140 Transactions. 



well for us that we have in Dr Jamieson's " Scotch Dictionary" 

 such an excellent collection. Testing this collection by the woi'ds 

 I have gathered, I am astonished, not so much at a few omissions 

 as at the laborious and exhaustive collation he has made. Gene- 

 rally when I got a new word I opened his dictionary, and with a 

 little painstaking I found it in some form or other there. With a 

 few words my search was long-continued. Dialect is not under 

 reins like the Queen's English. It runs a good deal loose at its 

 own free will. Gaelic scholars tell us a Skye man could scarcely 

 make himself intelligible in the Isle of Arran, nor a native of 

 Sutherland understand the patois of Breadalbane. It is the same 

 with the dialects of English. Consonantal and vowel changes, 

 depending on Grimm's law and on multiform divergent circum- 

 stances, changes like those so admirably discussed in Piele's intro- 

 duction to Greek and Latin etymology are to be met with. Thus 

 I look for Feiime, and I get it under Veem ; I look for Rauner, and 

 get it under Rander ; for Haizard, and it is written Rizzard ; for 

 Witter, 2.\A it is under Otter; for Xfw^/^ef, meaning "favours," 

 and I get it under Kinchis, a kind of rope ; and just in the middle 

 of the discussion on ropes, one of its meanings is " unexpected 

 advantages," which I believe is my Kenches thus cavalierly dis- 

 posed of. My Gameril is entered Cameril. Yaupish, meaning 

 " hungry," is entered Yape or Yap. Terminal d jumps in and out. 

 The consonant r is of mercurial temperament, and you cannot 

 predicate on which side of the vowel it will be found. In rare 

 cases initial letters or syllables disappear, as Toush for Cartouche, 

 and Oris for Worts. As for vowels, you are pretty much in the 

 position of the student of those Hebrew manuscripts, which have 

 none. Peile says that there is much reason to believe Indo- 

 Europeaus begun with one vowel only, the sound of a in father, 

 which hay become, by the law of least action, the father of the 

 other vowels that require a very little less stress to articulate. In 

 the Scotch dialect a often betrays a tendency to escape from itself ; 

 e and i change places, and altogether hardly a single district 

 abides exactly by the vowel sounds of another. As to etymology, 

 I have, with very few exceptions, let that alone. My impres- 

 sion is that the study of dialects proves there is no Scottish nation 

 distinct from Eng-lish. The Anglo-Saxon in both countries speak 

 dialectical varieties of the same language. I believe there are 

 more words of Celtic origin in the dialect of Renfrewshire than in 



