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:
“Better wear out shoes than sheets.”
—18th-century Scottish proverb, collected in J. Kelly, Complete Collection of Scottish Proverbs (1721)
“White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)