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On the Dialects of Scottish Gaelic. 355
the short, toneless, aspirated adit. TTow is tlie woi-d pronounced ?
Written plionetically it would appear in Arran and Kintyre as
pekuv, in Knapdale as pechduv, in Sutherland as j^eku, and in the
North of Ireland as ju'chdii. Tn the Isle of Man the final syllable
is hardly audible— the word is spelled peccdh; in Perth it entirely
disappears pechd. On the other hand, in North Ai'gyll and
Inverness the word is pronounced pretty full as spelled pechdMh ;
wiiile in Kintail the aspirated dii hardens into a — g pecliduy. Here
we have the sound of dh final going through almost all possible
gradations, from the unaspirated, soft guttural in Kintail to the
extremest limit of attenuated vocalization in the Isle of Man, and
disappearing altogether in Perth.
II. FoKMS.—I proceed to notice some grammatical forms
which our Gaelic dialects have preserved. Like its Indo-European
sisters, the Celtic language was once highly inllected ; and,
like all inflected languages, its sounds and forms are slowly
" weathering away,'' to borrow a favourite metaphor of the late
great philologist, Georg Curtius of Leipzig. Sometimes a grammatical
form is preserved in the literature long after it has disappeared
from the spoken tongue ; sometimes it lies imbedded in
stereotyped phrases or in obscure dialects, never having been
admitted into the standard literature, or long ago discarded from
it \ sometimes as if possessed of the powder of transmigration, a
doctrine, by the way, which Pythagoras is said to have borrowed
from the Celts, the form remains to animate a neighbouring word
long after it took its departure from that of which it once formed
the soul. Our language furnishes copious instances of all these
(1) Take that most venerable form—the dative plural in ihh
—a living representative of an old Indo-European form, and having
its co-relatives in the Latin ihus and the Greek pM(n). In
the Gaelic Manuscripts written or transcribed under the influence
of the Irish school, this form is almost invariably used, in the case
of substantives and adjectives used substantively. Through the
same influence it found a firm footing in our translation of the
Scriptures. It is given as the regular, almost the only, form in
all our Gaelic grammars. What has been its position, meanwhile,
in the speech of the people 1 In the Southern district the
form is now confined (1) to set phrases, where it is heard not
merely in the dative, but in the nominative and vocative
— -fhearaibh, mar fhiachaibh, an caraibh a cheile, &c., &c.;
jilural
(2) in
rhetorical and jjoetical phraseology Anns na h-drduibh ;
" 'S ioma car a dli fJuiodas tiffltn air na/ecn'aibh."
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