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350 Gaelic Society of Inverness.
face to his editiou of KoIj Donn's poems, the hite Rev. Dr Mackintosh
Mackay quotes a most interesting letter from Mrs Mackay
Scobie of Kcoldale, which shows that the admirable custom of
maintaining friendly intercourse between various classes of society
survived the fall of the clan system in the far north. The lady
writes — "I perfectly remember my maternal grandfather, who
held the wadset lands of Skerray, every post-day evening go into
the kitchen, where his servants and small tenants were assembled,
and read the newspapers aloud to them ; and it is incredible now
the propriety and acuteness with which they made remarks and
drew conclusions fi-om the politics of the day." Mrs Scobie in
this way accounts for the remarkable knowledge of public events
which the Reay country bard undoubtedly possessed and, indeed,
;
it is hardly credible to us now that two men so well informed as
Rob Donn and Duncan Ban Macintyre were unable to read a
word in any language.
The Gaelic dialect; are usually divided into three. The late
Rev. John Forbes, minister of Sleat, in the preface to his grammar,
recognises, for example, a Northern, an Interior, and a
Southern dialect. This division is accepted and reproduced by
Dr Murray in an interesting paper on the " Present Limits of the
Celtic Language in Scotland," contributed to the Revue Cellique
some twelve years ago. {Revue Celiique, volume II., page 17S.)
I am satisfied that the threefold division cannot, without considerable
confusion, be maintained. Mr Forljes himself admits
that one of the characteristic marks of his Northern dialect is
found in the Southern division—the substitution of o for a. Ccdl,
he says, is pronounced coll in the north, but so is gabh pronounced
go in Perth. A still more remarkable case, of which Forbes does
not seem to have been aware, is that the letter c in mac, (fcc, is
pronounced exactly in the same way in Sutherland as in Kintyre
and Arran (mak), while the liquid sound of ji in duine which pre-
vails in the far north, is also heard in the Southern Isles. I
do not myself attach much importance to the number of dialects
into which our Scottish Gaelic could l)e divided. It would perhaps
be as easy to distinguish thirteen dialects as three. Arran and
Kintyre, for example, break away from the rest of the southern
division drawn by Forbes in the case of two prominent sounds.
One of these I have mentioned, the pronunciation of c after a
broad vowel, which in Kintyre and Arran is sounded like k, in the
rest of Argylc likec//A;: mac is mak and machk, sac is sakuwAsachk.
In the same district the tenuis c in initial c// sinks to the medial
: g mo
chas is mo ghas in Kintyre. The sound of ao, to which, as