ERSE, the language of the descendants of the Gaels or Celts, in the highlands of Scotland.—Ersc is a corruption of iris/J. The highlanders were supposed by their Gothic neighbors to be an Irish colony, and hence the name given to their lan guage. The highlanders themselves in variably call it Gaelic. it first attracted notice after the publication in the English language of the poems of Ossian, said to be derived from it about the middle of the last century. These, it was pre tended, were translated from inaum,cripts in the translator's possession; but such poems in a written form, it is now suffi ciently known, never had any existence either in the Irish or Gaelic language. Although not committed to writing, or rather not handed down in writing, these poems, committed to memory and hand ed down from ono bard or story-teller to another, still exist in the highlands of Scotland, and in a dress not remote from that in which they were rendered by Macpherson into English. Their scene is sometimes laid in Scotland, but more fre quently in Ireland. In short, they aro the Iliad and Odyssey of the Celtic rare of the two islands, handed down by tradi tion only,—what the poems of]Tamer were in all likelihood to the Greeks themselves, before the art of writing was known to them. The Erse, although tt.
rude and uncultivated language, is a nervous and manly one, both as to ex pression and splint], and well suited to poetry, whether sublime or tender. The range of its sounds is vory great ; for it possesses twelve vowels, and no less than eight cc n diphthongs a nd triphthongs, with h forty-one consonants, including aspirates. Many of the consonants are guttural ; and of these, as well of the vooalic sounds, there arc several utterly unpronounce able by a stranger : the attempts made to express such a variety of sounds by the Roman alphabet are, of course, both awkward and imperfect. As to the grammar, that of the Gaelic is of complex structure, implying a primitive languago which has undergone little change by ad mixture with other tongues.