INTRODUCTION should give delicht. Delight, however, is a mis-spelling for delite, as the word never had a guttural sound in it. Some modern writers of Sc. who have no real knowledge or feeling for any Sc. dialect coin false Sc. words by such analogical reasoning — e.g. as lord gives laird, so accord should give accaird,1 as home gives hame so roam should give raim 1; as knee and knife had originally a sounded k, so also must nowt (cattle), hence we find knowte 2 written though the original word, Scand. naut, never had this sound. Phonetic Method of Comparison of Languages and Dialects. § 31. Languages and dialects may be compared in regard to pronunciation, grammar, idiom, vocabulary and intonation. Here we confine our attention to pronunciation, as being the distinction that most people notice first in varieties of their own speech, whether standard or dialect. Take for instance a sentence such as this: “Who whipped the poor little whelp that stood between you and me near that old stone dike?” In St.Sc. it might be written: “Wha whuppit that puir wee whalp at stude atween you an' me near the aul(d) stane dyke?” Whae, pair, stid, auld, stane, would indicate a Lothian Scottish speaker, but whaw, puir, stude, a Fif. or Perthshire man; yow and mey, stee'n, a Rxb. and e.Dmf. speaker; fa for who can be heard along the coast from the mouth of the Tay to the Pentland Firth; fuppit for whipt and folpie for whelp have their southern limit just south of the Dee; ssteen for stone is heard along the coast from the Tay to the Spev; puir becomes peer along the coast between the Dee and the Spey, but is pronounced with the diphthong of fewer in the Lowlands situated between the Spey and the Pentland Firth; it takes the sound of the Fr. eu [ø,æ] in Fif., Per., Ags. and the Mearns, Gall. and s.Sc., Ork. and Sh. In the insular area that, adj., and the are pronounced dat and de. In the following pages we shall give the principal phonetic differences between Sc. generally and St.Eng. and note a few of the differences between the various dialects, in both cases using O.E.3 — their common ancestor — as a background of comparison, with a few illustrations drawn from other languages, more especially Norse and Fr. Phonetic Comparison between Mod.Sc. and Mod.St.Eng. § 32. Words with ā in O.E. The following belong to a class of words which have ā in O.E. (pronounced like a in Mod.Eng. father) in their accented syllable. In Middle Sc. the representative of the sound is written variously ai, ay, a + cons. + e, æ, a, aa. In Mod.Sc. the vowel is pronounced as a in fate [e]; in Mod.Eng. it is spelled generally o, oa, o + cons. + e.

§ 32.1   O.E. Mod.Sc. Mod.Eng.    āc  aik  oak    āte  ait  oat    brād  braid  broad    drāf  drave  drove    hām  hame  home    lād  lade  load    lāe  lame  loam    rāpe  rape  rope    sāpe  saip  soap    tād  taid  toad    hāl  hale  whole § 32.2    gā(n)  gae  go    mā  mae  moe (obs.)    nā  nae  no    wā  wae  woe	§ 32.3   O.E. Mod.Sc. Mod.Eng.    ār  air (obsol.)  oar    hās  hairse, hairsch  hoarse    māra  mare  more    sār  sair  sore § 32.4    ān, pron.  ane  one    ānes  aince  once    bān  bane  bone    gān  gane  gone    nān  nane  none    stān  stane  stone

1 Culled from a modern Sc. magazine. 2 Waddell's Isaiah lxv. 19. This word has been severelyy dealt with in its passage down the ages. Its doublet nolt received an l because of its resemblance in sound to words like bowt and cowt which were originally spelled and pronounced with an l, bolt, colt. 3 O.E., as early as the 8th cent., appears in four dialects (1) West Saxon, (2) Kentish, (3) Mercian, (4) Northern English. From the third of these is descended St.Eng., and from the fourth, Sc. speech. The first — West Saxon — has come down to us in a fairly complete form, through a very extensive literature, and it has been written with a wonderful degree of phonetic accuracy. When the northern Eng. form of a word is not recorded, recourse will be had to West Saxon or to the other dialects.