Dr. O’Donovan, in his Irish Grammar, gives a statement of these
differences, which is somewhat meagre. He appears, however, to have
had little knowledge of Scotch Gaelic, except what he gathered from
Stewart’s Grammar; and this statement of the differences between the
two dialects is taken almost _verbatim_ from a prior statement of them
by P. M’Eligott, in the Transactions of the Gaelic Society, published
in 1808, p. 15.
Dr. O’Donovan, in his account of grammars previously published,
gives Stewart very just praise for the excellence of his Grammar;
but throughout his own work he never loses an opportunity of carping
at him, and is especially indignant at him for daring to state that
the Scotch Gaelic wants the present tense of the verb, and very
disingenuously quotes Shaw’s Grammar as a superior authority. He
likewise attacks Stewart for not producing ancient MSS. to prove
it, and for not seeing that the present tense is used by Bishop
Carsewell, in 1564. Stewart, however, was not undertaking a grammar
of the _ancient_ Scotch Gaelic, but of the dialect _then_ spoken
by the people; and most unquestionably, in the spoken dialect of
Stewart’s time, the present tense was not used. Dr. O’Donovan denies
this fact, and even charges Stewart with dishonesty. His theory is,
“that Stewart was induced to reject this tense, in order to establish
a striking point of resemblance between the Erse and the Hebrew,
which the Irish, supposed to be the mother tongue, had not,”--a most
unworthy insinuation, and most unphilosophical, for O’Donovan ought
to have known that the changes which take place in the structure of
spoken languages proceed from organic laws which cannot be influenced
or directed by grammarians. The will of any single man is powerless
to alter the minutest particle in the language; and the fact that the
inflected present tense is not used in Scotch Gaelic, is evident to any
one acquainted with the language, or who has come in contact with those
who speak it.
Dr. O’Donovan also finds fault with Stewart for expressing an opinion
that, “as the Erse dialect has not the inflections in the termination
of its verbs, which characterize the Irish, it is therefore more
original than the Irish.” This is, no doubt, an erroneous view; and
O’Donovan correctly states “that the mode of inflection, by varying
the termination, is more ancient than the use of particles;” but he
might have recollected that the contrary opinion was very generally
held when Stewart wrote; that the sounder principles of philology, in
this respect, were not known or understood till after the publication
of his Grammar; and that he could not, with any candour, impute it to
him as a fault that he had not anticipated the conclusions of a science
which had, so to speak, been created subsequently to his time. That
the same peculiarities existed in the language in the last century, is
proved by the fact that the Gaelic colonists in Canada, who have been
separated from the mother country since that period, speak a form of
Scotch Gaelic precisely similar to that now spoken in the Highlands,
and possessing all those dialectic peculiarities which distinguish it
from Irish. Although the present tense of the verb is usually expressed
by the auxiliary, the Highlanders also use the future tense to express
the present.
The leading differences between Irish and Scotch Gaelic may be stated
generally as follows:--