PHONETIC DESCRIPTION OF SCOTTISH LANGUAGE AND DIALECTS bleeze — blaze, meer — mare; i.e. he uses Older Sc. and Mod.Eng. spellings with very little consistency or method. The oo sound he represents generally in the Middle Sc. way — i.e. by ou, sometimes by ow, in the latter case generally suggesting an Eng. pronunciation as in sow (pig), cow, now, how, crowd, flow'r. The sound ui [y or ø], which in his time was probably still a rounded front vowel, he treats with the same inconsistency, the Eng. spelling of the word being the most common, broom, poor, goose, etc., although ui and u +cons. +e are also found, as bluid, guid, gude, schule. See Wilson's Dialects of Central Scotland, pp. 194-203. § 21. Fergusson, Burns and Scott all followed Ramsay's example, mingling Older Sc. spellings with Mod.Eng. spellings in the delineation of their common dialect, thus helping to obscure the real differences in pronunciation between it and St.Eng. The pronunciation can be best shown by means of a phonetic transcription which, though anathema to the average reader, is of great value to scholars. A form of simplified spelling was adopted by the late Sir James Wilson in which he used the ordinary letters of our alphabet but confined himself to one way, or in a few cases to two ways, of indicating ev ery sound — e.g. the vowel sound in Eng. lea is always written, by this system, ee, and the vowel in Eng. fade by ai, or, if final, ay. Sir James has rewritten in this simplified spelling a number of well-known Scottish songs and poems, and has thus been able to represent to the average reader, with a great deal of accuracy, the dialect pronunciation of their writers. The following is a sample from CallerHerrin': Neebour wives, now tent my tellin When the bonnie fish ye're sellin', At ay word be in your dealin. — Truth will stand when a' thing's failpa Neebur weifs, noo tent ma tellin. Hwun dhu boanay fush yee'r sellin At ay wurd bee in yur dailin — Truith ull stawnd hwun awthing'z fa ilin. (Wilson, Dial. Cent. Scol., 162-163.) Wives, now, my, when, bonnie, fish, dealin', truth, all misrepresent the Sc. word to the eyes of the reader, and dealin' and failin' spoil the rhyme. Read or recited with a pronunciation radically different from that of its author, a poem loses the sensuous effect intended, and therefore a very important artistic element. Sir James Wilson's handling of the common text will at least make everyone realise that, apart from vocabulary, there is a very great difference between written and spoken Scots. Dialect Literature. § 22. There have been, however, many Scots writers. from the early part of the 18th cent. up to the present, who have preferred to write in their own local dialect. They have been forced, in order to represent its peculiarities to outsiders, to spell their words in such a way as to indicate the pronunciation, and have followed, only with less consistency and effectiveness, a method similar to that adopted by Sir James Wilson as described above. We have verv little trace of these dialects prior to 1600, but we must assume their existence from an early date because of their marked differences from the standard form. In the modern period, Robert Forbes gives us, in his Ajax's Speech to the Grecian Knabbs and A Journal to Portsmouth (c.1742), examples of the Buchan dialect. From the same district, at a later period, we have an imitation of Christis Kirk on the Green in John Skinner's Monymusk Christmas Ba'in', and later still W. Alexander's Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk (1871). More recent examples of similar attempts are 'E Silkie Man by Rev. D. Houston, Lerwick, portraying the Cai. fisher dialect of Canisbay; Mang Howes an Knowes, by the late Elliot Smith, in s.Sc.; Galloway Gossip, by R. Trotter, in sm.Sc.; Dennison's writings in the Ork. and T. Manson's Humours of a Peat Commission in the Sh. dialect. Most Scotsmen whose eyes are accustomed to the spelling of literary Scots find considerable difficulty in reading these specimens of local speech. There are, however, many authors who lie between these two extremes. They wish to address themselves to all Scotsmen and accordingly follow the general literary convention, but every now and again they use a spelling that indicates a local pronunciation, or employ a word or an idiom that betrays their district origin. Their whole atmosphere, all their associations, may be local notwithstanding the general form of their speech. George Macdonald belongs to this type of Scottish author — e.g. he spells who and good as wha and gude, but his own pronunciation would be fa and gweed. Some writers even vary their Scots with their subject or with their supposed