THE RIMES IN THE AUTHENTIC POEMS OF WILLIAM DUNBAR. 645 



England and South of Scotland is the pronunciation of erk = ark, which survives in the 

 modern pronunciation of clerk = dark. But er before other consonants has not in Sect- 

 land the tendency, as in some parts of England, to become ar. What seems most 

 probable is that clerk then, as now, and as was the case with so many words in Dunbar's 

 time, had two pronunciations, of which the poet took advantage, just as in modern 

 English poetry no one hesitates to avail oneself of the two pronunciations of again = agen 

 or agen. 



§ 37. The rimes nek : effek : etc., instance a looseness of speech, a tendency to speak 

 with as little trouble as possible, which is a correlative indication of that tendency to 

 rapid change we have already noted in MSc. We have it exemplified in the loss of the 

 consonantal I, and in the loss of d and b after n and m respectively, as in hinner for 

 hinder, wunner for ivonder, lam for lamb, etc. How far such a tendency can go is 

 shown in the case of some Polynesian languages which have almost or entirely lost their 

 consonantal sounds ; and how far this might have gone in Scotland, but for the invention 

 of printing and consequent spread of education, it is impossible to say. But the fact 

 that these conservative factors were already in Dunbar's time beginning to work is to 

 me a valid argument that we should not expect the same rate of change which had 

 brought MSc. ahead of ME. to continue. And when we consider that not long after, 

 in the time of Knox, education became more general and of better quality in Scotland 

 than in England, and continued so, to a marked extent, up to the time of the adoption of 

 the School- Board system in England, and indeed even later, if not up to the present 

 day, we clearly have the reason why Scotch, which at one time ran ahead of English, 

 should soon after the time of Dunbar begin to lag, and should, at the present day, be 

 behind English in the sense of not yet having adopted such innovations of the present 

 century as the lengthening of the a in pass, gi'ass, etc. These factors, together with the 

 retention of the guttural spirant in Scotch, have tended to keep h in its original place, 

 while in nearly every other dialect of English it became and remains unstable, a con- 

 dition it was tending towards in Dunbar's time, as witness such spelling as hable, 

 habound, etc. 



I 38. We have here no instance of what Dr Gerken finds in Douglas of the riming of 

 end with eond (Gerken, § 8, l). In modern Scotch the word friend (freond) is nearly 

 always friin, which is Burns' pronunciation when he writes it as a Scotch word "frien," 

 as he rimes it with green, e'en, seen (Epistle to John Lapraik, verse 1). When he writes 

 it friend, he appears to use it as an English word, and rimes it with, for example, end 

 (Epistle to E. Graham) ; so I think we must regard the pronunciation frend as an 

 Anglicism. 



E, mutation of 6, rimes with 



quene : wene, 352, 46. 



„ : grene, 105, 76. 353, 88, etc., ttc. 

 grene : kene, 107, 137. 110, 199. 



,, : wene, 213, 62. 



5 a 



$39 



. 











a) itself. 













sweit : 



feit, 35, 9. 



358 



7. 







speid : 



meid, 352, 



33. 









quene 



kene, 284 



17. 



117, 



11. 





VOL. XXXIX. 



PART II] 



. (NO. 



25). 



