Orthography

The greatest difference between BDL and most other Gaelic MSS lies in its orthography. The scribes employ a spelling-system largely unrelated to the standard orthography of classical Common Gaelic, which was taught in the bardic schools, and which can be seen in John Carswell’s translation of The Book of Common Order of 1567. The scribes were evidently not ignorant of normal Gaelic orthography, since characteristics of that orthography are fossilised in certain of their spellings, and entire words occasionally appear in Gaelic form, where it would have been possible for the scribes to produce alternative spellings more in line with the basic patterns of their own method. This might suggest that their decision to reject conventional Gaelic orthography was deliberate, but that this orthography continued to exert some influence, particularly when non-Gaelic orthography was incapable of conveying the desired sounds, or could do so only clumsily. See Guide to BDL's orthographic system.

The basis of the orthography in BDL has long been recognised to be that of Middle Scots, the term usually applied to the stage in the development of Scots – the vernacular language of the Scottish Lowlands – which had been attained by c. 1400, and which persisted until c. 1560. The extension of Middle Scots orthography to Gaelic is a step of much greater significance than the adoption of an alien script, especially when maintained consistently throughout the Gaelic items in the MS, with only occasional evidence of conventional Gaelic orthography. The degree of scribal commitment to the Scots-based system is all the more striking when one considers that the MS is probably the work of more than one scribe, that it was compiled over thirty years, and that James MacGregor, whose name it bears, must have encountered some practitioners of ‘traditional’ Gaelic orthography.

The scribes’ commitment to their Scots-based spelling-system was not, however, based on personal idiosyncracy. There is good reason to believe that several such systems, related in principle to one another but differing according to dialects and scribal preferences (as demonstrated in BDL itself), were in use in late medieval Scotland, especially in areas (usually linguistic frontier zones) where Scots and Gaelic came into contact with one another in a bilingual context. When BDL was compiled, Scots was enjoying considerable prestige in legal and literary domains, and it seems likely that the MS reflects the culmination of a conscious or subconscious process of lowland Scotticisation which, in circumstances of Scots-dominated bilingualism, produced a Scots-based orthographic system (or systems) for Gaelic (see further Meek 1989a/1996, 1989b).