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The Poetry and Humor of the Scottish Language

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The Poetry and Humor of the Scottish Language in" :^)\EUN'i\TPr/> ^ c^ < ^ •-TilJD^ =o o ir.t' ( qm-^ I| POETRY AND HUMOUR OF THE SCOTTISH LANGUAGE. THE POETRY AND HUMOUR OF THE SCOTTISH LANGUAGE. BY CHARLES MACKAY, LL.D, " Autlior of The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Westerti Europe, tuore particularly of the English and Lowland Scotch;" " Recreations Gauloises, or Sources Celtigues de la " " Langue Fratifaise ; and The Obscure Words and Phrases in Shakspeare and his Con- temporaries" is'c. ALEXANDER GARDNER, PAISLEY; LONDON : 12 PATERNOSTER ROW. 1882. :•: J ^ PREFACE. a I/) c The nucleus of this volume was contributed in three " papers to Blackwood's Magazine," at the end of the year 1869 and beginning of 1870. They are here of Messrs. r--. reprinted, by the kind permission Blackwood, CO ^ with many corrections and great extensions, amounting "^ to more than two-thirds of the volume. The original :> intention of the work was to present to the admirers of ^o Scottish literature, where it differs from that of England, only such words as were more poetical and humorous in the Scottish language than in the English, or were \ altogether wanting in the latter. The design gradually extended itself as the with his ^ compiler proceeded task, ^^11 it came to include large numbers of words derived from the Gaelic or Keltic, with which Dr. Jamieson, the 4 author of the best and most copious Scottish Dictionary ^ hitherto published, was very imperfectly or scarcely at all acquainted, and which he very often wofuUy or ludi- crously misunderstood. " Broad Scotch," says Dr. Adolphus Wagner, the eru- and editor of the Poems of Robert dite sympathetic Burns,— pubUshed in Leipzig, in 1835, "is literally broadened, i.e.^ a language ot dialect very worn off, and blotted, whose VL PREFACE. original stamp often is unknowable, because the idea is not always to be guessed at." This strange mistake is not confined to the Germans, but prevails to a large extent among Englishmen, and not a few Scotchmen, who are of opinion that Scotch is a provincial dialect of the English, —like that of Lancashire or Yorkshire,—and not entitled to be called a language. The truth is, that English and Lowland Scotch were originally the same, but that the literary and social influences of Lon- don as the real metropolis of both countries, especially after the transfer of the royal family of Stuart from Edinburgh to London, at the commencement of the seventeenth century, have favoured the infusion of a Latin element into current English, which the Scotch have been slow to adoi)t. Old English words have dropped out of use in the South of the Kingdom, but have remained in the North, with the result that the Northern English (or Lowland Scotch) has re- mained the true conservator of the primary roots of the language. The Lowlands ot Scotland, from their prox- imity to the Highlands, where the Gaelic or Keltic —once language spoken over the whole of the country, as well as in France, Spain, and Italy — continued to exist in if colloquial not in literary acceptance, naturally borrowed or caught Avords from their more northern neighbours, after the Saxon conquest. From this fact it follows that the Scotch, or "broad Scotch," as I'rufcssor calls Wagner ii, contains a larger in- PREFACE. Vll. fusion of Keltic words than the fashionable modern English,—words unfamiliar to purely Teutonic scholars and exponents of the English language,—and which largely contribute to give the Scottish a distinctive character, unintelligible to English readers. The Author has to acknowledge his mdebtedness to " the late Lord Neaves, to whom the articles in Black- wood" were originally attributed, and to Mr. R. Drennan, of London, an Ayrshire man, for many valu- able hints and corrections, during the progress of this work. Fern Dell, Mickleham, Surrey, August, 1882. POETRY AND HUMOUR OF THE SCOTTISH LANGUAGE. 'T'HE Scottish language? Yes, most decidedly a lan- guage! and not a dialect, as many English people believe. Scotch is no more a corruption of English than the Dutch or Flemish is of the Danish, or vice versa ; but a true language, differing not merely from modern English in pronunciation, but in the possession of many beautiful words, which have ceased to be English, and in the use of inflexions unknown to literary and spoken English since the days of Piers Ploughman and Chaucer. In fact, Scotch is for the most part, old English. The English and Scotch languages are both mainly derived from various branches of the Teutonic ; and five hundred years ago, may be correctly described as having been Anglo-Teutonic and Scoto-Teutonic. Time has replaced the Anglo-Teutonic by the modern English, but has spared the Scoto-Teutonic, which still remains a living speech. Though the children of one mother, the two have lived apart, received different educations, developed themselves under dissimilar circumstances, and received 2 POETRY AND HUMOUR accretions from independent and unrelated sources. The English, as far as it remains an Anglo-Teutonic tongue, is derived from the Low Dutch, with a large intermixture of Latin and French. The Scotch is indebted more im- mediately to the Low Dutch or to the Flemish spoken in Belgium, both for its fundamental and most characteristic words, and for its inflexion and grammar. The English bristles with consonants. The Scotch is as spangled with vowels as a meadow with daisies in the month of May. English, though perhaps the most muscular and copious in is harsh sibilant while the language the world, and ; Scotch, with its beautiful terminational diminutives, is al- most as soft as the Italian. English songs, like those of Moore and Campbell,* however excellent they may be as poetical compositions, are, for these reasons, not so available for musical purposes as the songs of Scotland " An Englishman, if he sings of a pretty little girl," uses words deficient in euphony, and suggests comedy rather " than sentiment l)ut a of a bonnie ; when Scotsman sings wee lassie," he employs words that are much softer than their English equivalents, express a tenderer idea, and arc infinitely better adapted to the art of the composer • Neither of these was an Knglishman. And it is curii)vis to note that no Englishman since the time of Charles II. has over rendered himself very famous as a song-writer, with the sole exceptions of Charles Dibdin and Barry Cornwall, whose songs are by no means of the highest merit ; while .Sct)tsmen and Irishmen who have writ- ten excellent songs hnih in their own language and in English, are to be counted f'y the score — or the hundred. OF THE SCOTTISH LANGUAGE. 3 and the larynx of the singer. And the phrase is but a sample of many thousands of words that make the Scottish language more musical than its English sister. The word Teutonic is in these pages used advisedly instead of Saxon. The latter wor4 is never applied in Germany to the German or High Dutch, or to any of the as languages that sprang out of it, known Low Dutch, Even in the little kingdom of Saxony itself, the language spoken by the people is always called Deutsche (or Ger- man), and never Saxon. The compound word Anglo- Saxon, is purely an invention of English writers at a com- paratively late period, and is neither justified by History nor Philology. The principal components of the Scottish tongue are derived not from German or High Dutch, erroneously called Saxon, but from the Low Dutch comprising many words once possessed by the • English, but which obsolete in the latter have become ; secondly, words and inflexions derived from the Dutch, words Flemish, and Danish ; thirdly, derived from the French, or from the Latin through a French words derived from the Gaelic medium ; and fourthly, or Celtic language of the Highlands. As regards the first source, it is interesting to note that in the Glossary appended to Mr. Thomas ^Vright's edition of those ' ancient and excellent alliterative poems, the ' Vision ' and ' Creed of Piers Ploughman, there occur about two thousand obsolete English or Anglo-Teutonic words, 4 POETRY AND HUMOUR many of which are still retained in the Scottish Low- lands that in the ; and Glossary to Tyrrwhitt's edition of Chaucer there occur upwards of six thousand words which need explanation to modern English readers, but fully one half of, which need no explanation what- ever to a Scotsman. Even Shakespeare is becoming obsolete, and uses upwards of two thousand four hundred words which Mr. Howard Staunton, his latest and, in many respects, his most judicious editor, thinks it necessary to collect in a glossary for the better elucida- tion of the text. Many of these words are perfectly familiar to a Scottish ear, and require no interpreter. It appears from these facts that the Scotch is a far more conservative language than the English, and that although it does not object to receive new words, it clings rever- ently and affectionately to the old. The consequence of this mingled tenacity and elasticity is, that it possesses a vocabulary which includes for a Scotsman's use every word of the English language, and several thousand words which the English either never possessed, or have suffered to drop into desuetude. In addition to this conservancy of the very bone and sinew of the language, the Scoto-Teutonic has an advantage over the old Anglo-Teutonic and the modern English, in having reserved to itself the power, while retaining all the old words, of the language, to eliminate from every word all harsh or unnecessary consonants. it for love for fall for wall Thus has loe, ; fa\ ; u<a\ ; OF THE SCOTTISH LANGUAGE.
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