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The History and Poetry of the Scottish Border
The History and Poetry of the Scottish Border Author:John Veitch Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. ORIGINAL INHABITANTS NAMES OF PLACES AND NATURAL OBJECTS. Another important and perhaps more definite source of information and inference r... more »egarding the original inhabitants of the Lowlands is to be found in the language of the district. Here we must look both at the vernacular spoken and written, and particularly at the names of places and natural features of the country. These latter are frequently the symbols of races of men, which witness for them when they are gone, and when there is neither memory nor trace of their homes or their graves. Any one who scans the Ordnance map of the valley of the Tweed and the Lowlands generally will readily be impressed with the fact that the great proportion of names there is Teutonic. The dwelling-places of men, the most of the smaller streams or burns, the shaws, the rauirs, and the lower hills, bear Teutonic appellations.1 It is, however, by no means an easy matter to assign to each of the different branches of the Teutonic language its share of those names, whether we look to the chief orto the subordinate ramifications of the language represented by that name. And here it should be explained that certain terms connected with this point,—especially Saxon and Anglo-Saxon,—are somewhat vague, and open to misconception. When I use Anglo-Saxon as applied to a portion of the Teutonic speech and people, I intend it to apply to the three tribes, Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, who were allied in race, and who used a common language, with, of course, dialectical differences. These tribes certainly came to be supreme over a large portion of the early Celtic area of Britain, and they imposed their language on the sphere of their influence. The Eomans and Celts applied the term Saxon to those three tribes individually and collectivel...« less