skeleton of such words is found to remain more or less identical. We may see this in comparing Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic; Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French; German and Dutch; Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and English. In the case of dialects so closely related as the. various forms of the Teutonic speech, once written and still spoken in the British Isles, this obtains, of course, much more strongly; and the points which distinguish from each other the literary or Standard English, the English of Dorset, of Norfolk, of Yorkshire, of Cumberland, the Lowland tongue of Teviotdale, of Ayr, of Eife, and of Aberdeen, are, not indeed exclusively, but at least, to a very great extent, vowel differences. The only consonantal element present in the Lowland Scotch, and wanting in the English, is the guttural in nicht, lauch (the existence of which, however, in the Standard English, is a much more recent matter than is generally supposed). If to this we add a stronger and more archaic utterance of E, WH, and H; the use of the original K and SK for the derived CH and SH; the occasional interchange of S and SH; a different treatment of many consonantal combinations, by the transposition of their elements, the utterance of both where the literary English has allowed one to become silent (as in WE, KN, initial), or the dropping of one where the literary tongue preserves both (as in MB, ND, NG-, PT, KT, final); and the diverse treatment of the liquid L,—we sum up the leading differences in the articulate framework of words common