Said by Highlanders to Have Been Gaelic
The Scottish Highlanders have always been firmly convinced that Adam and Eve used “ta Gaelic;” and it is gratifying to find that philologists, as they grow wiser, are coming round to the same opinion, says the Scottish American. It is true that they have made no express admission to this effect as yet, but there ie evidence that we are on the eve of an acknowledgment that Gaelic was the original language of the human race.
The latest deliverance on the subject, if it does not altogether silence these skeptics and scoffers who derided this article of Highland faith, ought to at least make them give pause. Dr. Leitner, a distinguished German orientalist and philologist, has declared Gaelic to be a “contemporary or derivative of the Prakit, closely allied to the spoken lauguage and out of which Sanscrit became a written language.” He even goes so far as to assert that there seem to be in the Gaelic “certain survivals of a prehistoric language.”
Clearly this point in the direction of the Highland contention, and the present acknowledgment, therefore, although tardy, and not, perhaps, quite so full as might be desired, will no doubt be welcome.
But Gaelic has another distinction. It is, as even the Sassenach knows, the language to swear in. The distinction, however, is that one does not quite harmonize with the theory of its Paradisaical origin.
The Ketchum, Keystone, Ketchum, ID, April 2, 1898