# Studies in Lowland Scots/In Decadence

II.—IN DECADENCE
1. The Decadence of the Scottish Vernacular
Henry Cockburn, writing more than sixty years ago, regretfully contrasts his own sustained interest in Burns and growing love for the frequent reading of him with the pronounced lack of interest which his children evinced. For them the language of Burns had little meaning, and this blocked the way to appreciation. The huge development of a Burns cult since those days would seem to imply the removal of this obstacle to intimacy. Facts, however, do not bear out this inference. While no "common Burnsite" would pass uncondemned such a misquotation of a well-known couplet as that with which a recent writer favoured his readers in a magazine, to wit,—
"Oh wad the laird the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us!"
it would not be difficult to puzzle him as to the meaning, inner or otherwise, of half a dozen lines selected almost at random from the non-lyrical and strictly vernacular poems.
Nor is the remarkable vogue of the Scots story inconsistent with the real decadence of the vernacular. The interest here would have been much the same apart from the local colour of the language. To take the "Window in Thrums" as representative of the high-water mark of the Scots story, its consummate art is essentially the revelation in fiction of the spirit of the Lyrical Ballads, a Wordsworthian interest, that is, in the inherent beauty and pathos of common things and people, the interplay of human strength and weakness under simply human conditions. The situation is vernacular, whereas the language is not. Its imitators strain after its vernacular colour-effects by a liberal dash of dialect words, but their success is factitious. The reader can quite afford to skip the ​dialect and follow the plot all the better. The French of the menu card has little effect on the digestion of the dishes. Take, by way of emphasising this point, Dr. William Alexander's "Johnny Gibb o' Gushetneuk," a story which, though very precious to the few who are in sympathy to appreciate it, is yet caviare to the general who dote on Thrums and all its kin. Here the charm of rusticity is perfect. The characters are as strong, original, and lifelike as any in the whole gallery of the "Kailyard." The "waesome element o' greetin' and deein'" is indeed absent, but the humorous aspects of Scotch thrift and pawkiness and all the lights and shades of minor morality in a country-side are there, and worked out on the lines of Galt and Ferrier and Mrs. Hamilton (the creator of Mrs. Maclarty). But the author handicapped himself by his devotion to the vernacular setting of his tale. He could not do otherwise, this attitude being part and parcel of his thinking. Pope doubtless knew as well as Shakspere what constituted a poet, but nature had built him for reasoning in verse, so he was didactic and ratiocinative at the risk of being refused some day the very name of poet. Similarly we have the real Burns in the vernacular poems. Wordsworth was right in his appreciation of these, while Tennyson followed the multitude in preferring the songs in which Burns devoted his lyrical gifts to the gathering up of the fragments of a fading vernacular and dressing them out in the sentimental fashion of the eighteenth century. This preference is the more surprising when we remember that Tennyson himself has raised his own dialect work to the dignity of a classic. Nowhere else has he struck a deeper or truer dramatic note. The truth is that literature cannot afford to overlook such vernacular as we have in Scotland; witness the great number of Northern words now used as English. But the best evidence of the value of this interdependence comes from Burns, Scott and Carlyle, who nursed their art on this humble soil, and thereby secured a position among the most vivid, human, and truly realistic masters of English. If the Scottish vernacular should pass from decadence to decay, the people will not only lose the education of their bi-lingual inheritance, but English itself will suffer. For, while the effect of education on the literary speech is to develop expression by the strict rules of conventional ​imitation, the vernacular lends itself naturally to local environment in choice of words, significant content, idioms, tone and accent—everything, in short, which gives to style its colour and individuality. Scotland, from the more archaic character of its development, and from the fact that the whole nation early found its native speech shouldered out of general literature, presents a specially rich field for the study of dialectic growth.
While education and intercourse are between them killing out the vernacular, and writers for striking effects have to resort to Yankee or coster slang, or even sheer Kiplingesque audacity in diction, decadence can never apply to the classic Scottish speech. As long as we have Barbour, Blind Harry, Henryson, Douglas, Dunbar, Lindsay, their diction can be studied like that of Chaucer, Langland and Spenser. But, alongside of this, there has always existed a vernacular with a character and contents of its own. It lives quite independently of literary production, but pines away before the breath of education and its fashions. It was as well that Ramsay, Burns, and Fergusson were but little versed in classical Scots, for they could no more have kept it alive than could Elizabethans the archaisms of Chaucer and Spenser. What they did was to have the courage to admit so much of the vernacular into literary diction, and this is now the true strength of their style. But it is with Barbour, Wynton, and the Burgh Laws with which the vernacular is most in touch. From these one might cull many expressions that are only now ceasing to be "household words." Thus Barbour describes the good Earl James of Douglas as "a black-a-vised man that wlispyt sum daill, but that set him richt weill." In "Peebles to the Play," when the cadger has tumbled in the mire off his horse,—
"His wife came out and gave a shout,
And by the foot she gat him;
All be-dirtin drew him out;
Lord (how), right weil that sat him."
Henry Morley ("Shorter English Poems") glosses this as "vexed him," in defiance of the context. After the disaster of Methven, when Bruce and he were "dreand in the Month (Mount, i. e. the Grampians) thair pyne;" and "gret defaut of mete had thai," ​Douglas "wrocht gynnys" (the girns or nooses of the rabbitcatcher) "to tak geddis (pike) and salmonys, trowtis, elys, and als menownys." Here we have the familiar mennons (minnows) of the schoolboy. When Barbour tells how Bunnock, the husband-man, carried out his clever plan for capturing Lithgow Peel from the English while ostensibly leading his wain full of hay for the garrison, the whole scene is a lifelike presentment to a Lowland farmer who has kept to his vernacular. "Aucht men, in the body of the wain," should "with hay helyt be about," where helyt recalls the hool or covering of a bean and the hulls or clothes of Sartor Resartus. In Burns's "Hallowe'en," when the vision of "an out-lier quey" came between the widow Leezie and the moon, her heart "maist lap the hool" (she nearly "jumped out of her skin"). Compare the Orcadian—"My heart is oot o' hule." Then when Bunnock's wain was "set evenly betuix the chekis of the yett sae that men mycht spar (close and fasten) it na gat" (way), he "then hewyt in twa the soyme" or traces. Gregor's "Banffshire Glossary" shows this soyme still in use. "Fin thir wuz a crom (kink) in the sowm the gaadman geed (went) and raid (disentangled) it." In Caithness, late in last century, tenants had to furnish simmons, or ropes of heath for thatching purposes, to the laird. Skinner very aptly uses the word in his Epistle to a Ship Captain turned Farmer,—
"Your hawsers and your fleeand sheets, Ye've turned them into sowms and theats" (trace-lines)."
In simmons the definite article has been added to the Norse sime, ropes of straw or bent. The oat straw used for making them was called "gloy." They were twisted with a "thrawcruck." There are innumerable touches of this kind in Barbour which stir up associations with vernacular—"ane Englishman that lay bekand him be a fyr," where the preposition, German bei, is used in its favourite sense, or "mycht na man se a wäer man" than Edward Bruce, where the epithet would be poorly rendered by sadder, or this greeting between Bruce and his men,—
"He welcummyt thaim with gladsum fair, Spekand gud wordis her and thar, And thai thair lord sa meekly
Saw welcum thaim sa hamly, Joyful thai war."
"James of Douglas his menye than Sesit Weill hastily in hand 'At (those whom) thai about the castell fand."
This idiom is found throughout the literature which best preserves the vernacular—Privy Council Registers and the Records of Burghs, Kirk-Sessions and Guilds, and is still in general use. Burns and Ramsay avoid it as beneath the dignity of literature, but there is a good specimen in the "Window in Thrums," "Him at's marrit on the lad Wilkie's sister." Dr. Murray, who quotes a typical example, "the dug at its leg wuz rin owre," ascribes this form of that to Celtic influence, but in spite of the teaching of the Celtic Revival the Gael has made scarcely any impression here or elsewhere on the language of the Lowland Scot. The Sassenach has taken kindly to vulgar Gaelic words like creesh (fat, grease) or bodach, a silly person, a buddie (body), which he loves to characterise as windy (boastful), birssy (irascible), fikey (finicky), or nochty (insignificant). A Gaelic word for relationship, oy from ogha, a grandchild, was in use last century. In the year 1717 the Burgh Records of Dysart note an heir to property as "oy to John Ramsay, carpenter," and Burns has ier-oe, a great-grandchild. "Wee curlie John's ier-oe" (Dedication to Gavin Hamilton), shows one of the very few Gaelic words in Burns. In the case in point it supplied him with a handy rhyme. The Orcadian has jeroy, a great-grandchild. Oy has met with the fate of eyme, an uncle, common in Barbour and the ballad-writers, and still general in German as oheim. The notorious President Kruger was known familiarly as Oom Paul. To him his bête noire, Mr. Rhodes, is a schelm. This is the same word as the very Gaelic-looking skellum, applied by that waefu' woman Kate to her husband, Tam o' Shanter. It is in Gaelic as one of many borrowed Teutonic words. Another word of extreme interest, scallog or sgalag, a husbandman, has come into Gaelic from the Norse, and during last century was the name in the Outer Hebrides for the poor tenants—virtually the serfs of the tacksmen. It has never been in vernacular Scots, though as schalk ​it is found in the mediæval romances. In the Gothic Gospels the centurion gives, as an instance of his authority, "To my servant (du skalka meinamma) I say, 'Do this,' and he doeth it." Though thus an old Teutonic word, we find it in strange places. St. Serf taught his scolocs at Gulross in 517, and Dean Hole, in his " Memories," notes shack as in the dialect of Newark applicable to one who "can and will do anything but regular work." Pratt, in his "Buchan," mentions a charter of 1265 in which the Archbishop of St. Andrews granted to the Earl of Buchan certain lands that "the Scoloci hold," evidently the church nativi, neyfs or serfs. Joseph Robertson and Skene say they are the scholastici or pupils on the monastic lands, but Skeat connects it with skalk (servant) in mare-schal. The German element is conspicuous everywhere in Lowland Scots, even where one might have looked for Gaelic. Till the potato famine brought over the Irishman, Highland reapers and drovers were regular summer visitants in the south. Yet such a common expression as kempin, in which one shearer struggled to outstrip another, is pure German (kämpfen, to wrestle). In that interesting last century poem, The Hairst Rig, where there is a graphic description of a kempin tussle, the Gael and his speech are treated as something quite fremit (Ger. fremd) or foreign. One genuine Gaelic word, however, is only too well known on every farm in Fife, skellocks, Eng. charlock or wild mustard. This obtrusive and vigorous weed is the Gaelic sgeallag. Macbain ("Gael. Dict.") finds its root as sqel, separate, Eng. shell, which last Skeat prefers to connect with scale. Its place on the Highland crofts as an ubiquitous weed is taken by the gool or wild chrysanthemum, so named from its yellow flower,—
"The gool, the Gordons, and the hoodie craw Were the three warst faes 'at Moray e'er saw."
With the decadence of the vernacular has gone a great number of words that were bound up with the social life of the past. The position of the long-forgotten birley-man was of great antiquity and importance. He was the elective Schulze or magistrate of the primitive village commune and an authority on boor-law that was referred to in all disputes. Till near the end of last century he was the recognised valuator or appraiser ​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). ​In Mid-Scotland he is only "a man," but his help is a hafflin, an extra hand is an orra man, while the hagg is charged with the feeding of the nowte or rather cattle-beast. Harness and farm implements have much the same names all over the country, but some exist only because of conditions special to a district. Thus in the hay-making regions of Lanark and Ayr a slyp or sledge is well known. Burns graphically visualises the action of the verb when he tells how the auld mare Maggie in her best days "spread abreed her well-filled brisket" at a stiff bit of ploughing, "Till spritty knowes wad rairt an' risket, an' slypet owre." The word and the implement came from Holland originally. In Gaelic slipe appears as sliob, a stroke, a rub, a lick; Ir. sliohhaim, to polish; Norse slipa, to whet; Du. slijpen, to polish, sharpen; A.S. slipan, to glide. In Ayrshire the word is used for whetting a scythe or for a whetstone. Gaelic helps also with the graphic risket of Burns in its reesk, coarse grass, marshy land, morass with sedge; Ir. riasg, a moor, fen; Eng. rush. Sprits are rushes growing where the water spurts or oozes out.
In house affairs there are seen similar dialectic differences. The "bain" or bucket of the west is unknown in the east, where it is a cog or kimmin. The bairn of Fife is the wean of Lanark, the gett of Aberdeenshire. This latter term in Morayshire was always applied to an illegitimate. Even words that seem ridiculously easy to a Fifer are but little known in the west, such as dubs and puggies, a poalie finger and a ploatet pig. Perhaps not quite so much familiarity can be claimed for another Fife word, a willie-miln, a latch or door fastening worked by a string. Its origin is obscure. As it has lingered longest about the Dysart and Kirkcaldy district, it may preserve the name of some skillie smith body about Pathhead, otherwise unknown to fame. It is not a little humiliating to think that these and suchlike decadent expressions, so hamely to many of us, and so rich in the kindliest of associations, will speedily go the way of worn-out coin.
No better test of the survival of a vernacular is to be found than the general intelligibility of proverbial sayings. Where a community cherish these, apply them aptly, and even coin new ones on the old lines, there is dialectic growth. They ​retain the family features of a racial speech. They embody the inspiration of generations of nameless stylists, and form a record of social changes that is unique. The "wise saws" of the Scots—graphic, direct, homely—are instinct with the proverbial experience of a people of simple wants and limited outlook, but endowed with no common gifts of thought and expression. If daily converse must be coterie in kind and imitative, better the continual wedding of wise saws to modern instances than the shallow and tiresome iteration of such coster slang as bloomin', bally, and beastly, of slope, and oof, and chump. Proverbs photograph the life experience of an age. "It's nae lauchin wark to girn in a widdy" recalls the wild times of the Gallows Hill and Jeddart justice, when the poor wretch hung for days from a noose of heather or tough twigs (withes). How different the social attitude of these equivalents: "As weel be hanged for a sheep as a lamb," and "In for a penny, in for a pound!" The universal use of timber on the homestead at a time when iron had to be imported, and that in very modest quantities, gave point to the worldly wisdom that appreciated character in these saws,—
"Thraw (twist) the widdy (sapling) when it's green, 'Tween three and thirteen;"
"It's a ticht caber (beam) 'at has neither knap (Ger. Knopf, knot, button) nae gaw (crack, flaw) in't;" "Him 'at hews aboon's head may get a speal (splinter) in's e'e," or "Whatever way the saw gangs the dust flees," which is another way of saying that the lawyer's mill is always sure to get grist. In the days when the winter's kitchen hung from the cross-beams instead of coming from the co-operative store the pig was a gentleman of importance whom everyone appreciated. He was familiarly addressed as "goosie! goosie!" A touch of Celticism appears in the name for his sty, a cruve (Gael. craobh, a tree) or "wattled cot," a term better known in connection with enclosures for securing salmon in tidal waters. The futility of half measures is emphasised in "Wha ploats his pig in loo water?" where loo is what the new generation calls tipt (tepid). English fails to render ploats, the soaking of the stuck pig in hot water to facilitate the scraping process. The tenderness of maternity is ​roughly hit off in "A yeld sow (not giving milk) is never good to the grices." "Dogs will redd (separate) swine" is just "Any stick is good enough to beat a dog with." "Ilka body creeshes (greases) the fat soo's tail" roughly describes the worship of wealth, expressed by "To him that hath shall be given," or "Men worship the rising sun." The sheep was a kindly pet, and so was quoted on occasion. "Ae scabbet sheep will smit (taint) the hale hirdsell" tells the lesson of evil communications. We see what "the gift o' the gab" can do in "He's a chield can spin a muckle pirn oot o' a wee tait (tit-bit) o' woo'." Old Hawkie, "'yont the hallan," was one of the family to the thrifty goodwife. The virtue of tender handling is commended in "It's by the head 'at the coo gies milk," and of patience under trial in "Dinna fling awa' the cog when the coo flings (kicks)." The cog has come in again from the Gaelic as the quaich. From the milk-pail the milk was sied or strained (sieve) into the bowie or kimmin, thence to be reamed (Ger. rahmen) for the cream. Around the yard went the homely chuckle when couthie caution was commended in "Fleyin' (frightening) a hen's no the way to grip it." The ingle-lowe gathered round it the household, and baudrons or cheetie-pussy courted the warmth to her cost, when we were warned against trusting to appearances with, "Like the singet cat, better nor she's likely (seemly)." There was a bog in every howe, the burn swept past the loan-end in roaring spate (flood), and the wayfarer risked a watery grave among the boulders, when these had a meaning: "Let the tow (rope) gang wi' the bucket," "There was water where the stirk (bullock) was drowned," "Let them roose (praise) the ford as they find it." The inexperience of youth is in "He hasna ridden the ford yet." When the Yankee tramp comes to the proverbial long lane he says, "Guess I've struck the prairie," but Tam o' Shanter might have faced the weary Scots miles with the consoling reflection, "It's a bare moor but one will find a cowe (bush) in it." The "cowe," familiar to the curler, was properly the kale-runt or stalk of the curly green, for it is akin to Lat. caulis, Fr. chou, and cauliflower. Gustock is cowe-stock or cabbage-stalk. Close attention to business was commended in "The maister's fit maks the best fulzie (compost)." Through the dreary winter the starved beasts ​went roaming about in search of a bite, till, when nature resumed her green mantle, they were "at the liftin'," like a corpse before burial, so, instead of the Englishman's "While the grass grows the steed starves" we have the Scots, "The auld aiver (nag) may dee waitin' for new grass." When the bairns protested too much at sight of their humble fare the thrifty housewife answered with a "Na, na; corn's no for staigs" (colts).
These were the days of small things, when to be near or grippy was not unpardonable, yet large-heartedness breathes in "Him 'at has a good crap may weel thole a wheen thistles." He may well put up with the sornin' (sponging) of poor relations. Table-love, however, was appraised at its true value: "Mony aunts, mony eems (Ger. Oheim, uncle), mony kin, few friens." True neighbourliness comes out in "A borrowed len (loan) should aye gang lauchin' hame." There was no worship of the baby then, for "Dawtet bairns dow bear little." The unwise fondling in dawted (dote) is a poor preparation for real life. This obsolete dow (can put up with, effect) was much used by Burns and Fergusson. A favourite word with Burns is heard in "A tarrowin' (grumbling) bairn was never fat." Its Orcadian meaning is "to take the dorts (tirran, cross, ill-natured)," from the expression tarre, an incitement to dogs to fight (cf. Ger. hetzen, and Shakspere's Hey!). Kindly indulgence for youthful wild oats was not awanting: "Royet (riotous, dissipated) lads mak' sober men." The Scot's dramatic faculty is deemed as weak as his appreciation of humour; but was pawkiness (a better word than knowingness) ever more neatly put than in "He's no sae daft as he let's on" (gives out, a favourite idiom); "Wark for nocht maks folks dead sweer" (unwilling, Ger. schwer); "Better fleech (flatter) fools than fecht them;" and "There's a time to gley (look awry) and a time to look straucht." Nor could there be a sounder appreciation of the personal reference than "Ye mett (measure) my peas by your ain peck." "Men are no to be mett (measured) by inches," and "Guid gear is little-booket" (of small bulk) are two views of the same situation. "Marriage is a lottery" appears as "She's a wise wife 'at wat (divined) her ain weird" (fate). And while the endurance of the ills we have is ​commended in "Better rue sit than rue flit," or "Better twa skaiths (Ger. Schade, injury) than ae sorrow," we are to sturdily face consequences with "The warst may be tholed (endured) when it's kenned," or "Better finger aff as ay waggin'." The old-time peasant had much of that spirit of independence on which Burns harps so often. "My ain hose will be tied wi' my ain gairtans (garters)" is the fearless resolve of the man that "will to Cupar, so maun to Cupar," while "We can dicht oor corn in oor ain cannis," points to the custom of clearing out the chaff in the process of winnowing by throwing up the grain between the doors of the barn and letting it fall on the canvas spread out to receive it. "I'm mebbe poor but I'm no misleared" (badly brought up) is a croose claim to respect for native worth. Popular philosophy put the truth that the will dominates the understanding, as "Gar'd (forced) gress is ill to grow." The virtue of thrift is commended in "Hained mooter (multure) bauds the mill at ease and 'fends the miller," the analogue of "A penny hained (saved) is a penny gained." Scott finely expresses true independence in his favourite motto, "A hedge about his friends, a heckle (for dressing flax) to his foes." Contempt for the opposite attitude of spiritless acquiescence breathes in his "They liket mutton weel that licket whaur the yowe lay."
Some of these maxims are severely condemnatory. The retort of shallow insolence is but "a goose's gansell." The cotter's children in the "Twa Dogs" are " a' run-deils thegither"—runs, ründs (Ger. Rand) or clippings from the selvage of a very bad web. But there was generally playful exaggeration in this as well as in the commoner reproach, a "limb o' Sawtan." The boy, mischievous as a monkey, is said to be "as ill-sets a puggie," which last is, by the way, a very good test-word for the survival of dialect. Few of the rising generation, and many even of the risen, specially if brought up away from the east side of Scotland, can make a guess at puggie. I have had it explained as a kind of engine, and again as a fox. In Orcadian pieg is anything of diminutive growth, as a pieg o' kale, a very small cabbage. The Danish is paeg. Pioo, a small quantity, may be Forfarshire peeay. Pug in English is a monkey, as in the above proverb. In Scots anything small is a pug or a puggie ​(Gael, paeg, small), as a pug engine, a pug plane is a joiner's tool. A small Shetland horse is a gur-pug (garron, a nag, and pug). In primitive times this word must have been applied to the fairies, always described as the little folks, cf. Puck, pixie, the wee pechs. Henry Morley ("Shorter Poems," p. 234) has a very interesting note on Puck, written also, he says, as Pouke and Pug, the former of which is first found in "Piers Plowman," signifying the devil. '"Paecan," to deceive by false appearance, is early English. From a derivative, pickeln, to play the fool, Morley gets the usual name for a mischievous boy, a pickle.
Another pithy comparison, "as saut's pell," is well known in Fife. Jamieson notes it under pell as butter-milk very much soured, which makes little account of the saltness. I take it rather to be a survival of the times when tanning was a village industry and salted hides (pelts, Lat. pellis, skin) were common on every homestead. There is no obscurity about this: "The lift 'll fa' an' smore (smother) the laerricks"—one of many expressions for the impossible, what is most unlikely to happen, so characteristic of the canny Scot. There is surprisingly little in these proverbial expressions which might be called obsolete. They have the quality of a true style, they rarely miss the mark. Some archaisms, however, there are here. Farmers do not now call a horse an aiver, though Burns uses it, as in "A Dream," when he wishes to be sarcastically, nay daringly, familiar. A century ago it was in the north applied to a goat. It really means a property (Lat. habere and our average). The parallel word, cattle, equally abstract (Lat. capitale and chattel), has retained its special concrete bent, except in Scots, where one still speaks of a cattle-beast, plural, cattle-beas'. A few other terms in these proverbs, such as tarrow, roose, mett, eem, are now intelligible only to one fairly well read in old literature.
So far we have had illustrations of the dialectic development of a bi-lingual people, as the Scots historically are. Alongside of this distinctively northern use of English we have the pesistence of native usage in an unbroken chain. At the Union strenuous and successful efforts were made to preserve the individuality of Scots law. During the "Auld Alliance" French models had been preferred to English, and latterly ​Dutch, when Episcopacy and Independency together had driven Presbyterians into the arms of the Calvinists of Holland. Though legal nomenclature is necessarily technical, yet, as the Scots always loved a good-going plea, legal terms have become to a surprising extent household words. A pley (plea) is indeed the very commonest expression for a dispute in general, while the lawyer is, par excellence, "a man o' bizness." These words are in no special sense Scottish, being in every case English worn with a difference. At the head of a Court, or indeed anybody acting in a judicial capacity, is the preses; the pleader is an advocate. The provincial representative of a judge is a depute. To bring a complaint into Court is to delate, a sense not unknown to Shakspere; witness the phrase in "Hamlet," "More than the scope of these delated articles allow." The parties are complainers. The Crown prosecutor is the fiscal, a "god of power" in a Scottish burgh. The accused is the pannel and the indictment is the libel, a term so familiar that some worthy folks speak of having their luggage libelled. Evidence is adduced, and witnesses depone. A civil suit is a process, prepared by a writer, or depreciatorily a "writer buddy," who summonses witnesses. The judge condescends upon the facts, and issues an interlocutor or decision. In questions of real estate the guardian is a tutor, sureties to contracts are cautioners, and the deed must be implemented conform to its terms. The successful litigant is discharged from the conclusions of the summons. To become a bankrupt is to fail, a catastrophe, classed of old for its awfulness with insanity and suicide as a "stroke from God," or damnum fatale. The unhappy "dyvour" sat near the Mercat Cross on a stone bench and clad in a yellow robe. The word long survived its disuse in the legal sense as a weapon in a scolding-match. A declared bankrupt was notour, to be put to the horn if he failed to extinguish the debt, followed by the terrors of poinding and multiple-poinding. The proprietors in a parish are heritors. One who holds under a perpetual ground rent is a feuar, or in Lanarkshire a portioner. Real estate is mortgaged under a bond or disposition in security, the agent in the transaction is the doer or haver, and the decision of the Court upon it is a decreet. To transfer a property is to convey, and the buyer becomes infeft of his ​possession by sasine, a term also familiar to Shakspere from Horatio's statement, "All those his lands which he stood seised of." The general intelligibility of these terms goes far to prove that in old society law was not "a supperfluity" but a "necessar."
The Church was another peculiar institution, with terms in still more popular use. It was governed by an assembly, synod, presbytery and session. In a land of many sects one belonged to a body. In the hey-day of schism a stranger, present at a social gathering of one of these groups, approached a little girl and addressed her affably, but she pulled him up short with, "I dinna belang to the body." No Dissenter could join in the laird's comprehensive toast, "The Kirk, the auldest, the cheapest, and the best." In Moderate circles a Dissenter was classed in a common horror with a Radical, a Patriot, and a Quaker. Such was the attitude of that otherwise meek and worthy man, Dr. Haldane, of St. Andrews. He was reprimanding the beadle for ill-using his wife, but was completely disarmed by the sly rogue's apologia. "Weel, ye see, doctor, she'll no hud awa fae thae Dissenters," eliciting the reply, "Then if you must do it, John, let it be in moderation." Sacerdotalism, ritualism, and the sanctity of consecration found no favour with these sturdy democrats. The minister was but human. One old dame refused to give him his title after he had been made a D.D. When remonstrated with she retorted, "Weel I wat, there's nae doctors in Heevin." The elders were always ready to sound his doctrine or prove his conduct, and even the beadle had a mind of his own about the conduct of the sanctuary. A clergyman, unduly conscious of greatness, after a higher flight than usual, asked his man if he did not share this feeling. "Ou, aye, yer Psaums wuz no that bad."
Little respect was paid to either the kirk or the kirkyard. To uncover on entering the one, or to do anything but gossip or feed calves in the other, savoured of innovation or sacerdotalism. The centre of the tabernacle was the poopit, rising over the lettern, all that was left of the lectern and the old-time institution of the reader, whose place was taken by the precentor. This last functionary was much exercised over the wedding of the metres to tunes. On one occasion when an ​unusual Psalm was given out, he looked up at the preacher with the remark, "That's a gey kittle ain, ye maun just try that yersel, Maister Davidson." The only sacrament was Communion, served on what used to be literally tables, on the model of a banquet in a baronial hall. The long strip of white linen, the bread and the goblet or loving cup handed round, followed exactly the custom in the big house on company days. A solemn exercise was the fencing of the tables, for the good things of the faith were not for the Gentiles. Strong on minor morals must that minister have been who thus wound up the solemn exercise of fencing the tables at Communion—"Brethren, I debar from the sacred ordinance any man that pits twa fingers into his neebor's mull but one intill his ain."
Of more consequence socially was a burial. The beadle, often fresh from shovelling out the mools or soil, went from house to house telling when the corp would lift. The friends met the evening before for a mild dairgie (dirge, from the Psalm in the Vulgate, "Domine, dirige nos") lyke-wake fashion, at the kistin' of the weel-streikit corpse. The company at a kistin' were horrified when the newly-made widow went up to the coffin, and bringing down her fist on the lid, exclaimed, "He wuzz an ill neebor there whaur he lies." There was here the long-suppressed tragedy of her married life. Next day, in the darkened parlour, the social glass was handed round before leaving for the grave, and in solemn silence, save when, as once, a bucolic voice was heard to utter his usual toast, "May never waur be amon's." The gathering of cummers (commère) for a christening was a more genial function. The goodman had to arrange some evenings before with the minister. One good wife, probably used to genteel ways when in service, schooled John well for the occasion. "Mind, when the minister speers, ye'r no to cau'd the bairn, but the infant." And in due course came this colloquy in the manse parlour. "Well, is it a boy this time, John?" "No." "Ah, then it's a bit lassie." "It's no that nether." "Dear me, John, what can it be then?" "I'm no very sure, but the wife tell't me to cau'd the elephant." The cries or banns preceded a marriage. In due time came the day when the procession trudged up the manse loan, the groom carrying in his button-hole "the rock and wee pickle tow." ​The return journey to the house was more boisterous, for it was entered amid the fusillade of rusty guns, only brought out at the Hansel Monday sports. I saw only once this old-fashioned rural wedding. The guns were fired at the door of the village inn where the bridal party dined. The lamp over the door was smashed under fire. The groom was often unequal to the greatness thrust upon him. Like Hendry in the "Window in Thrums," he failed to see what a man body had to do wi' mainers. Chalmers used to tell of a wedding in the fishing village of Buckhaven (Buckhine) at which the groom quite forgot the responses, when a more experienced friend's stage whisper was heard, "Ye eediwat, can ye no boo!" This Chalmers called "the heavings of incipient civilisation."
Small was the share of the minister in these socialities. A big voice had early betrayed his destiny. Though so many of the leaders of thought were college bred, academic terms have taken little or no hold of the people. One who had been to the college was looked up to with respect, but only he himself knew that he began as a bejant, and finished graduand. At Aberdeen, according to Beattie, an undergraduate was known in last century as a libertine (Lat. libertus, a freedman). A learned alumnus whom I have consulted on this point says, "Obviously you have struck a dodo." If he ettled at the Kirk he went through the Divinity Hall, where the great object was to acquire extempore gifts, for reading the discourse was the unpardonable sin. Great was the labour then of committing sermons to memory—manding (Lat. mandare) as it was long called in the U.P. Church. And if success followed he issued from the Presbytery examination a licentiate, and thereafter a probationer, and finally, an ordained or placed minister, with the privilege of wearing bands. I have a vision, as a little boy, of standing in the dimly lit street before a house, fascinated by the sight of a figure, casting a darkened shadow on the window as it passed and re-passed. It was a son of the house, qualifying for the pulpit by manding his discourse. In later days I saw, high up on a rock by Loch Lomond side, a similar exercise. Pleased faces of kindly neighbours were looking out the while from the doors of the paternal homestead not far off. In this case I could but see the elocutionary gestures, ​reminding me of a probationer's flight of oratory when he called statuary "the dumb dialect of cheeseld eloquence."
2. Scots and English.
The old game of Scots and English, once so popular with boys on this side the Border, anticipated those movements which are giving such prominence in high politics to the problems of race. But it has a still deeper significance. The true inwardness of the Union of 1707, and the work it has done for good or ill, have still to be adequately told. Suffice it meanwhile to fight again the old battle on its kindly but not unprofitable side, the differences of tone and accent, of diction and idiom, which distinguish natives benorth the Tweed from their southern compatriots. If Mr. Chamberlain was right in facetiously describing Scotland as having annexed England, it is all the other way where language is concerned. Our northern authors of the eighteenth century wrote under an ever-present dread that some Scoticism, as they called it, should bewray them. Burns, Scotissimus Scotorum, in playing the part of Stevenson's "sedulous ape," gave his days and nights, not to Addison alone, but to all the best models in contemporary English. The process has spread apace since his day. The youthful Scot not only mouths the latest coster slang, but condescends even to such ubiquitous English solecisms as "like I do," and the book "lays on the table." All through the seventeenth century Scotsmen wrote lay and lays for lie and lies, but they pronounced the -ay long i. In time the pronunciation changed to rhyme with "day," but the spelling remained the same. This seems to be the real source of "lays" for "lies!" To go lower still, the Glasgow street urchin used to hawk his "Vestar, a penny a box!"
Though the Scottish language lingers now only as a decadent vernacular, there was a time when it was cultivated as literature. For more than a century after the age of Chaucer, when there was scarce even a third-rate poet to be found south of Tweed, Scotland was the Muses' haunt. Strange to say, however, not till near the close of the fifteenth century was the language ever spoken of as anything but the "Inglis tongue." It was Gavin Douglas that first knew the "Scottis speech" as a generic term, ​though for long afterwards this was commonly applied only to Gaelic, the Erse of Burns's poems. Gaelic itself was universally known in Scotland as Irish. The first Marquis of Argyll had his son, Lord Lorn, fostered (educated) under Sir Colin Campbell of Glenorchy, to whom his mother writes: "I heair my son begines to weary of the Irishe langwadge. I intreatt you to cause hold hime to the speaking of itt, for since he has bestowed so long tyme and paines in the getting of itt I sould be sory he lost itt with leasiness" (Willcock's "Argyll," p. 26). For many centuries the common features of one and the same Northern speech prevailed from Humber to Grampians. The Tynesider or Yorkshireman of to-day has a vernacular far more in touch with Lowland Scots than the man of Lincoln and the Fens. Reformers like Knox and Melville had no difficulty on the score of language in consorting with the English Puritans. Shakspere is not very complimentary in his allusions to Scotland, but he notes nothing so distinctive in Northern speech as he does in Welsh. It must have been in the rôle of "schoolmaster of the nation" that James VI., addressing the Estates at Edinburgh in 1617, said reproachfully that "the Scots had learnt of the English to drink healths, wear coaches and gay clothes, take tobacco, and speak neither Scotch nor English." Nor, again, did Baillie and his fellow-presbyters find any difficulty—quite the reverse—in preaching with the utmost acceptance to the Londoners in Cromwell's time (Baillie's "Letters"). It would be hard to find much that is distinctive in the diction of Northern writers after 1603, although the speech of the people retained its national features. The later Union of 1707 was accompanied by a growing consciousness of a distinction between the Northern and Southern vernaculars. The Jacobite risings introduced a fresh disturbing factor in the shape of the Celtic element, and forthwith Scotland was blunderingly thought of in the South as a Celtic country. Then the Englishman travelled northwards, taking with him his prejudices and insular lack of curiosity. The extension of the Empire carried Scots all over the world, and these discreetly said little about their origin; but their clannishness, push and success still further emphasised distinctions in speech. Such were never observed, however, in the literary speech, only in the vernacular. Thomson, Hume, ​Smith, Robertson, Smollett, all challenge attention as English writers. Burns laboured hard to make himself the reverse of what Mr. Henley has so superficially called him—"a rather unlettered eighteenth-century Englishman." Currie, his first biographer, remarking that Scottish dialect was going out, says that "Burns, never farther south than Carlisle or Newcastle, had less of it than Hume, or perhaps than Robertson." In those days Beattie, an Aberdeen professor and elegant writer, thought it worth while to make out a list of Scoticisms (spelling of Burns and last century writers generally, to indicate the long o in use then) for reproof and instruction. Another Aberdonian professor was said to have carried modernity so far as to speak to his students of Thomas of Shanter and Shoemaker John. In our own time it would be hard to tell the nationality of an author from his printed page. As for the speech that bewrayeth, there are differences enough between any two individuals quite irrespective of their place of origin.
While literary style, like fashion in clothes, discourages the use of the archaic and characteristic, these qualities are persistent in spoken discourse. I have heard Carlyle, and his accent would have been pronounced decidedly provincial by the smart young person, but no one would question his right to a place among the masters of literary English. It is matter of common observation that the man who is consciously in touch with a well-marked vernacular like Scots, educates himself up to a high standard of purity in the use of the literary speech. The English of Inverness has been ascribed to the presence of Cromwell's soldiers, very doubtful models; but it rests on a far older and more philosophic basis. Nor is it confined to Inverness, but marks the use of any language grammatically taught, and never heedlessly employed. What English is more distinct and mellifluous than the utterance of a Highland girl who has acquired it as something apart from her mother-tongue? Only a slovenly Highland preacher would say 'he for the, char for jar, or indulge in the comic effect of yiss and divvel. In a genuine letter from Rob Roy he says: "The man that bought your quhway (quey) divill a farthing he peyd of you." These are the shibboleths which grow up with habit and environment; and so much are we the creatures of ear in speech that slight changes in tone ​and accent and pause will produce the effect, when we hear it, of a foreign tongue. This is well put by Sir Robert Christison. When studying in Paris in 1820, a time of political unrest, police spies were in all public places. At the Thèâtre Français, with his fellow-student and brither Scot, Cullen, they were cautioned by a French friend to be on their guard. "Let's kittle our freen's lugs," said Christison, "wi' a wee braid Scots." It worked well. "I have often noticed," he continues, "how thoroughly the mingling of a little Lowland Scots and genuine English renders it unintelligible to the foreigner, however familiar he may be with it in its purer form."
Apart from these general effects of separate environment, there are fundamental differences between the phonetic systems of English and Lowland Scots. The latter is more archaic, but both have developed with respective gains and losses. The Southron has grown to be excessively fond of the open, name sound of the vowels, and especially a (witness the Cockney "lidy"). The Cockney makes the most of it as a sweet morsel, and in academic circles it has severed England from all educated nations in the pronunciation of Greek and Latin. Long ago Punch hit off this point neatly in the lines,—
"O Mary, Mary, sigh for me, For me, your Tony true: I am become as a man dumb, O let Hymen prompt you."
So they sounded, read Anglicè, but every word was good Latin,—
"O mare, mare, si formae, Formae, ure tonitru: lambicum as amandum, Olet Hymen promptu."
This preference leads the Englishman also to shun the Italian pure a, so characteristic both of the Romance and Germanic tongues as it is of Lowland Scots. Thus in words like had, hat, this vowel becomes a thin, affected e. This typical Lowland vowel, as in man, the Englishman fails to catch, his rendering of a by the impossible mon being the nearest approach to it. In the life of the famous brothers Erskine we are told that Thomas, ​pleading before the House of Lords, said cūrătors in the Scots way, and, being twitted thereupon by Mansfield, who had the English way, curātors, he replied effectively by playing upon senātor and orātor. The Parliament House still keeps to the form cūrător. It is hard for the Scots vernacular ear to be consistent with o, witness—
| poaket | for | pocket |
| jok | „ | joke |
| woarship | „ | worship |
| rod | „ | road |
| cot | „ | coat |
| prōvost | „ | provost (pruvvost). |
The last has now quite lost its long ō, absolutely necessary as representing the Latin præpositus.
The Scot seems to have an aversion to the long sound of o and, specially where unaccented in finals, substitutes for its English value his favourite light ending, shown in diminutives like lassie, or a sound similar to final e in German. Examples of the light a substitute are—
| barra | for | barrow |
| arra (also for area) | „ | arrow |
| pianna | „ | piano |
| marra | „ | marrow |
| thurra | „ | thorough |
| mota | „ | motto; |
of the light ie substitute are—
| cargie | for | cargo |
| echie | „ | echo |
| pitawtie | „ | potato |
| follie | „ | follow |
| swallie | „ | swallow |
| windie | „ | window. |
As a medial the open sound is modified by a contiguous r; for example, firr'm (form, or bench), wurr'm (worm); or, again, lengthened as in coer'n (corn), stoer'm (storm); while an l, following, either preserves the long o (coal, mole), or is itself dropped and a quite different vocalisation appears, as row (roll), ​knowe (knoll). But even here we have further anomalies illustrated by sowel (soul), cool (cowl), fool (fowl).
The thin i again is characteristically English. The Scot as well as the foreigner breaks down here. Thus he says keeng for king, or calls a word like pin, peen, or by preference preen, or flattens the vowel, especially if near a liquid, to u (sully for silly to avoid the i sound which he knows not), or to a sound unrepresented in English, such as his rendering of tin. Mr. Chamberlain is here un-English in his aggrándĭsement, thus shunning the name-sound of i. So also Mr. Stanley used to denounce what he called "our suícĭdal" policy in West Africa. The north-eastern counties, however, delight in the attenuated form of this letter. In the case of u the Scot is better off than the Englishman, for he has the peculiar thin sound characteristic of Greek and French, as mune and gude (moon and good), in addition to such forms as we hear in cut and 'cute. All through the Scottish vowel system what is known in German as modification prevails largely. Unlike the Southron the Scot has no special liking for the name-sound of u. It is only the flattery of imitation that makes him say Bew-kanan (Buchanan) Street. A Glasgow business man enlisted the help of his daughter at a push in sending out his accounts. One of his customers was surprised to find himself addressed as Bluechanan. The explanation is that the young lady, having had a modern education (sic), was trying to correct what she knew as the vulgar pronunciation of blue (bew). Human thinking is often a wonderful process. Similarly the English preference for the name-sound of o, combined with the presence of the liquid, has changed the Rome (Room) of Shakspere's time—"Now is it Rome and room indeed" (Jul. Cæs.)—though we still say Froom (Frome), while broom (brougham) is coming into vogue again. On the other hand, it is the Irishman that preserves the seventeenth-century name-sound of a in tea, treat, repeat, though the Englishman still keeps to great (grate). Smollett, with this old sound in view, cleverly produces a comic effect, when Winifred Jenkins in his "Humphrey Clinker" writes that her mistress, having turned Methodist and Evangelical, is "growing in grease and godliness." An Irishman might still call grease, grace. The troubles of the imitative Scot are many. He speaks of Kirkcaddy, Kil-mál-colm, Cupar-Ang-gus, the ​Cowgate, the Cow-caddens. One young lady admires what she chooses to call jookery-packery, while another bids adieu, more Scottico, thus: "But I min win away." She emerges badly from the ordeal of a Scottish song, giving "snow drapping primrose" for snowdrop and primrose, and explaining the "Auld Quarry Knowe" lilt as something about the present time.
The liquids, link between vowels and consonants, seriously disturb radical vowels, as seen in the Englishman's Mary, marm, drorin-room, strawrat (straw hat), dawnce, sarvent. The treatment of l and r by Northern and Southron seems to balance, for each chooses a different one for elimination. We might put the English faam (farm) against the Scots faˈ (fall). The strange thing is that the omission of l, so characteristic of Scots, did not appear much before 1500, and for long after we find such a word as nolt instead of the spoken nowt (cattle), the English neat. In Cumberland conversely old is still oud. The vocalising of r in English words has been of recent and very rapid growth; and here again the Englishman, unlike the Scot, is strongly insular. Though essential to good fawm (form), it puts him out of touch with both the Latin and Germanic races, in both of which r is a strong trilled consonant. The icence of aspiration is now coming to be very properly tabooed as a vulgar and ignorant departure from the written language. It would be well if similar attention were given to the retention of r. But here, too, we are capricious in even obtruding this consonant where it has no business to be. On the stage and in the pulpit we hear it, and there "the very idear of such a thing" is excessively irritating. Here and in sofar, and "Asiar and Africar among continents" (heard from a recent traveller), the presence of r seems due to a strong dislike to the flat sound of a. The intrusive letter exerts its usual effect of flattening the neighbouring vowel, which is what is wanted here. Another English loss is the weakening of initial wh to w, as when one hears even a Cabinet Minister speak of "the great Wig leader." Here the Scot proceeds, in strongly sounding wh, on true archaic lines. For a time after the introduction of printing—that is to say, during the sixteenth century—he pedantically wrote it quh, but he has always stuck orally to the hw of his remote Gothic ancestors, making the h a strong ​guttural aspirate. This double consonant has disappeared from modern English entirely. A popular novelist's "whisps of fog that had lost their way" must surely be a misprint. A Scotsman and an Englishman found themselves at cross-purposes when talking on the golf links about the dangers of erratic driving. What the one called whins the other took to be winds, the sounds appearing alike from the Englishman's dropping of the h in wh, and the Scot's favourite softening of d after n. The Scottish schoolboy is actually warned by his teacher nowadays to look out for a wippin', so rapidly is the Anglicising process advancing. This is nothing, however, to the Anglican criticism of a boy's exercise, read in the class-room, as "all rot."
The Scot has his own sins of omission, chief of which is his slovenly treatment of dentals between vowels, such as Se'erday for Saturday, waa'er for water. Dr. Murray thinks it due to the neighbourhood of the Gaelic speaker, but it is a well-known feature of the Romance transition from Latin to French. Nor is there any Celtic influence in the Lanarkshire vulgarism of hree (pronounced chree) for three, and Foorsday for Thursday. The same change is found in Cumberland, where Furesday is also spoken,—
"Fra far an' neer a' Fuursday neight Fwoke com as fast as cudbe."—
Lonsdale—"Upshot."
The Scot, however, still manfully takes the trouble to articulate his strong gutturals, though the poet Malloch changed his name to Mallet to suit Southron ears. Murdoch, who introduced gaslighting, became Murdock, but the young Anglo-Scot goes further when he asks his lady friend if she is "gowin' to the Merrdok's," when he means Murdoch's. On one point, the dropping of the last letter in the combination—ing, he is approximating to what has always been the Northern and truly archaic practice. In cases like finger, anger, and hunger again the Scot, like the German, nasalises the ng instead of doubling the g as the Englishman does. He is unfortunately imitating the Englishman, however, in such a blunder as reconise for recognise. He still keeps to the old ways in strongly sibilating words like weiss (wise) and hoosses (houses), whereas his ​neighbour now prefers the softer z. The Elizabethan, however, used the Scots hard s, as in Raleigh's "Soul's Errand,"—
"Tell Wit how much it wrangles In tickle points of niceness; Tell Wisdom she entangles Herself in over-wiseness."
But he is, under Southron influences, sibilating where he ought not. Lord Kames said that the sibilating of z in Menzies, Mackenzie, and the like was enough to turn his stomach. This letter is not really a sibilant at all, but the softening of an original g such as we have in the English equivalents of the German Menge (a crowd, many) or gefallen, Chaucer's i-fallé (cf. yclept). This whole subject of Scottish and English comparative phonetics has never received anything like adequate treatment.
While the primary rocks of a Scottish phonetic system will long resist the denuding effects of English reading and converse, time will work its wonders here too. The young Scot will go on "beshin his bet" out of recognition, mouthing his kind, and cake, and Mary to his own satisfaction, and tripping over his -ng, wh-, ch-, and -r, with bated breath and studied imitation. His speech will lose in weight and distinctness, but will flow down the smooth stream of tea-room prattle and the gabble of the comic stage.
The Scots "mis-chievous" is accented, however, in his fashion, by the Elizabethan writers, as this example from Spenser's "Epithalamium,"—
"He let mis-chievous wretches with their charms Fray us with things that be not."
Equally hazardous is the attempt to use "kenspeckle" words in the grand style as contermashous for contumacious, protticks for projects, or the Highland cook's query to her mistress, "Should I delude the soup or sicken (thicken) it?"
A little knowledge is in language a dangerous thing, as when Mrs. Parvenu is in search of a "tempery cook" and is careful to "libel" the luggage when she travels, has to put on "mournings" when a bereavement occurs, is at a " non-plush" ​when she has not another trump, or asks if the tea-cakes are "pennies each." But the task of such "sedulous apes" is laboriously slow. It is otherwise with the stock of old Scots vocables. There are ample resources of expression in English, yet evolution in language does not always secure the survival of the fittest. In many cases the vernacular seems to carry more than the literary speech. What Scot would exchange the revived Greek nous for his time-honoured gumshon, or Yankee 'cuteness for smeddum, or the very modern go for through-pit, or a quick intelligence for gleg i' the up-tak. The modern man is rather proud of his smart hanky-panky, but it cannot compare with the severe but kindly jookery-pawkery. Even that phonetic nut umhm! is preferable to its English form ahem! which he never pronounces. Could tenderness surpass dawtie, hinny, doo, or contempt be more withering than gawpus, gomeril (Cumb. "Thoo is a gert gommeral, to be sure"), tawpie, sumph, or opprobrium arm itself with severer epithets than besom, limmer, randy? Is there more perfect visualising than Burns's scorn for the sordid sons of Mammon?—
"Their worthless nievefou (handful) o' a soul May in some future carcase howl!"
Or Chalmers's obiter dictum, "Jacob was too much of a sneck-drawer and Esau was the snool about the pottage," or his delight when "an auld wife hirsled aff a dyke to curtsey to him." Chalmers took a real delight in the Doric to which his oratorical instincts prompted him—witness these, "There was great chivalry in David pouring out the water before the Lord. I would e'en have ta'en a willie-waucht. As a student at St. Andrews I remember with what veneration I regarded the Professors. When I was one myself I used to wonder if these gilpies could have the same feeling towards me." Good, too, are Aytoun's splendid Fozie Tam in "How I became a Yeoman," or Donald's description of his mare, Mysie, in "Robert Urquhart," a truthful tale of Fifeshire life, "She's a real frake when she's wantin' onything," where frake is so different from its German cognate frech. The Orcadian frack describes a weak, delicate person. Fraykin was a favourite with my mother, used exactly as in "Robert Urquhart." Nor is Scots wanting in a rich ​variety of concrete expression. We have every grade of quantity among a humble folk, considerate of small things, in the series—a tait, a curn, a stime, a bittock, a hantle, a wheen, a feck, while nothing can be more comprehensive than "the hale-apothick." This last is either a surprising use of the Greek apothēkē, a granary, storehouse, or is based on the farmer's familiarity with the law of hypothec. Nor were such harmless affsets to conversation awanting as Losh peetie me! My certie! My san! Sal! Goavie-dick! A low comedian, Pillans, prime favourite with Edinburgh audiences in the sixties, used the last cryptic expression with great effect. Apropos of a favourite expletive, there is a good story in the life of the Erskines. Before the Mound in Edinburgh assumed its present elegant appearance it was a rough embankment called the Mud Brig, and a favourite place for caravans and wild-beast shows. Lord Hermand, taking this as the usual route between the Parliament House and the New Town, was so excited over the news he had just heard of the defeat of the Ministry of All the Talents that he kept on muttering to himself, "They're a' oot, by the Lord Hairry! They're a' oot!" A good woman, hearing him and thinking only of the wild beasts, flung herself into his arms, saying, "Oh! save me and then my bairns."
This comparative list shows how difficult it is to do justice in English to a group of graphic descriptive epithets:—
| Scots. | Scots. | English. |
| blate, | feebly rendered as | coy, shy |
| gleg, | „ | 'cute |
| dweeble, | „ | pliable, lithe |
| dowie, | „ | sad, in Elizabethan and Miltonic sense |
| fikie, | „ | fastidious |
| furthie, | „ | abundantly hospitable |
| couthie, | „ | kindly |
| fashiss, | „ | ill to please |
| wersh, | „ | insipid |
| bauch, | „ | dull (in surface) |
| croose, | „ | cocky. |
| Scots. | English. |
| feckless | feeble |
| fushonless | without virtue or grit |
| menshless | immoderate, insatiable |
| thowless | handless |
| wairdless | thriftless |
| taebetless | benumbed. |
The more one studies English historically the more is one convinced that what Gavin Douglas called the Scottis tongue was substantially one with what his predecessors named the Inglis tongue. Certainly crowds of old words and expressions ceased to be intelligible to Englishmen long before they died out in the north, but this is only to say that literary culture and social development lagged there a full century behind the pace of the south. This element, so long archaic to Englishmen, has now almost disappeared from the Scottish vernacular. Alongside of this, however, there are uses of the common living English stock of words which are essentially idiomatic in Scotland. These idioms are generally of great antiquity. Take the common word greet. There is no doubt that its meaning in Scots, to weep, is much older than the modern, to welcome. In the Gothic Gospels (fourth century), "When the cock crew, Peter, going out, wept bitterly"—"Usgaggands ut gaigrot baitraba." If we remember that the reduplicating preterite here, gaigrot, became a monosyllabic strong preterite, this Gothic is good Scots, "Gangin oot he grat bitterly." Similarly cry, to call—to "Cry on the maan"—better preserves the sense of its cognates, écrier, scream, screech, than the English. Hamlet's town-crier was not expected to weep. The forensic expression, to challenge a juror, preserves a meaning of the word which is vernacular in Scots from the "Him 'at chalengis the gudis" of the "Ancient Burgh Laws" to the current, "I was never challenged for that afore," It has always meant, to call in question, accuse, reprimand, and never been like Lat. provocare, to call to combat. The verb learn ought never to do duty now for teach, but the Scoticism, "learn the boy his ​lessons," would have passed muster with even elegant English writers of the eighteenth century. It has left its mark in the proverb, "Learn the cat to the kirn (churn) and she'll aye be lickin'." On the other hand, "to hearken one his lessons," in the sense of hear him say, has been developed on independent lines. Similarly idiomatic are such uses of tell, as, "It'll no be tellin you"—not to your advantage or credit, and "Tell him to come"—bid him come. Scots retains much of the Elizabethan freedom in making verbs. Thus, to even has the peculiar senses of "think equal to," and "mention" in connection with an eligible. Along with this there is a characteristic quaintness, as in Robertson of Ochtertyre's remark about an old Scottish lady: "She was an excellent woman as long as she was herself." The reviewer's statement, on the other hand, to the effect that "though Mr. Barr's wit is American, he is not himself," is mere journalistic slipshod. A Scot, however, will in all good faith say "I had lost myself, and asked the way." Peculiarly odd is the idiom in "The children took their bare feet, and went to the sands," "He knew what I wanted, but never let on" (said a word of explanation). "I don't like to crave (dun) a man for debt," "The book is sitting on the table." Characteristic of Glasgow and neighbourhood is the frequent use of get as an auxiliary—e.g. "Can I get going to the post?"
Scots has always had a strong preference for the adjectival use of the past participle in -ed, hardened where possible into it or et. This comes out in many forms such as pointet for tidy, the twa-neukit (cornered) moon, champet (mashed) tatties, roopit (hoarse from cold), boolie-backet (round-shouldered). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these were pronounced literary forms. A stout old Jacobite lady thought Prince Charlie "an ill-usit lad." Preterites of verbs ending in a dental generally drop the suffix -ed, a feature of Shakspere's English also. To this we owe such pasts as put, cut, hit. The Scot said cuttit for cut, and puttit as well as pat for the past of put, and even preferred hotten to hit. The Orcadian says hitten in the past participle, past hat (Sc. hote or hutt). This rule is observed even in modern words. A cyclist was warned not to ride on the footpath with the remark "That's proheebit, sir." This ​applies specially to "lang-nebbit" words of Latin origin, as in, "It's braw to be weel eddicate," just as Shakspere writes (1 Hen. IV.), "These things indeed you have articulate" (expressed). Another Elizabethan feature is the use of a strong preterite for a participial form. Thus, in "King Lear," we read," I dare pawn down my life for him that he hath wrote this to feel my affection." Lord Stair said, "All letters from Lord-Advocate Craigie, before and after Prestonpans, were wrote like a man of sense and courage." This Shaksperian characteristic is found in many of last century letters, even those of English ministers. Chancellor Hardwicke to Lord President Dundas has "was writ." Newcastle again says, "Sir Alexander Gilmour is very much threatened that he shall not be chose again for the city of Edinburgh." Another correspondent, speaking of Sir John Cope, says, "He has rose fast to considerable rank and preferment." Only the uneducated would now say, "The man has corned, is went away, begoud (began) his work early, I seen him do it."
Some well-marked differences between Scots and English fall under the head of relational expressions. Such idioms as these are common: "This is the man as told me," "Still in life," "Had it in his offer," "He speaks through his sleep." A favourite preposition in the Scots vernacular is at—"Angry at him, asked at him, a hatred at him." In "Robert Urquhart" we read, "Robert Muir took scant notice of his neighbour's belated sympathy. He had seen how his mother had suffered at their tongues when she was alive." Other prepositions are equally characteristic. Witness the phrases, "A pound in a present," "No fault to him," "Better o' a dram," "Married on," "Oot amon' thae neeps," "Oot the hoose at wance," "Aboon the lave," "A slater to his trade." There is change in progress even in modern English. Thus Gray wrote, "What cat's averse to fish?" Formerly from had been more frequent in such a case, and this is coming in again. Quite recently to has superseded from after "different." Shakspere uses avert without a' preposition, "To avert your liking a more worthier way" (Lear).
What would now be deemed a vulgarism, alongst for along, was very frequent till near the close of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Calderwood, as well as many English writers, uses ​it constantly, as here, "You must carry this alongst with you." It is also in ballads like the "Battle of Harlaw,"—
"Alangst the lands of Garioch Great pitie was to hear and see."
The modern vernacular admits also wanst and twicet. The equally faulty whilst has quite superseded whiles in good English. While is really a noun (Ger. Weile), whiles is its genitive case used adverbially, to which t has been added by a false analogy with superlatives. Whilie is the Scottish noun; the monosyllable while, pronounced whill, means until. After comparatives than has become fixed in English. Scots prefers by, meaning in comparison with, nor, and as, reserving than for the sense of then: "He's an aulder maan by me," "She's better nor she's bonny," "I would rather go as stay." It has nothing corresponding to the faulty conjunctive use of like instead of as, so marked in English, e.g. "He feels like I do," but it uses the prepositions without and except for unless as a conjunction. The adverbial like in Scots, as "He did it that way like," is still a common German idiom. Another Teutonism is the admissible use of any adjective as an adverb. This is very common in Shakspere, but would be condemned now. Equally characteristic is the use of that for so: "I'm that thrang the noo." The expression for negation shows the surprising persistence of the original Indo-European particle nā exactly as in Sanskrit nā, Greek and Latin ne with imperatives. This strong form is like the German nein. As a strong negative, equivalent to an affirmative here, it is preferred to not—e.g. " That's no bad," "It's no a good day," "She's no bonny," "'Deed no." The enclitic form is well marked: "Ye mannă bide lang." In compounds the Saxon un- is preferred to the Latin in- just as we find it in Shakspere. Scots delights in words like "oncanny," "onbonny," "onneat." Distinctively Northern are thir and thae for these and those. It is in his sparing use of such forms that Burns shows either unfamiliarity with the vernacular, or more probably the chastening influence of his English education. He more frequently resorts to the most characteristic of Northern idioms, the declension of the verb present with s throughout, except immediately preceded by the personal pronoun in the ​nominative, as "I come." Even here dialectic decay asserts itself in the colloquial "says I." Pure Northern are such forms as "we wuz" for we were, "some speaks o' lords," &c. The apparent solecism, often heard even from young people educated entirely on English, "Thae wurr a man," for there was a man, is very interesting. "Thae," not the article here, is far older than there. In German the two forms exist together as da and dort. "Wurr," again, is just was, pronounced wuzz, with the usual change of s to r between vowels. This favourite Northern usage has given us are and were for the older is and was in plural as well as singular. The infinitive of purpose keeps its old preposition "for" in Soots as persistently as "pour" in French or "um zu" in German. The subjunctive has quite gone now, but it is regular in Shakspere and in Burns, though these are so far apart in time. In the "First Commonplace Book" Burns writes, "Nobody can be a proper critic of love compositions except he himself in one or more instances have been a warm votary of the passion." Here we have the subtle Scotticism in the use of except as a conjunction instead of unless. His editors sometimes presume to tamper with this subjunctive.
In recent years we have witnessed a change of venue in philological pursuits. Investigation used to be concentrated on the structure of words, so as to get at historical development. But increased attention to dictionary-making, to style, and to international intercourse has brought to the front neglected phases of word growth, such as the import of words, the mental attitude of those who have either coined new metaphors or diverted old ones to suit modern wants. This line, if pursued, would provide educational discipline as fertile as it is novel. A French writer, M. Bréal, devotes a recent work to this new and most interesting development of philology, his "Essai de Sémantique."
In this connection comparative idiom throws light on the Scottish way of looking at things. Significant are such buried metaphors as to "straucht one's legs" for to take a walk, "change the feet" for putting on fresh stockings, "break one's word," "he's no himsel the day," or "he's cairrit," to express a delirious condition, "to feel a smell," "to have a want or to ​hae a misfortune," "to think shame," "to mind it weel," "to pou' a flower," "to stay at a place." In the use of particles with verbs Scots is strongly Germanic, as cast up, a kick-up, tak on (run up an account), tackin in, up-tack, intack, oncast, oncost. A logical habit comes out in the use of "argue" for goes to prove, as "A hang-dug glower argues a man either a thief or an ill-set scoondrel." The wrangling of the causeyhead lives in "argie bargie." Odd uses from the English point of view are to cry on a man to arrest his attention, "gie him a cry in the passin'"; to challenge or call in question, with its synonym to quarrel; to tell for to bid or order, to turn sick, to weary alone, to think shame. My watch is behind, to play cards, What o'clock will it be? Mrs. Calderwood (1758) uses one of the above words, quarrel, in characteristic fashion thus: "Lady Nell bought a gown and quareled wi' the talior (Fr. tailleur) that made it. Capt. Dalrymple bought some cravats and quareled wi' the woman that made them, and she scolded him like a tinkler."
The Scot is credited with Doric reticence, but on occasion he protests too much, as in "There's no matter" for no matter, "He was in use" for he used to, "I'm hopeful that" for I hope, a four-square table for a square table. Even in the formation of words he errs by excess, as mishanter for mischance, residenter for resident. At times there is method in his excess. Tinkler and kittlen seem to carry more than tinker and kitten. On the other hand, he takes a short cut in inconvene, slippy under influence of the German suffix ig, necessar, ordinar, expiry for the clumsy expiration.
Metaphorical epithets offer another characteristic feature as a coarse day, dull o' hearin', fresh weather, a windy (boastful) body, chancy for risky. But even matters of fact are not put in the English way, witness cripple for lame, failed for debilitated, frail for feeble in health and its opposite, stout, an inward (internal) trouble, hard fish, sweet butter, roasted cheese, butter and bread, fork and knife. Some of the commonest words become in the North traps for the unwary Englishman. Thus his fog is moss, and a pig in a bed is very different from a pig in a poke. Sidelights again on social history are thrown by special uses, for ​
| Scots. | | English. |
| minister | = | clergyman |
| elder | = | in deacon's orders: found only in alderman |
| Communion | = | Eucharist |
| chamberlain | = | land steward |
| grieve | = | head man on a farm |
| tradesman | = | workman |
| wright | = | joiner |
| carpenter | = | shipwright |
| lime shells | = | lime for mortar |
| chimley | = | fireside |
| merchant | = | shopkeeper |
| gear | = | worldly goods |
| deals | = | boards |
| plenishing | = | household requisites |
| providin' | = | bridal trousseau |
| friends | = | relatives |
| juice | = | gravy or sauce |
| pouch | = | pocket |
| keep | = | fodder. |
One often hears Lowland Scots declared to be little more than English mis-pronounced or mis-spelt or both at once. Of course there is individuality in pronunciation—nowhere more so—as in every form of personal presentation. But as Scots is much more archaic, and as the tradition of book knowledge has been with it more persistent and more thorough, it will be found that supposed mistakes often represent an older and historically correct usage. Thus preen would be voted but a vulgar double of pin. But the Gaelic prine, and Mid.Eng. preon, and Norse prjoun (needle) should give us pause. In the German Pfriem, Kluge compares the change of n to m with pilgrim for Fr. pelerin, Lat. peregrinus. To take one other example, protticks might be considered but a blundered projects, but Gaelic has prattick, a trick, A.S. praett, craft, Norse pretti, a trick, A.S. praettig, tricky, and Eng. pretty.
Certain idiomatic expressions show a curiously contrasted point of view in passing from the general to the particular. The following have a general sense—meat, storm, wife, yard. ​On the other hand, the particular is preferred in beasts for farmstock, harvest or hairst for autumn, policy for pleasure grounds, planting for plantation, corn for oats, victual for rations, labour for to till, manage for to get through with. Another mode of particularising is to use my or the as "Is my dennir ready?" "I'll come i' the noo" for just now, or "the morn's mornin'" for to-morrow morning, I've got the cold, going to the kirk. Where quantity is concerned Scots follows the German partitive usage as a bit bread, a wheen grozers, even a few soup. Equally German is some better for somewhat (etwas), cow milk, a cloth brush. It also prefers the plural for the expression of a distributive sense in dealing with materials as thae (these, but a quite different and older form) soup or porridge, my linens for underclothing, corns for crop, pennies each, mournings, jobbings. Contrariwise it follows a Saxon practice in saying six horse as we still say ten feet, twenty year. Scotland, it has been sarcastically said, has quietly annexed England, and it may be part of the process to find expressions now in general use which a purist like Beattie, an Aberdeen professor of last century and very notable in his day as philosopher and poet, warned his Northern contemporaries carefully to avoid if they wished to conceal their origin. He instances homologate, maltreat, militate, restrict (limit), liberate, succumb, notice, wrote him. He warns his compatriots not to say, "Give me a drink," but a draught, and to speak of a milch cow, not a milk cow. The Latin re, now in general use, is a poor equivalent for the "anent" of his taboo-list. From good Scots writers of almost his own day one can cull curiosities of usage, such as Cockburn's frequent use of "transpire" and Jeffrey's "refrain" as an active verb in the sense of the Lat. refrenare. English writers of an earlier period use what would now be scarcely admissible expressions, such as Swift's "Styles and I do not cotten," or Penn's advice to his sons in his will, "to act on the square;" or a use of idioms now purely Scottish, as Defoe to Harley, "I doubt I throng you with letters."
Idioms die hard. In spite of free schools, penny magazines, and penny poets, these expressions will long remain to betray the Anglified Scot. Dialect words, on the other hand, disappear with the pursuits, customs, and all the concrete equipment of ​speech, out of which their roots are nourished. For they are nothing in themselves. Hobbes has well said, "Words are the counters of wise men, but the money of fools." Their virtue lies in previous accretions of thought which they vivify by assimilation. It is in respect of the associations they recall that the loss of them affects the capacity for finding pleasure in language. The great weakness of our educational system is its academic and analytic character. For centuries the schoolboy has studied the mechanism of language, not the expression of human life and interests, with nose over printed text and finger in lexicon. The ear and the imagination have not worked in unison so as to visualise the situation and give it its place in the world of fact. The effect is to fill our dictionaries with words which reveal their content to the logician and scholar. The corrective to this lies in the recognition of the historic mother-tongue. Created by needs which were lying to hand, its diction is suggestive of the concrete representation that is of the essence of poetry. It is a healthy sign of a national literature when it keeps in touch with its vernacular as based on natural observation, humour, and pathos. Better this than to strain after the striking or familiar by the use of coterie slang. The dramatic instincts of Mr. Kipling seem to have imposed a diction which shocks the more punctilious, but even so good a stylist as Mr. Augustine Birrell quite needlessly offends good taste when he speaks of certain people's scholarship being "no great shakes," or tells us that "a vast number of people do not care a rap about reading."
The foregoing is an attempt to exploit a subject which may fairly be said to have escaped learned discussion, though much of the matter of it is part of our everyday experience. Extended observation might not only widen the view here outlined, but fill up many gaps.
3. Dialect in Lowland Scotland.
The word dialect has been coined for us by those early Greek grammarians who endeavoured to present their matchless literature and language to the duller understandings of their Roman conquerors. They thus differentiated the Ionic, ​Doric, Aeolic dialects from the classical Attic, all dignified equally with it by the possession of literary monuments. But the modern dialect is something quite beneath the notice of the grammarians, and too vulgar and coarse for literary treatment. To it may well be applied the words of Comus to the Lady,—
"It is for homely features to keep home, They had their name thence."
The peasant lends picturesqueness to the canvas, but the literary artist must trick him out as the conventional Corydon and Thestylis. Spenser tried in his "Shepherd's Calendar" to make his peasants speak "in habit as they lived." But the experiment broke down when they proceeded to discuss ecclesiastical politics and the creed of Puritanism. Then their language ceased to be the dress of their thought. The diction of Spenser, indeed, is as ideal as his matter, hence his lack of a general vogue. His case shows the dependence, for vitality, of literature on the homely vernacular. In Scotland the persistence of a distinct vernacular with its human appeal has given universality to Burns and Scott, whereas in England the vernacular in post-Elizabethan literature has had but a local interest. It is dialect pure and simple.
Dialect as the humble patois or tongue shaped by the environment of locality, occupation, or manners, is in a sense equivalent to vernacular, both presenting speech in undress. The vernacular, however, is more correctly the mother-tongue, the speech to which we are born, and as much our inheritance as gait and features. "When we take heed, under the influence of education or example, our speech may approximate more or less to literary form, but it never quite reaches it. If this be so, one may well question the appropriateness of Mr. T. F. Henderson's title, "The History of Scottish Vernacular Literature," for the gist of the whole matter is that the vernacular is not literature, else should we all be talking prose and verse without knowing it. Now, the works of which he has to treat—those of Barbour, Douglas, Dunbar, Lindesay, and the rest—are as much literary monuments as those of their English contemporaries. Yet, would a "History of English Vernacular ​Literature" follow Mr. Henderson's plan? His title would imply also that the Scot has no right to regard English as his mother-tongue. The authors on his list would certainly have resented any such limitation. Nor will anyone who has had the misfortune to be born north of Tweed be likely thus to disclaim his inheritance in English. Even the Englishman cannot disown kinship with the Northern speech or neglect to cultivate an intimate acquaintance with it. The native speech that characterises the provincial districts of England differs from the standard English quite as much as the Northern speech, but here an important distinction asserts itself. The various tongues in rural England have remained mere dialects, whereas Scotland developed and cultivated for centuries such a literature as entitles us to speak of a Scottish language, the sister tongue of English.
If dialect be regarded, then, as only localised vernacular, have we evidence that anything of the kind is found to prevail in Scotland? There is something to be said for a negative answer. We have not a case here on all-fours with the provincial dialects of England, which, for obvious reasons, have been much more thoroughly segregated. Almost nothing has been done for the general diffusion of these dialects, whereas Scotland has been remarkable for the unusual quantity and widespread popularity, not alone of national, but also of dialect, literature. Hence it happens that the great bulk of Scottish vocables are diffused more or less over all Scotland. Nay, the Northern genius in tale and song has successfully planted a mass of its vocables in English itself. Thus it would be almost an insult to an educated Englishman to gloss such words as ane, auld, bonnie, wee, canny, cosy, dour, blate, sweer, couthy, fashous, weel, ettle, thole, pree, coup, hirple, speer, to select a few at random out of hundreds. Another crowd of words represents but English disguised in form or meaning or both, such as weel, waur, sair, stoor, ca', dunt, brizz, cauld, cripple, wyce, scart, brunt, warsle. It is such adventitious dialect that the modern writers of song and novel draw upon to give local colour to their style. The results are not without a suspicion of trading on false pretences, as when a Thrums weaver is made to say, "Gang straight forrard," or a character in "Cleg Kelly" ​speaks of "The likes of you." The archaic is twisted, too, into doing duty as current. A favourite with Mr. Crockett in a forced sense is awsome, as "It's an awsome nice scene." This is but an abuse of the old and very interesting "ugsome," still heard in the Border counties. A favourite with him, too, is the wicks, applied to the corners of the mouth. The curler is familiar with "wickin a bore," but I have never met with anything like the novelist's use of "wicks." A much more successful artist is the clever and amusing lady who writes "Penelope in Scotland." Her plan was much after the orthodox Kailyard fashion. "Then we made a list of Scottish idols—pet words, national institutions, stock phrases, beloved objects—convinced that if we could weave them in we should attain atmosphere. Here is the first list:—Thistle, tartan, haar, haggis, kirk, claymore, parritch, broom, whin, sporran, whaup, plaid, scone, collops, whisky, mutch, cairngorm, oatmeal, brae, kilt, brose, heather, fowk o' Fife, Paisley bodies, gentlemen of the North, men of the South." Her greatest triumph is a rhymed "Farewell to Edinburgh," into one line of which she contrives to put the delightful hotch-potch, "hoots, losh, havers, blethers."
On such lines must the Scottish vernacular be written in these days. Hear, however, what Stevenson, the last of the makkars, has to say on the existence of dialect in Scotland:—
"I note again, that among our new dialecticians, the local habitat of every dialect is given to the square mile. I could not imitate this nicety if I desired; for I simply wrote my Scots as I was able, not caring if it hailed from Lauderdale or Angus, Mearns or Galloway; if I had ever heard a good word I used it without shame; and when Scots was lacking, or the rhyme jibbed I was glad (like my betters) to fall back on English. For all that I own to a friendly feeling for the tongue of Fergusson and of Sir Walter, both Edinburgh men; and I confess that Burns's has always sounded in my ear like something partly foreign. And indeed I am from the Lothians myself; it is there I heard the language spoken about my childhood; and it is in the drawling Lothian voice that I repeat it to myself. Let the precisians call my speech that of the Lothians, and if it be not pure, alas! what matters it? The day draws near when this illustrious and malleable tongue shall ​be quite forgotten; and Burns's Ayrshire and Dr. Macdonald's Aberdeen-awa' and Scott's brave metropolitan utterance will be all equally the ghosts of speech. Till then I would love to have my hour as a native makkar, and be read by my own country-folk in our own dying language; an ambition surely rather of the heart than of the head, so restricted as it is in prospect of endurance, so parochial in bounds of space."
No one has a better right to speak on this subject than Stevenson. Dowered above most moderns with the gift of style and a temperament keenly susceptible to human influences, he best could stamp the hall-mark of genius on what survives of the humble northern Doric. Since the peasant's pipe fell from the hands of Burns no note has been struck that is so genuinely true to the national character and sentiment as his "Underwoods." To the testimony of a consummate literary artist like Stevenson regarding the existence of local dialects in the north may be added that of a professed philologist, Dr. J. A. H. Murray. His "Dialects of the South of Scotland" is the only systematic treatment of the subject that we may be said to have. Dr. Murray says: "It is customary to speak of Scots as one dialect (or language), whereas there are in Scotland several distinct types and numerous varieties of the Northern tongue, differing from each other markedly in pronunciation and to some extent also in the vocabulary and grammar. The dialects of adjacent districts pass into each other with more or less of gradation, but those of remote districts (say, for example, Buchan, Teviotdale, and Ayr), are at first almost unintelligible, to each other, and, even after practice has made them mutually familiar, the misconception of individual words and phrases leads to ludicrous misunderstandings." He arranges these dialects in three groups—a North-eastern, a Central, and a Southern—which may be further subdivided into eight minor divisions, or sub-dialects. The first group, or dialects north of Tay, seems to fall into three sub-dialects—Caithness, Moray and Aberdeen, and Angus. In the central group are the sub-dialects of Lothian and Fife, of Clydesdale, of Galloway and Carrick, and of the Highland border from Loch Lomond to the Braes of Angus. The southern group is represented only by the dialect of the Border counties from Tweed to Solway, and ​from the Cheviots to Locher Moss. He proceeds to give an exhaustive analysis of his native Border group, bringing in much that is of great value and originality in connection not only with the other groups, but with the historic relationships of these dialects to literary Scots. His concern is, however, mainly with the grammar and pronunciation.
With the exception of Dr. Murray's monograph, there exists no systematic treatment of the subject and nothing of the dialects as a whole. This compares badly with continental efforts in such a field. As far back as 1819 there was published an exhaustive Dialektologie for Switzerland, with a comparative presentation of the parable of the Prodigal Son in all the Swiss dialects. About the same time Jamieson produced the first part of his dictionary, in which something of this sort was attempted for Scotland, but in no scientific or systematic fashion. So indifferent was either he or his public that nearly twenty years elapsed before he finished his task, and even then Henry Cockburn complains that he had made no use of the recent researches of Thomson and other antiquaries. It would be easy to find illustrations of how the study of dialects emphasises the defects of Jamieson. Take one from the most distinctive of all the dialects, the Shetland. As recently as 1897 Dr. Jakobsen of Copenhagen published two most interesting and suggestive lectures on this subject, in which he frequently supplements both Jamieson and Edmonston. Thus Jamieson at one point notes tuva-keuthie as unexplained, giving as authority an "Ancient MS. Explication of Norish Words in Orcadian." Jakobsen comes to the rescue: "Kudda" is usually applied to a small rounding point, originally to a "bag," and akin to kod, a pillow (well known in Scots and obsolete English). Some of the Kuddas go by the name of Tevakudda, the first part being O.N. theofa, to waulk or shrink cloth. They are places at the seashore, where people used formerly to fasten "wadmel," the old Shetland cloth, in order that it should shrink and consequently grow thicker and closer by the action of the ebb and flow of the tide. The word is now lost in its original sense in Shetland, but is preserved in the expressions, "to tove (toss) a body (person) aboot" and "dere's a tove (commotion) in the sea." The verb to taave or ty-ave still lives in Aberdeenshire in ​the sense of "pottering about, Handy-Andy fashion." Gregor noted it in Buchan as "labouring hard": "He tyeuve on a' weenter wi' consumption, an' dee't i' the spring," "He tew throo a' the loss o's nowt (cattle), an' noo he hiz stockit-siller" (cash laid past). In Cumberland we find "teav," to fidget with hand or foot, and "tew," physical exhaustion, as—
"Git oot wid the', Jwohnny, thou's tew't me reet sair; Thou's brocken my comb, an' thou's toozelt my hair."—
Gibson—"Jwohnny."
Even in English we have it in taw or tew, to prepare skins so as to dress them into leather. Skeat quotes here from Aelfric's "Homilies," "Seo deoful eow tawode," the devil scourged you, which explains the familiar taws, the Scottish ferula. The metaphor now is familiarly expressed by a hiding. The Shetland mode of preparing cloth suggests the old Hebridean mode of curing leather, which was to sink the hides in a stream or in a tidal flow. In the old Statistical Account there are various references to this primitive mode of fulling cloth.
Much might be said in favour of a new Jamieson. It should present the results of a scientific inquiry into the whole history and development of the Scottish language. But quite independent of such an arduous enterprise, there is room for the study of dialect, whether living or obsolescent, in respect of the localising of idioms and vocables, and especially in preserving the more obvious characteristics of tone and accent. A learned treatise on systematic botany leaves an ample field for the humble local inquirer in observing and noting the habitat, distribution, and parochial appreciation, as it were, of the familiar weeds and flowers that are "born to blush unseen" by the scientist. The English Dialect Dictionary annexes the whole Scottish vernacular as an English dialect, to be entered in much the same fashion as Wilts, Yorkshire, Shropshire words. Apart from consequent imperfect localising of words there is evidence in the entries of a loose employment of Sc., when we find darn figuring as Sc, Eng., Amer., and the kindred dash as Sc. Ir., Eng., Amer. Again the dight, familiar to every reader of L'Allegro, "The clouds in thousand liveries dight," appears as Sc, Ir., Linc, Sussex. The only Scottish authority given is Fergusson's Poems, ​more than a century old now and themselves imitative. The true Scottish form is dicht (strong guttural), in general use and in various meanings. It is now simply a vulgar term, to wipe up, clean, though farmers still "dicht" or clean the corn in winnowing. Greater dignity attaches to the word in German, where Dichter is a poet, cf. Scots makkar and Greek Poiētes. The very common chows for small or smiddy coals is noted as obsolete Scots, no fresher illustration of it being given than a reference to the Statistical Account of a century ago, as quoted by Jamieson. The same mistake is made with the well-known cirsackie, a workman's coarse overall, "obs. Scots, Tennant's Poems," while the rarer form carsackie appears as Fife (Jamieson) and Ayr. Cirrseckie, not the impossible carsackie, is the Fife form. Then we have such surprising bits of information as this: "Brether, a plural for brothers, is in everyday use in Fife. In towns it has in some degree given place to brithers, but in the country it still holds its own." No doubt plurals such as childer and brether were at one time distinctively Northern, "but children and brethren only are found in writings from the sixteenth century." An entry in Chambers's "Domestic Annals" under the year 1600 gives a very late example of brether. "In Edinburgh this day at nine hours at even a combat or tulzie was fought between twa brether of the Dempsters and ane of them slain."
The omissions, also, are not a few. Bunker, not in Jamieson, is absent here, as well as such familiar words as carblin=wrangling, carcidge=carcase, chops me!, clack=gundy, cripple as an adjective. The word doach for a salmon trap or cruve is given, but not localised, as it ought to have been, on the Galloway Dee. The unknown daver=stun, stupefy, is given as Sc., Ir., N.-country, though the true form is doaver, to be in a dose. Professed omissions—kept back from want of information—are caddle, four in the game of cherry-pip or papes; cip, to play truant; cruden, a partan or crab. The first used to be known to most Edinburgh lassies, cip is the "playing kip" of the Glasgow boy, and cruden is a corrupt form of the Ayrshire and Campbeltown cruban, i.e. crab, with the usual suffixed article. The boost of Burns, "boost to pasture," appears under the sense of to guide, with a query. The usage, quoted from Wigtownshire, ​"he buist to do it" (Jam.), might have suggested that we have here the well-known "bu'd to be," behoved to be, under the influence of an analogy with must, which latter is properly in Scots "mun or maan," as in the proverb, "Him 'at wull to Cupar maan to Cupar." The expression is also Orcadian.
We ought all to be proud of such a work as the English Dialect Dictionary. On every page it throws light from England on Scottish vocables, thus emphasising the fact of an essential kinship in vernacular speech from the Humber to the Gaelic Border, and westwards to the Presbyterian colony in Ulster. Thus there seems to be some original racial heredity to account for dike meaning, south of Humber, a ditch (cf. Ger. Teich, a pool), and north, a wall. If, as I am told, dike in Ayrshire means ditch, this may be due to the fact that when enclosing began there last century the common fence, in the absence of stone, was a ditch with a thorn hedge planted on the top of the bank that had been made higher by the soil thrown out to form the trench. In Holland a dyk is a wall, while graben is a ditch. Northumberland, too, has surprising links with Scotland. My friend, Mr. Atkinson, mining inspector for the North-Eastern District, tells me that the word is familiar to the Northumberland collier. The spiteful mischief done in the pit is set down to the cutty-soam, a goblin that haunts mines and cuts the tackle for the hutches. So far good. Professor Wright has done a notable work in the English Dialect Dictionary, but he must perforce give a poor account of Scotland from the Scotsman's point of view. The partner is here as elsewhere too predominant. For one thing, the work shows an unwise dependence on Jamieson. This must explain the inclusion of Scottish law terms in an English dialect dictionary, though these are all good English words used in a special archaic sense. Even in such disguised forms as cayshin and cayshner it is easy to recognise caution and cautioner, for which the Englishman now uses security, and the surety who pledges it. This dependence on Jamieson is doubly unfortunate, since he is specially weak in dialect. Nor will the defect be altogether made good by gleanings from what might be called the parochial muse of the minor singers, however rich as this undoubtedly is in local words. Moreover, dialect is ever shifting, ever growing. It is ​the slang and coterie talk of the masses. Thirty years ago to every boy in East Fife correction by the time-honoured taws was known under the name of pawmies, French paume as in jeu de paume or rackets. As far back as 1604 we find the Aberdeen Presbytery enforcing a magistrates' edict ordering that, "for repression of oaths and the like, every householder should keep a palmer and therewith punish all offenders." Nowadays in East Fife pawmie has given place to caker, an incomer from Dundee. In those early days neither the Dundee accent nor vocables had travelled far across Tay. But increased intercourse by rail has altered all this. Similarly, a learned friend assures me that curn, a small quantity, is not indigenous in the Kingdom of Fife but imported from Forfarshire. From the North, too, has recently crept all along the coast the "Smoky," as the modern development of the Finnan Haddie is called.
Can the study of those homely, but fast disappearing, dialects be justified on the score either of utility or necessity? Certainly no one would wish the flavour of rusticity or provincialism to linger about what any educated Scotsman either speaks or writes. In this he must be inspired with such an ambition as that which made Burns so ardent a student, to know and to use English as well as any educated Englishman. But this, no more than in his case, need cut us off from those charms of memory and imagination by which homely speech keeps us in touch with rural life, simple manners, time-honoured customs, youthful associations. For my own part the study of those poor relations in the family of speech has vivified forgotten associations, explained much that was obscure, and thrown many side-lights on what was deemed familiar. For it would be a great mistake to assume that the average man, though born and brought up in Scotland, knows these expressions, so apt to be looked down upon, when those who are very much above the average in intellectual curiosity and capacity are found wanting in this knowledge. A Galloway laird, a well-known and versatile contributor to current literature and an authority on matters Scottish, was talking with some farmers on his own estate. When he spoke of the Guisers his auditors failed to follow him, as they knew them only as the Mummers—children who go from door to door at Hogmanay time. Later on they had the ​better of him, when someone was described as "having a mant" (a stutter), an expression quite new to him. Few have done so much for a knowledge of Old Scotland as Dr. Robert Chambers. His "Domestic Annals," "Traditions of Edinburgh," "Popular Rhymes of Scotland" will for ever keep his memory fresh. Yet when noting, in the first of these works, the account given by Law the diarist of the earliest exhibition of an elephant in Edinburgh (1680), he adds a query to the graphic phrase in his author, "lowged like twa skats"(?). Singular that a Scotsman should have any difficulty in reading this as ears like two skates. He also confounds staigs (colts) with stags. So experienced an editor and so loyal a Scot as the late Dr. Grosart occasionally went far astray in his glosses. Here are some examples from his edition of Alexander Wilson, one of the many poetical lights of Paisley. In one of those severe satires on the Paisley corks (small employers) of his day which soon made the town too hot for him, he has occasion to say,—
"Our Hollander Kens better ways o' workin, For Jock and him has aft a spraul, Wha'll bring the biggest dark in."
This peculiar spelling of the quite familiar darg tempts to the gloss, "day's work (before dark)." Surely a comical attempt to throw light on the origin of the word! In a humorous elegy on a tailor, Wilson says,—
"Wi' yowlin clinch aul' Jennock ran, Wi' sa'r like ony brock."
No one who knew what a brock is could read this as serve instead of savour, to say nothing of its defiance of grammar. The very word is in the Buchan dialect: "He got a sawr (disgust) wi' that, and geed awa'" (Gregor). Further on we have,—
"As soon's she reekt (reached, Gar. reichen) the sooty beild, Whare labrod he sat cockin, 'Come doon,' she cried, 'ye lump o' eild.'"
Incredible to relate, labrod, the "harmless but necessary" implement by which the tailor is here facetiously described ​is glossed, "mill-stream at work." The "Abbotsford Series of the Scottish Poets" has the merit of being a commendable attempt to popularise the neglected study of our old literature, not without serious faults of execution, however. From the last, and what ought to have been the easiest, of the volumes, "Scottish Poetry of the Eighteenth Century," I select a few points out of much that "comes in questionable shape." In Alexander Watson's droll story of the "wee wifikie comin' frae the fair" the line "Somebody has been felling me" is given thus without note of explanation, and the reader is left to imagine the pedlar knocking her about like a football, so that she must have been almost comatose. Clearly the poor body is simply saying in her best Aberdeen accent, " Somebody has been feelin me"—that is, making a fool of me, as the narrative graphically bears out. Here is a verse from Skinner's epistle to Burns that aptly illustrates this distinctively Aberdeenshire vocalisation,—
"Now after a' hae me exqueesed For wissing nae to be refeesed, I dinna covet to be reezed (lauded) For this feel lilt: But feel or wyce, gin ye be pleased Ye're welcome till't."
As a specimen of Fergusson, again, we have the "Leith Races," where the poet winds up his humorous narration with,—
"The races owre, they hale the dules Wi' drink o' a' kinkind."
Here we encounter the extraordinary gloss, heal the pains. The editor, misreading hale, recalls quite ineptly the common ballad word, dule (Fr. deuil), and misses entirely the point of Fergusson's witty metaphor. This is an example of the dangers of mere book knowledge, yet Allan Ramsay uses the very phrase in question. Any Scottish schoolboy ought to know what it is to hale the dules, or dulls as he terms it. Few Scotsmen will admit that Burns is ever obscure to them. They "smile and smile" with a knowing look as most of us do when we listen to a longish Latin quotation or a drawing-room song. In the Abbotsford Series the editor very properly includes "Hallowe'en" and "Tam o' Shanter," and here we have ​examples of the climax of absurd glossing sufficient to make "the judicious grieve, the unskilful laugh." Near the close of the former poem we read,—
"And ay a rantin kirn we gat, And just on Hallowe'en It fell that nicht."
We are here told that a rantin kirn is a "churning in which the butter does not gather rightly." If any unhappy Southron should have difficulty in visualising a churn ranting, he must feel grateful to the editor. I had a teacher once of the old, and much over-lauded, school whose favourite compliment to the troublesome dullard, among a variety, was kirn-stick. It was no "ranting-kirn" for him. In reality the poet was referring to the revelry of the harvest-home under its usual designation of the kirn. Again, in "Tam o' Shanter," occur the hard lines,—
"Rigwoodie hags wad spean a foal, Louping and flinging on a crummock."
The two obscure words here are thus glossed—rigwoodie, straddling; and crummock, cow with crooked horns. Alas! "stands Scotland where it did?" Why hags, above all people, should have occasion to straddle, and why in that condition they should be chosen to spean foals, are known only to the editor. To discover what a rigwoodie is he should try the alternative which old Polonius was ready to face—"keep a farm and carters." But these wonderful hags not only straddle when speaning foals, but loup and fling on a cow with crooked horns. Poor Crummie has cruelly tossed the editor here. Even Burns shows us that crummock need not always be appropriated to a cow. It was an obscure Ayrshire poet who sang in his "Carriek for a Man,"—
"When auld Robin Bruce Lived at Turnberry House, He was the prince o' the people, The frien' o' the Ian'. At the stream o' auld bannocks (Bannockburn) There was crackin' o' crummocks. It was a hard tulzie, Lang focht han' to han'."