Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

ETYMOLOGIES OF THE ISLANDS. 143
Being thus discomfited in my enquiries into learned
books, I submitted a list of these islands to different
Gaelic scholars of high reputation. Out of the whole
I procured six that were correct, as I ought to have
foreseen from the fate of Sky and the ^budae ; the re-
mainder were a collection of quidlibet a quolibets worthy
of being ranked with Eurydice and Astyanax. The
struggles and ambages that were used to extract the
square root of a Danish word in Gaelic, were particu-
larly amusing. On carefully examining the names of the
islands by other rules, it became evident that a laro-e
proportion of them was of Scandinavian origin. But
these are not all contained in any one of the present dia-
lects ;
being, on the contrary, divided among the Danish,
Swedish, Norwegian, and old Icelandic. Two or three
are compounded of Scandinavian and Gaelic; and a few,
if not purely from the latter tongue, are only altered by
the addition of the Scandinavian terminal ey, ay, or a, all
of them abbreviations of eylan, signifying island, or
water-land : ey being- a Gothic word for water, whence
the French term. A very few have hitherto defied my
researches, as well as those of the Gaelic scholars ; but
the reasons are not inexplicable.
It is, unquestionable, that many of our local names,
in Britain generally, as well as here, have been imposed
before the Celtic tongue had been divided into its present
various dialects. Thus names of places are still in use
in Scotland, which must be sought in the British or
Welsh, and not in the Gaelic; and thus it is possible
that some more of the unexplained names may be re-
ferred to their real sources, as I have here referred
Arran and Cumbray ; though I have hitherto failed in
my own attempts. It is also evident, on comparing
some of the names by which the islands were anciently