3. Of the double forms, sung and sang, drank and drunk, &c. one only will be the permanent.
As stated above, these tendencies are a few out of a number, and have been adduced in order to indicate the subject rather than to exhaust it.
[§ 182]. What the present language of England would have been had the Norman Conquest never taken place, the analogy of Holland, Denmark, and of many other countries enables us to determine. It would have been much as it is at present. What it would have been had the Saxon conquest never taken place, is a question wherein there is far more speculation. Of France, of Italy, of Wallachia, and of the Spanish Peninsula, the analogies all point the same way. They indicate that the original Celtic would have been superseded by the Latin of the conquerors, and consequently that our language in its later stages would have been neither British nor Gaelic, but Roman. Upon these analogies, however, we may refine. Italy, was from the beginning, Roman; the Spanish Peninsula was invaded full early; no ocean divided Gaul from Rome; and the war against the ancestors of the Wallachians was a war of extermination.
CHAPTER III.
ON THE LOWLAND SCOTCH.
[§ 183]. The term Lowland is used to distinguish the Scotch of the South-east from the Scotch of the Highlands. The former is English in its immediate affinities, and Germanic in origin; the latter is nearly the same language with the Gaelic of Ireland, and is, consequently, Celtic.
The question as to whether the Lowland Scotch is a dialect of the English, or a separate and independent language, is a verbal rather than a real one.
Reasons for considering the Scotch and English as dialects of one and the same language lie in the fact of their being (except in the case of the more extreme forms of each) mutually intelligible.