Page:The Celtic Review volume 5.djvu/91

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SCOTTISH GAELIC DIALECTS
79

by blood, and as those who had for some time been calling themselves Camerons were not Macgillonies, it would have been extremely unwise for them to try to force their own name on the whole clan.

It is stated in several works that the Macgillonies of Strone fought against the Camerons at Corpach, when John Og of Coll was slain. There is no ground for this assertion. The Macleans had been in possession of Corpach for several years. The Camerons made an unexpected attack upon them and put them to the sword. There may have been some fighting, but there was no battle. Some of the Macgillonies of Strone—possibly persons who had been living with John Og of Coll—took charge of his son, John Abrach, a boy about two years of age, and went with him to Coll. They acted kindly to John Abrach and his mother—a daughter of Ewen Maclean of Kingerloch—but we are not to assume that they had been fighting against the Macgillonies or Camerons of Lochiel.


SCOTTISH GAELIC DIALECTS

Rev. C. M. Robertson

(Continued from vol. iv. p. 280)

Assimilation

Where a liquid is assimilated to a following liquid or other consonant, the preceding vowel if short, as will be exemplified in some of the instances to be quoted, often becomes long in pronunciation. Thus millse (or milse) sweeter, where i is short and ll long, may be heard as mìse in West Ross. The vowel in such cases is not infrequently marked long in writing, and certainly where the assimilated liquid is left out in the spelling the marking of this compensatory lengthening of the vowel may be justified; but when the silenced liquid is retained in the spelling it would seem better to leave the vowel without the long mark. Thus, to mark i long would be justifiable if we were writing mìse