Scots Gaelic is a different language from Doric/Lallans/Lowland Scots, which is what MissPrint's talkig about. I agree, Scots really is a spoken language, and speaking it and hearing people speak it is a very different thing from academics trying to make it a written language. (Even Hugh McDiarmid had problems trying to make it a written language and I'm not sure anyone's got much better at it since then.) People do speak it every day though. Just depends where you come from in Scotland. But everyone speaks some words of it.

Here are the Broons and Oor Wullie. They're great! [www.thatsbraw.co.uk]



Post Edited (07-14-03 15:04)

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If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

Yes, personally I find attempts to write down Lallans rather bizarre -- it's a spoken language, and none the worse for that.

And it's not at all unusual for a country to have a spoken language that is very different to the written language (It's true of all languages, including English English, to some extent, but that's another story.)

Obvious examples are Swiss German (which is almost never written down -- they read and write in High German) which is really very different. On the rare occasions I have seen it written down, it's one of the most bizarre languages I've come across -- for example it uses triple vowels! (The word for sheep is schtööösli or some such -- saw it in a shop window in Zürich once.)

Greek does the same thing, with a formal language, the katharevousa, and an everyday version, the dhimotiki. Dhimotiki does get written down quite a lot these days though (for example the broadsheet newspapers are written in katharevousa and the tabloids in dhimotiki

And there are hardly any Italians that actually speak Italian in everyday life -- they tend to speak their local dialect (which there are hundreds) but read and write in formal, standard Italian . . .

I'll shut up now.



Jesus saves; Buddha does incremental backup.

I think that linguists call this phenomenon 'diaglossia' or maybe 'diglossia', or at least something that's spelled very much along those lines. Would our resident anthropologist be able to comment authoritatively on this point?

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Other examples; Norwegian, with Landsmal (village language), Bokmal (formal, written 'book' language) and Nynorsk (New Norse, a not entirely successful attempt to meld the two).

Dialect speech is declining all over the world; ISTR reading recently that it was only in the last few years that a majority (albeit a small one) of Italians gave Italian as their first language instead of a dialect. Similarly in France, where Parisien is continually gaining ground over both regional variations and also genuine minority languages (of which there are a surprising number ... Flemish, German, Italian, Provencal, Catalan, Basque and Breton come to mind). Small tongues get squeezed out, a process that has happened from the dawn of speech, but has accelerated enormously in the modern age of mass media.

It's a sair fecht.



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I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

Indeed, but not an irredeemable one - for instance I don't know of a better way to say, 'it's a sair fecht' than 'it's a sair fecht' - language surviving and adapting. The English say 'wee' now and sometimes even 'dreich'. And it did occur to me that what we actually speak now in Scotland may have be very like English, but it's still Scots adapted and updated... the phrasing's slightly different, similar words mean different things... wibble wibble sclup... ok I'm talking drivel! Sorry guys...



Post Edited (07-14-03 19:03)

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If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

And I still make Sarah laugh with "outwith" and "uplift" (as in what the bin men do to the rubbish, not what bras do). I had thought these to be standard English until told otherwise. And I like the fact that English has embraced the Scots word "minging".

Since my experience of Scots is of a playground/childhood character there are lots of lovely expressive words which I don't know the English for such as "glabber" and "stoor" which have very precise meanings in Scots, but need a whole load of words to get across in English. Okay, glabber is a particular sort of mud, quite runny, but very dirty, and stoor is a sort of dust/fluff, quite thick, and may be sticky, but no necessarily, like the stuff you find on the kitchen extractor fan.

And what is the English for a scunner?

I can't think of a better way to say "it's a sair fecht" either.

I was stunned when the BigBrother household were discussing Cameron's use of the word "breeks" I had though that was fairly standard, and if not, at least well understood.

Isn't chinese basically split into 2,000 ways of saying something, each of which use exactly the same way to write it?



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Hmm, yes - the distinction that it's a spoken but not a written language might make sense. I'm a Scot, but in linguistic terms I really don't think it's a true language. It has some stunning dialect words, mind, and like MissPrint says there are words which don't seem Scottish, but are, like uplift. I'll have to ask my mate in England for a list, but the latest one she texted me about was either "long lie" or "lie in" - one of them's Scots, but I can't remember which...

My mum acquired an old book of poetry by WD Cocker in Scots, yesterday, and he wrote a bit about it in the introduction:

"In the writing of Scots poetry I have always maintained that the idiom is of equal importance to the vocabulary. In this I differ from many modern writers [this was published in 1932], who disregard the idiom entirely, and use a vocabulary, garnered from John o'Groats to Galloway, which would sound foreign in any locality. In the main, my Scots is the speech that I was familiar with as a boy in Strathendrick' and I seldom use a word that would not come as readily to my tongue as to my pen."

I think it's this disregarding of the idiom I was complaining about. Anyway, the poetry is at least vaguely intelligible to me - see what you think:

There's a bogle by the bour-tree at the lang loan heid,
A canna thole the thocht o him, he fills ma hert wi dreid,
He skirls like a hoolet, an he rattles aa his banes,
An gies himsel an unco fash to fricht wee weans.

On Wednesday, someone tell me every time I use a Scots expression. I probably use more than I think...



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Do something pretty while you can...

A former Scots colleague of mine here in SW England used to refer to where he was "staying", which made me think he commuted and went home to Scotland at weekends. This made particular sense because he was forever extolling the wonders of Scotland and how superior it was to England in every respect, from the education system to fish and chips. Oh, and the system for buying and selling houses was FAR better in Scotland as well. It was when exploring this further that I discovered he'd been living in England for a quarter of a century. Apparently when a Scotsman refers to "staying" somewhere, the term is interchangable with "living" (whereas to an Englishman it means a more temporary habitation, as in for example "staying" in an hotel whilst on holiday). Being of Irish extraction myself I was left feeling as if I'd walked into some kind of temporal warzone in that office, "two nations separated only by a common language" as someone or another once writ. Funny looking back on it though.

Yep, I'd use "staying". There is definitely a difference between the questions "where are you staying?" (temporary) and "where do you stay?" which is just "where do you live?", which you wouldn't know from looking at them...

The Scottish education system *used* to be better than the English, but they've done horrible things to it recently. I can't comment on English fish and chips, but Scottish ones are great. And the English house buying system is far better than the Scottish as far as I can tell, especially these days where most houses up here are going for an average of about 40% over their worth or the asking price. Which is stupid, because you can't get a mortgage for it. And our surveying system is set up to benefit the surveyors only; not sure what yours is like...



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Do something pretty while you can...

Pretty much the same, stupidly. SCotland's sealed bids, isn't it? Whereas here is gazump until you're blue in the face...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

I'd forgotten about "staying", if somebody asked me where I stay I'd tell them the name of the district without hesitating, but if they asked where I live, I'd say "Scotland".

Just because you can muddle your way through a Scots poem doesn't make Scots any the less a language IMO. It just means it is related to English. Think of Norwegian and Swedish, once you've grasped the basics of spelling, there's not much to choose between them or so I'm told.

Aren't we presupposing that the English language took over Scots and that Lallans is all that remains of what was the Scots language? I'm not sure that that's true (but I don't know - does anyone?) Given the various invasions and settlers in both countries I would have thought it's possible they've developed in parallel - or am I wibbling again?



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If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

Scots is definitely a different language, but not necessarily a distinct one, as anyone who has ever listened to Kenny Dalglish can verify!

(Actually, I defy even the Scots here to make sense of Kenny Dalglish. I'm sure he mumbles deliberately so he can say he was misquoted afterwards...)



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

MissPrint - no, I wasn't saying that it wasn't a separate language just because I could just about understand it, sorry for the confusion!

I think of it as many different dialects rather than one unified language. But again, that can be true of other countries, like Germany. I do believe it's more "genuine" spoken than written - I don't believe anybody would naturally write in Lallans, because written Lallans is a corruption of English to represent phonetics, mainly, so you'd have to be familiar with English conventions first. (Admittedly, this is all down to education.)

Basically, I just don't think Scots is different enough from English. I know about all the Scandinavian things, but IMO a large part of them being classified as different languages is political, because they're different countries, rather than chasms in the languages. Any English person could come up to Scotland and understand 95% of what 90% of the population is saying* - the same proportions probably go for Yorkshire, and very few people would classify that as a different language.

* Statistics have been made up on the spot to validate my argument, but I'd defend their rough accuracy!



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Do something pretty while you can...

If you have ever heard anyone speaking in broad Sheffield, you might well revise your opinion about whether it qualified as a different language or not! A baffled southerner once heard a couple of people talking in broad Sheffield and actually had to ask if they were speaking Chinese. I've lived here twenty years and I still struggle to translate.



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

My point exactly - there's vast variation in English, and no-one is translating Parliament reports into Sheffieldese!



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Do something pretty while you can...

I took GCSE History many years ago, and was quite intrigued by the syllabus. Did we study royalty or wars? No. We studied the beginning of Mormonism, how to date a house by looking at its windows (including a field trip to Saffron Walden) and the history of medicine. Therefore I still have no idea what war was when (apart from the obvious recent ones) or what order the kings/queens are in.

However, looking at the current A-level syllubus, it appears to almost entirely cover the Hitler years.

There's a mnemonioc ....mnemnnoinc ... thing to help you remember the kings;

Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste,
Harry, Dick, John, Harry three,
One, two, three Neds, Richard two,
Henries four, five, six - then who?
Edwards four, five, Dick the bad,
Harries twain and Ned the lad,
Mary, Bessie, James the vain,
Charlie, Charlie, James again,
William & Mary, Anna Gloria,
Four Georges, William and Victoria,
Edward, George, then Ned the eighth
quickly goes and abdicate'th,
leaving George, then Liz the second,
and with Charlie next it's reckoned.

Of course this presumes English History to have started in 1066, which is Wrong and Bad, but don't get me started on that.



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I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

I like it!