THE GAELIC LANGUAGE. 239 



will say, He isi in his king, Tha e 'na righ, or, It is a king that is in 

 him, Is e righ a tha ami. She is a good woman, is expressed in Gaelic 

 by the j)hrase : She is in her good woman, or, It is a good woman that 

 is in her ; Is hean mhath a tha innte. It is not easy to explain how 

 such a form as this came to be used. Perhaps when the language 

 was in process of formation, the ideas of the people in regard to 

 personal identity may have been unsettled. The doctrine of the 

 transmigration of souls and the facility with which, it was believed, 

 witches and others could transform themselves into hares and other 

 animals, may have led to a belief that bodies were not always possessed 

 by the same s; -irit. It was a common superstition which is perhaps not 

 yet wholly extinct, that there were " little men" living in the hills, at 

 times invisible, who, after stealing children, would transform them- 

 selves into their exact image, so tliat the mothers would take them for 

 their own and nurse them tenderly at the breast until some Jiosaic/ie, 

 or seer, would shew them that they were nursing some toothless, 

 grey-haired old man from some neighbouring hill or bruth. These 

 legends regarding the hill dwellers or fairies, may have a historical 

 basis, and may be a shadowy remembrance in the mind of the Gaelic 

 race of the aborigines of the west of Europe, whom they, on their 

 arrival, displaced. In Gaelic the idea of possession or ownership is 

 expressed by that of proximity. Tha sgian again— the knife is at 

 me. That knife is mine, is in Gaelic, Is leamsi an sgian sin, It is 

 with me that knife is. 



In Gaelic, changes may take place either at the beginning or at the 

 end of a word, and the meaning may be much changed by what is 

 called aspiration. For instance, tog means lift; thog, lifted. The 

 possessive adjective a may be masculine or feminine, but this is 

 determined by the form of the following word, as a ceann, her head, 

 a cheann, his head. In Welsh, on the other hand, the word after the 

 feminine adjective is aspirated. It is now known that these changes 

 in the old language depended on other cau.ses. 



Gaelic and Irish are so nearly alike that, although the two races 

 have been separated for perhaps thirteen hundred yeai's, any intelli- 

 gent, educated Highlander can read Irish almost as easily as he can 

 his own language. Manx is also the same language written phone- 

 tically. Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, form a group distinct from, but 

 closely allied to, Gaelic and Irish. 



