GALLOWAY GOSSIP.
Galloway Gossip. By R. de Bruce Trotter. (Courier and Herald, Dumfries.)—Dr. Trotter claims to write the Scots language in its purity. Commonly, it seems, it is corrupted from an ignoble complaisance to English tastes. " I have," he writes in his preface, "over one thousand volumes by Scotch authors, and in no one of them has the Scotch been left in its pristine rudeness." Here the reader will find "strictly grammatical Scotch." It is not worth while arguing the point; but we would remark (1) that there are certain logical rules of grammar which every language is found to follow, and (2) that no language can be said to reach the grammatical stage till it has a literature. Galloway has no more claim to be independent in these respects than, say, Wiltshire. In the Wiltshire dialect, " Do they not ?" is changed into " Don 'ism?" Should we be justified in saying that in grammatical Wiltshire " the verb to be always has an objective case after it," to quote one of Dr. Trotter's canons ? Is " gutteral," we should like to know, Galloway orthography ? As for the book, it is sufficiently amusing, though we must own to a preference, for literary purposes, for the modified Scotch which Dr. Trotter so despises. This is a little hard for a Southron to understand, and—so our author frankly tells us—impossible to pronounce. Some of the tales are variants of well-known anecdotes. We find, for instance, a tale that we heard many years ago told of Dr. Wolff of Bakhara fame told here of a newly enriched laird. Do Galloway people describe a mermaid as a "submarine sweetheart " ? That does not exactly smack of the soil.
Previous page
