Scottish Lakes
Scotland has very few natural water bodies actually called 'lakes'. The Lake of Menteith, an Anglicisation of the Scots Laich o Menteith meaning a "low-lying bit of land in Menteith", and applied to the loch there because of the similarity of the sounds of the words laich and lake. The Lake of the Hirsel, Pressmennan Lake and Lake Louise are other bodies of water in Scotland which are called lakes and all are man-made.
The word "loch" is sometimes used as a shibboleth to identify natives of England, because the fricative sound is used in Scotland whereas most English people incorrectly pronounce the word like "lock". However, due to increasing Anglicisation and globalisation, today not even all Scots can pronounce the fricative and in attempting to say the word "loch", they instead make the sound of the word "lock" - i.e. they pronounce it the incorrect English way.
Read more about this topic: Loch
Famous quotes containing the words scottish and/or lakes:
“Our noble King, King Henery the eighth,
Ouer the riuer of Thames past hee.”
—Unknown. Sir Andrew Barton. . .
English and Scottish Ballads (The Poetry Bookshelf)
“While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognita to them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)