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356 Gaelic Society of Inuerness.
An Argyllshire man, unless when " orating," makes the dat. pi.
like the nom. pi. I never heard cnsaibh, or cluasaihJi, or siiilibh,
or srunaibil, in the common speech of the people. I heard casan,
and chia^an, and snilean, and sronan. But in the South, where
the form has been preserved, it is pronounced. In the North
the sound of ihh has disai)])eared even more absolutely than in the
South, it has become \oca\\7.od—fhearaibh, mar fhiachaibh is
fJiearn, mar fhiachn. But, as it were in compensation, the vocalized
sound is preserved in the North in cases where the fiilk r form
has entirely vanished in the South, e.cj., daoinin, for the Southern
daoine, a living witness, maimed though it be, of this primeval
form.
Such is the state of matters to-day. Nor has it been different
for centixries back. This form has entirely disappeared fi'om the
Manx dialect— the dat. pi. of nouns is like the nom. pi. in the
Manx grammar. In 1815 Mr Lynch, author of an Irish Grammar,
wrote that an Irishman wlio would .say do na caiplibh instead of
do na capaill would be laughed at. But in the case of some
monosyllables the same competent authority states that the ihh
form was used in the nom. and in the dat. pi.— the people said
na fearaibh and do na fearcdbh. Nay more, O'Donovan (Gram.
p. 84) finds that "even in the best Manuscripts the dat. pi. is frequently
formed by adding a or u to the nom. sing, la naemlin erenn
(with the saints of Ireland); /vis na righu (to the kings)," the
very idiom of Sutherland to-day.
Tiie Ossianic portion of the Dean of Lismore's MS., and the
political ballads of Macrae's MS.— that is, the poi)ular literature
of the people, bear precisely the same testimony. In both ]\ISS.
the prepositional pronoun j-reserves the bh— dhoibh and duihh are
spelled zi'.ive and duive. In the Dean's INIS. the form ibh is represented,
in noinis, by ow or ew, and is given occasionally for the
nominative, as well as for the dative, plural ; er feanow (air Fiann-
aibhj, eg mathew (aig maithibh) : feanow (Fiannaibh) api)ears
also in the nominative case. In Macrae's MS. n stands for the
Dean's ow and ew ; do chedn (do chendaibh); lea lamithu (/e lannaibh)
; err vahru {air bharraihh). Macrae gives in cons(^cutive
lines the full form ibh and the vocalized form u :
" Le mhiltii/t de shloghraidh
'S a shruilte ri crannw."
Elsewhere milfibh appears in the nominative, and eachaibh in the
gejiitive! In a Lochaber song, written not later than tiie first
lialf of last century, and jirintcd in the Proceedings of the Society
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