Scottish Gaelic features in the BDL texts

The influence of vernacular Scottish Gaelic on the various types of text in BDL has long been recognised. A list of the most obvious features reflecting modern Scottish Gaelic practice has been compiled by Professor Watson (1922-24: 259 f.). Although Watson draws on the ballads, the present section offers a list of the most common vernacular features found in the corpus.  As the present edition indicates, certain BDL texts sometimes attest what appear to be Irish venacular features, although on a much smaller scale than Scottish Gaelic ones. This will bear closer examination by scholars of Irish. Here we may consider the levels at which vernacular Scottish Gaelic forms, occur in the ballad texts, and the wider implications of these features.

When a list of vernacular features in the BDL texts is compiled, the impression may be given that these occur systematically throughout the texts, and that a wholesale process of vernacularisation has been effected by the scribes. This, however, is far from being the case, as a glimpse at the texts themselves will demonstrate. If the scribes were indeed responsible for the vernacular forms in their texts, they have obviously missed many opportunities to bring their texts more closely into line with their native vernacular.  In order to keep a sense of balance with regard to vernacular innovations, the citation of Scottish Gaelic features is accompanied by examples of the Classical forms of the same features found in BDL.

The ambivalence of Classical and Scottish Gaelic forms in the MS may be seen in the treatment of the negative particle, which is cha(n) in modern Scottish Gaelic, and ní,  níor, and nocha(r) in Early Modern Irish. Where ní occurred in a text, it would have been easy for the scribes to have substituted cha(n) without disturbing the line. This substitution does occur from time to time, but there are sometimes long sequences where ní remains unaltered (see BDL X, qq. 16-21). It would thus seem that the scribes did not make a deliberate attempt to accommodate their texts fully to Scottish Gaelic practice; while they may have been conscious of the distinctions between Early Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the substitution of Scottish forms was clearly not a matter of urgency or convention.

Not only is the occurrence of vernacular forms in BDL sporadic, rather than systematic, it is also clear that the process involves only fairly minor textual adjustments. Usually the changes affect prepositions, conjunctions, forms of the article, initial mutations and other aspects of morphology and phonology. Syntactic changes are also in evidence, with the conditional tending to replace the subjunctive after dáN, and the imperfect indicative taking over from the conditional (see VI, 29 n, and X, 11 n, for examples and discussion). The attrition of verb endings is apparent too, with the creation of occasional nonce forms (see VI, 29 n, and cf. XX, 142, n). While most of these features are characteristic of Scottish Gaelic generally, features of the scribes' own dialect are attested, most commonly in the loss of unstressed syllables, especially in the final position.

Nevertheless, there is no major dislocation of the text; the lexis remains that of Early Modern Irish, and there are comparatively few examples of forms of nouns which are distinctively Scottish. Thus, in spite of vernacular Scottish Gaelic influence, BDL preserves very fine, mainstream Early Modern texts. These can usually be shown to be superior to versions found in DF or in other late Irish collections, although these are disposed to linguistic conservatism in areas where BDL is innovatory.

Two important questions arise with regard to the implanting of Scottish Gaelic vernacular features in BDL texts. The first is whether these forms were inserted by the BDL scribes, or whether they reflect a process involving previous transmitters of the poems. It seems fair to conclude that Perthshire dialect forms are to be attributed to the scribes, but with wider Scottish Gaelic features the evidence is difficult to interpret. There are occasional hints that the adjustment of certain phrases are part of a process which is not peculiar to the BDL scribes, since these apparent adjustments can sometimes be found in versions later than BDL. Thus, the loss of the preverb, and the insertion of the compensating syllable attested in BDL V, 47, are evidenced in a later Scottish text; while the form of the superscript in BDL XXIII, 2, in which the preverb is used as a relative with a primary tense, foreshadows the line as it appears in later Scottish versions. Such evidence, however, is not generally conclusive.  Perthshire Gaelic shares a core of general Scottish Gaelic features with the other Scottish dialects, in addition to those features which belong distinctively to Perthshire.

The second question is whether these Scottish vernacular features came to be embedded in the texts through an oral or literary medium. At first sight, an oral medium seems the more likely, and indeed this view might gain support from the fact that some adjustments in BDL are attested in later versions of certain poems derived from oral transmission. This, however, does not mean that alterations could not have been made at the literary level in the course of transcribing MSS. In the Middle Ages in the Gaelic world and further afield, the distinction between reading (especially silent reading) and oral recitation was probably not as rigidly defined as it is in the present day. It is quite possible that a scribe in copying from a MS could 'hear' his text in his head, and be able to make adjustments towards the vernacular as he went along. In any event, even if the vernacular forms came in initially at an oral level, this does not necessarily mean that the BDL scribes were deriving their material from oral sources; they could have been copying from exemplars in which these features were already in evidence, with oral transmission lying behind such exemplars.  There is some slight evidence, also, that the language in which one poem was composed may have been influenced from the beginning by Scottish vernacular features (see BDL II, 1 n, 11 n, 22 n, 29 n).

Negative particle 

Eclipsis

Verb forms

Noun endings and definite article

Prepositions and pronouns

Phonological