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354 Gaelic Society of Inverness.
sertatious in the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, seems almost to prove
the colonization of Iceland by Noi-.semen from the North-west
Highlands, by an examination of the subject matter of the old
Icelandic literature.
As further examples of the greater tendency to dii)hthongisation
among the Northern Highlanders may be noticed the
dissyllabic sound in trom (troum), mall {maull),fion {fian). Even
so the Irishman says foine, and the Englishman nou (for no),
paiper (for paper), giving the long vowel a diphthongal sound.
Through the same principle, o long has become in Irish and
Gaelic ^la ; hora, uair ; glossa, gluas ; slogh, which we still use
occasionally, has become sluagh ; os, the preposition, appears as
toa in siias, nuas, uasal ; the tirst syllable in Boadicea is biuiidh ;
the Glota of Ptolemy is now Glitaidh. A feature common to all
languages is loss of sound. The nations strive after ease of utterance.
The ultimate law in phonology is the law of least effort
the very prevalent law of laziness. In the Celtic tongues we
have reduced the original pilar to athair, that is to say, of three
consonants we have killed and buried one, and maimed, all but
strangled, a second. A Celtic throat has within historic times
transformed patrem to pere on the soil of France. We first
aspirate our consonants ; we then vocalize them. As between the
two dialects of Scottish Gaelic vocalization proceeds if anything at
a more rapid pace in the North Highlands than in the South.
Take for exam])le m in medial sound. It first becomes 7iih ; and
if the flanking vowels are short the aspirated consonant soon becomes
vocalised, as e. g. in domhan, ciimhann, where mli serves now
merely to divide the syllables. But where the preceding vowel is
long (and in some cases even where it is short), the rah is sounded in
the South. In the North Highlands mh becomes u. The greater
part of Ireland and the Isle of Man join the North Highlands in
this instance. Samhradh (summer) is, for example, pronounced
savradh in South Argyll and Arran. Over the whole of the rest
of the Highlands and in Ireland the pronunciation is sa-v-radh ;
and in the Manx dictionary the word ap[)ears as sourey.
Sometimes, it must be confessed, we are bewildered rather
than edified by the apparent caprice and lawle.ssness which pre-
vail. The Latin word peccdtiim appears in Gaelic orthograjjliy as
peacadh. As always happens in the case of borrowed words, the
fiexional syllable is dropped. The tenuis t, flanked by vowels,
sinks into the medial, and is aspirated, dh ; the double consonant
cc secures that c appears in Gaelic unas[)irated ; the aocent is
shifted forward so that the long accented syllable at appears as
;