[27] Pinkerton's Inquiry into the History of Scotland.
[28] _E.g._, troidh _a foot_, has been written troidh or troigh, either of which corresponds to the pronunciation, as the last consonant is quiescent. In Welsh, the articulation of the final consonant has been preserved, and the word is accordingly written troed. This authority seems sufficient to determine the proper orthography in Gaelic to be troidh and not troigh. For a like reason, perhaps, it would be proper to write tràidh _shore_, rather than tràigh, the common way of spelling the word, for we find the Irish formerly wrote tràidh, and the Welsh traeth. Claidheamh _a sword_, since the final articulation was wholly dropped, has been sometimes written claidhe. The mode of writing it still with a final labial, though quiescent, will probably be thought the more proper of the two, when it is considered that claidheamh is the cognate, or rather the same word with the Irish cloidheamh the Welsh cleddyf, and the French glaive.
[29] I flatter myself that all my readers, who are acquainted with any of the ancient or the modern languages which have a distinction of gender in their attributives, will readily perceive that the import of the term Gender, in the grammar of those languages, is precisely what I have stated above. The same term has been introduced into the grammar of the English Tongue, rather improperly, because in an acceptation different from what it bears in the grammar of all other languages. In English there is no distinction of gender competent to Articles, Adjectives, or Participles. When a noun is said to be of the masculine gender, the meaning can only be that the object denoted by it is of the male sex. Thus in the English grammars, gender signifies a quality of the _object_ named, while in other grammars it signifies a quality of the _name_ given to the object. The varieties of _who_, _which_, and _he_, _she_, _it_, refer not to what is properly called the _gender_ of the antecedent _noun_, but to the _Sex_ real or attributed, or the _absence of Sex_, of the _object_ signified by the antecedent. This is in effect acknowledged by writers on rhetoric, who affirm that in English the pronouns _who_, _he_, _she_, imply an express personification, or attribution of life, and consequently of Sex, to the objects to which these pronouns refer. The same thing is still more strikingly true of the variations on the termination of nouns, as _prince_, _princess_; _lion_, _lioness_, which are all discriminative of Sex. It seems therefore to be a mis-stated compliment which is usually paid to the English, when it is said that "this is the only language which has adapted the gender of its nouns to the constitution of Nature." The fact is, that it has adapted the _Form_ of some of the most common names of living creatures, and of a few of its pronouns, to the obvious distinction of _male_, and _female_, and _inanimate_, while it has left its nouns without any mark characteristic of _gender_. The same thing must necessarily happen to any language by abolishing the distinction of masculine and feminine in its attributives. If all languages had been constructed on this plan, it may confidently be affirmed that the grammatical term _gender_ would never have come into use. The compliment intended, and due to the English, might have been more correctly expressed, by saying that "it is the only language that has rejected the unphilosophical distinction of gender, by making its attributives, in this respect, all indeclinable."