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On the Dialects of Scottish Gaelic 3G:^
hill are reproduced in the crystal depths in all their infinite
diversity of form and colour ; when not even the shadow of a
breath dims the face of the faultless mirror ; the Highland fisherman
resorts to the language of figure in order to picture the scene.
He does not nixy fcdth inor as you find in Mark, l)ut Jenth geal—
the very metaphor which Homer puts into the mouth of Ulysses
in order to account for the perfect stillness that reigned within
the harbour of Lamos (Od., x. 94)—
" For there was a white calm around."
Again, in the Epistle of Jude, Enoch is described as the seventh
from Adam i.e. tiie se^•enth in descent ; but the English, like the
Gi-eek, is quite intelligible in the elliptical form. Not so the
Gaelic. Our translators supply the lacuna thus, " An seachdamh
pearsa o Adhamh "—a phrase which means whatever you may
mean by it. But when Lachlan ^lacvurrich gave his pedigree to
the Committee inquiring regarding the authenticity of Ossian's
poems he used different phraseology. He described himself as
" an t-ochdamh glun deug o Mliuireach a bha leanamhain teaghlach
Mhic 'Ic Ailein," this metaphor being our idiom to express
descent in line. It was only by a slavish adherence to the Ii'ish
translation that Highland gentlemen, whose forefathers lived in
tribes, and who could trace their own pedigrees back almost to
Enoch and Adam, could ever have fallen into snch a blunder as
this.
If we turn from words to phrases we find the same state of
matters in considerable profusion— native idioms rejected in favour
of foreign idioms. One of the most elementary rules of Gaelic syntax
is, that when one noun governs another in the genitive case, the
article can attach itself only to the latter an long mhor, but long
vihor nan tri chrann. Yetwe haveto thisday "a'cuimhjieachat/h nan
cuig aran nan ciiig mile. . . . nonanseachd arannanseachdmile,"
offending the taste of the Gaelic reader. In the classical tongues,
nouns in apposition agree in case. It is not so in Gaelic—the
specifying noun is put in the nominative case, fearann Sheumais
do rnhac, not do mhic. But in Sciipture the invariable idiom is
Litir an Absloil Phdil (instead of Pul) a chum nan Romanach,
«fec. Let me take one final illustration from the construction of
agus—a word which is far more fiexil^lc in Gaelic than and is in
English. Like the Latin ac and atque, agus expres.ses "equality"
and " comparison"
—
cho fhada '& cho fhada (so long and so long) is
equally long \ /had' 's is bed mi (as long and I live) is " as long as
—