Lanterna Rally

Author: James Wilson

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-07-20

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 9781331906346

Excerpt from As Spoken in the Lower Strathearn District of Perthshire The scholarly study of Scottish dialects is no new thing. More than a century ago its foundations were firmly laid by the extensive and careful work of Dr. Jamieson, whose dictionary still remains the great source of information on the subject. There have been other good and active workers since his day, but much remains to be done before the task can be regarded as completed. For the deficiencies which still have to be made good there are in the main two reasons. One of these is that the Lowland dialects are not at all sharply divided from each other, so that there is little apparent ground for dealing with each of them separately. The tendency has thus been to consider Scottish speech as a whole, instead of as a collection of dialects, - a view which has been greatly assisted by the use of a more or less standard form for literary purposes. The other reason is that greater attention has been given to the vocabulary than to the sounds of the language, though even here the recorded information is often lacking in fullness and precision, leaving it doubtful how far a particular word is in use over a given area. It is only within recent times that the exact form of individual dialects has become a subject of serious study, but in some countries of Europe this branch of philological investigation has already been carried on very extensively. A fair number of English dialects have now been dealt with in this way, and others are being gradually added to the list, but in Scotland the work is only now beginning to be seriously undertaken. There can be no doubt that if it is to be done at all, it should be done without delay; another generation is certain to modify most dialects in certain respects, and may possibly obliterate distinctions which at present are quite clear. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.