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104 Gaelic Society of Inverness.
might become historical, and called upon to deal with queations of
great difficulty and complexity. (Hear, hear.) He was sure it
was the general wish that they would act as true patriots, and
labour to advance the true interests of the Highlands of Scotland.
(Applause.)
Mr A. Macbain, Raining's School, proposed " The Language
and Literature of the Gael." In doing so, he .said this was the third
time within the past five years that he had been called upon to
propose this same toast, and he had indeed hoped by this time
that his two former speeches on the subject ought, owing to their
excellence, to have entitled him rather to respond to the toast than
to propose it. (Laughter.) In these circumstances he would
adopt the method employed by the candidates at the late election.
When any knotty question was proposed in the course of the
heckling, the candidates invariably referred his questioner to a
speech he had delivered in some other place on that very topic.
(Laughter.) Now, if they were anxious to know his opinions on
the language and the literature of the Gael, he must first refer
them to his previous speeches on this subject (Laughter.)
Of course they all knew that the Gaelic was the oldest language
in the world— (Hear, hear, and laughter)—at least it could
not be scientifically proved that it was not the oldest language,
and that itself was a great consolation— (Laughter)— for
in reality a language and the race that spoke it were just as old
as the human race and no older or younger. In regard to the
Gaelic as a language, personally he had found it, he said, of the
greatest use in the special field of science which he followed—
in philology and mythology. There was scarcely a })hilological
law of the ancient or of the modern world that Gaelic did not
exemplify. It was of special importance in studying what the
Germans called "Umlaut"— the action of a terminal small vowel
on the preceding syllable; it showed, as no other language could,
how they could get rid of consonants on jirinciple, for vowelflanked
consonants generally disappear, so that the French people
and the Strathspey j)eoplc pronounced the word for " mother "
exactly the same way, get^,ing each rid of the medial letter t ; and,
lastly, the philological law of analogy, whereby declension and
conjugation came to be of similar types, was extremely well exemplified
in Gaelic. In regard to Gaelic literature, the Gaels could
hold their own any day with any similarly situated })eople on this
score. The literature was lively, pathetic, satiric, like most folkliteratures,
and as such it was the best in Europe. (Applause.)
General literature owed one great feature to the Celtic idea of