Kine/Kye noun cows, cattle, cow
‘“Robbie and Sandy’ve gone to tend the kine…”’ (Written in my own Heart’s Blood)
Most plural nouns are indicated very simply in present-day English by adding an ‘s’. However, there are a few well-known exceptions, such as child/children, foot/feet, or fish (singular)/fish (plural) (though there is also the alternative plural fishes). In both English and Scots these exceptions were once more numerous, illustrated here by the forms kine and kye ‘cows’.
Kye descends from Old English cӯ, the plural of cū, exemplifying the same kind of vowel alternation that gave mūs ‘mouse’, mӯs ‘mice’. It was once used widely in both England and Scotland. In Shepherd’s Week (1714), the Devon poet and playwright John Gay referred to ‘Cic’ly the Western Lass that tends the Kee’, adding a learned note: ‘Kee, a West-Country Word for Kine or Cows’. However, it seems this form was later restricted to northern England and Scotland.
Ky appears in the earliest Scots literary texts, such as John Barbour’s epic-romance The Bruce (composed 1375), and continuously after then. A relatively recent citation suggests that kye is now often regarded as archaic: ‘Both this pass, and its parallel neighbour, the Lairig Ghru, were once droving routes that resounded to the movement of cattle, the small black kye of the Highlander’ (Sunday Herald, 2004). However, it appeared in 2021 in Thomas Clark’s poem ‘Nae Pets Allowed’ in Dinnae Mak Me Laugh: ‘And if I want some geese or kye, A beastie big or wee, I need tae hide it oot the wey, Whaur naebody can see.’
Kine seems to have emerged by what linguists call analogy, with what are now regarded as irregular forms such as children, oxen, brethren. Kine is common in Scots in the period before 1700. The earliest examples appear in the Muniments of the University of Glasgow for 1638, and the Scottish Parliamentary Acts for 1641. One of the most interesting of these early instances is from the Memoirs of the Maxwells of Pollok (1650), which refers to: ‘When kine wer elfe-shote’. Elf-shot is defined as ‘A disease, most commonly of cattle, thought to have been inflicted by elves or fairies. “The disease consists in an over-distention of the first stomach, from the swelling up of clover and grass, when eaten with the morning dew on it”’.