he language. We have one or two inscriptions in
Latin characters, such as that at St Vigeans and the Ogams mentioned
above, which have not yet been solved. In the _Book of Deir_ there is a
colophon of a few lines probably written by an Irish scribe in the 9th
century, and as the language of these lines differs in no wise from the
Irish of the period, we do not know if they accurately represent the
Gaelic of Scotland or if they may not be pure Irish. In the same MS.
there are further Gaelic scraps belonging to the 11th and 12th
centuries. The word-forms in these entries are identical with those
current at the time in Ireland, but the historical orthography seems to
show more signs of decay than is the case in Irish. The medieval
Scottish MSS. in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh are only just being
published, but they seem either to hail from Ireland or to be written in
pure Irish. The end of the 15th century brought a change. The Lordship
of the Isles, the great bond between Ireland and Scotland, was broken
up. The Gaels of Scotland, thrown on their own resources, advanced their
own dialect to the position of a literary language and tried to discard
the Irish orthography. The _Book of the Dean of Lismore_, compiled about
1500, is written in a kind of phonetic orthography which has not as yet
been sufficiently investigated. The language of those poems which are
not directly ascribed to Irish poets, and which may therefore be
regarded as representing the literary language of the Highlands at the
time, seems to occupy a position midway between Irish and Scottish
Gaelic. But until the beginning of the 18th century the Highlands were
under the literary dominion of Ireland, so much so that Bedell's Irish
version of the Scriptures was circulated in Scotland with a glossary
from 1690 to 1767, and Bishop Carsewell's version of Knox's Prayer-book
(1567) is pure Irish. The language of the people is poorly represented
in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the orthography is not fixed until
we reach the 18th century.

Irish and Scottish Gaelic differ considerably in point of vocabulary,
but there are also important divergences in phonetics and inflections.
In the first place, Scottish Gaelic as written has entirely given up
the nasal mutation (eclipse), e.g. Scottish _ar bo_, "our cow," Irish
_ar m-bo_; Scottish _nan tir_, "of the countries," Irish _na d-tir_.
It should, however, be observed that in Skye and the Outer Isl