BRITONS WHO DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17633, 9 December 1922, Page 10

BRITONS WHO DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH.

Few English people realise that to the Hebridean islesmen English is just as much a foreign tongue as —shall we say?— French or German (writes Seton Gordon in a London paper). Yet : along the western sea-board of Scotland and in the Hebrides many of the older generation can speak no word of English. . The younger generation are better educated and converse in the language of the South, but it is always in Gaelic that they think. Few of the visitors to the Hebrides have any knowledge of Gaelic. The islanders thus have considerable difficulty in understanding their speech, and it is surprising how happy they become should the_ stranger snow even a superficial acquaintance with their language. Gaelic is a difficult speech to master. It contains many pitfalls for the unwary. Its alphabet is limited; it has no j, k, g, v, w, x, y, or z. Yet the v sound sound is found in many words; it is made by the letters mh, or bh. Thus mhor (great) is pronounced vor. There is no j sound in the language. For instance, John becomes lain. Gaelic 'is a language rich in songs. They are simple and mostly sad. They are usually sung to no accompaniment. The dwellings of the Hebridearn islesmen are often of the most primitive There are not more than .two rooms. In the case of a woman tweed-weaver with a family of eight, these two rooms measure no more than twelve feet square, and the hand-loom occupies a good quarter of the space in the livingroom. The floor is of earth, and is periodically sprinkled with fine whit© sand, which is carried in a sack from the shore two miles away. There is no chimney, yet a peat fire smoulders day and night "on the hearth and the smoke escapes through the door and a hole in the roof in the opposite side bf the room to the fire. So thick is the room with peat smoke, it is almost impossible to see across it and one's eyea smart painfully. Hence the well-known smell of the so-called Harris tweed (the cloth is made not,,only in Harris but in all the Outar Hebrides},