Spoken dialects of Irish. Before letters were introduced, however, there could have been no fixed standard of language. Each Tuath, or tribe, had probably its own variety of the common speech; but these all, no doubt, belonged to that branch of the Celtic language called Gaelic. There would thus be as many varieties of the spoken Gaelic as there were independent tribes.53 The tendency of language at this stage is to go through a process of corruption and decay. It is then easily modified by surrounding circumstances and affected by external influences, which an oral literature, consisting of the songs and legends of a rude people, is powerless to control. This tendency would be arrested only when a written and cultivated language was formed under the influence of the Christian Church, and a common standard of the language, in its most perfect shapes and preserving its older forms, was established, which was spoken and written by rejecting the Ogham as spurious, as read in 1848 and 1849 to the same body as that referred to by Mr. Burton (see Proc. R. I. A., vol. iv. pp. 174, 356); and the investigations of Dr. Graves and Dr. Samuel Ferguson in Ireland, and Professor Westwood in Wales, all of which Mr. Burton simply ignores, have placed the genuineness of the Ogham inscriptions beyond the reach of challenge. 53Not only the several provinces of Ireland,' says Donlevy, 'have a different way of pronouncing, but also the very counties, and even baronies in one and the same county, differ in the pronunciation. Nay, some cantons pronounce so oddly that the natural sound of both vowels and consonants, whereof (even according to themselves) the words consist, is utterly lost in their mouths.'-Quoted in Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Dublin, p. 13. Donlevy published an Irish-English Catechism in 1742. the cultivated class of the community, and to a knowledge of which a portion of the people were raised by education. Under its influence the numerous varieties of the spoken language became more assimilated, until at length we find that in the main there remain only four forms of the vernacular Irish, which were peculiar to the four great provinces of Munster, Ulster, Leinster, and Connaught, into which the country was divided. There was also an old division of Ireland by a line drawn across the island from Dublin to Galway into two parts, termed respectively Leth Cuinn and Leth Mogha. This division was known to Bede, who distinguished between the northern provinces of the Scots and the nations of the Scots dwelling in the northern districts of Ireland.54 The northern half contained the provinces of Connaught and Ulster and the old province of Meath, which is now included in Leinster, and the seaboard of which formed the plain of Bregia, or Magh Bregh, mentioned more than once by Adamnan.55 The southern half consisted of the old provinces of Leinster and Munster; and the difference in the spoken language between the northern and southern Irish was somewhat more marked. ties of Irish The peculiarities in the spoken Gaelic of the four pro- Peculiarivinces are thus expressed in the following sayings current dialects. in most parts of Ireland : The Munster man has the accent without the propriety. The Leinster man has neither the propriety nor the accent. The Connaught man has both the accent and the propriety.56 The difference in these four dialects is mainly in words, pronunciation, and idiom; but the grand difference between 54 Bede, Hist. Ec., B. iii. c. 3. 56 O'Donovan's Grammar of the Irish Language, p. lxxiii. Written the vernacular Irish of the northern and that of the southern part of Ireland consists in the position of the accent, in the vowel sounds, and in the form of the verb. In the north the primary accent is on the root of the word, or the first syllable, and the secondary accent on the termination; but in the south the primary accent is on the termination, and the secondary accent on the root, if short.57 The vowel sounds vary very much, their most perfect pronunciation being in Connaught. In the verb, the analytic form-or that in which the verb has a common form for all the persons, and these are expressed by separate pronouns, while the auxiliary verb is more employed-is used in the spoken language of the north, and principally in Ulster. The synthetic or inflected form, which is the more ancient, is generally used in the south of Ireland; and in this respect it approaches more closely the forms of the written or cultivated language, and shows a less degree of corruption than the vernacular of the north. In the written Irish, the more ancient verbal forms have been preserved in their entirety, and there is a complete system of inflections, with a very copious vocabulary, of which several glossaries have been preserved. The most ancient is that attributed to Cormac mac Cuilennan, king and bishop of Cashel, who was killed in the year 903; and the greater part of it undoubtedly belongs to that period.58 There has also been preserved an ancient Grammar termed Uraicecht na m-Eiges, or Precepts of the Poets, which is certainly not much later in date; 59 but Zeuss' great work, the Grammatica Celtica, exhibits the grammar of this written language in its most complete shape, as he has constructed it from materials furnished by MSS. of the eighth and ninth centuries. 57 O'Donovan's Grammar of the Irish Language, p. 404. 58 Printed by Mr. Whitley Stokes in his Irish Glossaries, who has also edited a translation for the Irish Archæological Society. 59 Copies are contained in the Books of Ballimote and Lecan. Gaelic, Such being, in the main, the position of the Gaelic lan- Scotch guage in Ireland and the relation between the written and cultivated language and the spoken dialects, we find that Scotland presents to us, in connection with the distribution of her languages, somewhat peculiar phenomena, which are more difficult of solution. If a line is drawn from a point on the eastern bank of Loch Lomond, somewhat south of Ben Lomond, following in the main the line of the Grampians, and crossing the Forth at Aberfoil, the Teith at Callander, the Almond at Crieff, the Tay at Dunkeld, the Ericht at Blairgowrie, and proceeding through the hills of Brae Angus till it reaches the great range of the Mounth, then crossing the Dee at Ballater, the Spey at lower Craigellachie, till it reaches the Moray Firth at Nairn-this forms what was called the Highland Line, and separated the Celtic from the Teutonic-speaking people. Within this line, with the exception of the county of Caithness which belongs to the Teutonic division, the Gaelic language forms the vernacular of the inhabitants, and beyond it prevails the broad Scotch. The one is as much a dialect of Irish, and is substantially the same language, as the other is of the Anglic or Anglo-Saxon. There are small and unimportant provincial varieties observed in both; yet each forms essentially one dialect; and Scotch Gaelic must be viewed as simply a provincial variety of the spoken Gaelic, of the same class as the provincial varieties of the vernacular Gaelic in Ireland. It exhibits some differences which are peculiar to itself. In other points it corresponds with one or other of the Irish dialects. The primary accent in Scotch Gaelic is invariably on the first syllable of the word, and the analytic form of the verb, with the use of the auxiliary verb, is preferred to the synthetic. In these respects it corresponds with the spoken language of the north of Ireland, and its vowel sounds approach most nearly to those of the Connaught dialect. Scotch Gaelic is, in fact, so far, more Origin of the Scotch Gaelic. closely allied to the northern Irish than the latter is to the spoken language of the south; but there are other peculiarities of Scotch Gaelic which seem due to influence from another quarter. It forms the genitive plural of some nouns by adding the syllable an, in which it resembles Welsh forms. It does not use that phonetic change of the initial consonant, termed by Irish grammarians 'eclipsis.' It drops the final vowel in some substantives, and the future tense of its verb resembles the present tense of the Irish verb, while for the present it uses the auxiliary with the present participle. These peculiarities Scotch Gaelic shares with Manx, or the Gaelic of the Isle of Man; and it indicates that this vernacular form of Gaelic had been arrested at a somewhat later stage in its process of disintegration than the northern dialects of Irish. The whole of the mountain region of Scotland with its islands within the Highland line, with the exception of Caithness, thus possessing a dialect of spoken Gaelic which must be ranked with the vernacular dialects of Ireland, the natural inference is that it must at all times have been peopled by a homogeneous race. But when we inquire into the elements which enter into its early population, we find that, prior to the ninth century, it consisted, in name at least, of two different races. In that part of Argyllshire which formed the kingdom of Dalriada, with the islands south of the promontory of Ardnamurchan, were the Scots, who unquestionably immigrated from Ireland in the beginning of the sixth century; while the whole of the rest of this region, with the islands north of Ardnamurchan, was peopled by the Pictish tribes. If these two races were not homogeneous, the question arises, How did this Gaelic dialect spread over the whole of it? To this question Irish writers usually return a very short and ready answer. They tell us that the Irish colony of Scots spread gradually over the western districts; that in the ninth century they subjugated the Picts; that the |