Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles In an extraordinary and somewhat devastating discovery, it turns out virtually the entire Scots version of Wikipedia, comprising more than 57,000 articles, was written, edited or overseen by a netizen who clearly had nae the slightest idea about the language. The user is not only a prolific contributor, they are an …
Thank you for once again proving PG Wodehouse's dictum about it never being difficult to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance.
The internet today is so confusing. Here was me thinking that mild racism isn’t acceptable. But now it is??
The entire Scots language section of one of the worlds largest website seems to have been made up, the first comment is a broad racial stereotype yet pointing it out is somehow ripe for criticism.
At the time I thought it was an overreaction, but now I understand why they got rid of that Willie character from the Simpsons.
"Any other shit cliches you want to wheel out while you're logged in? Maybe something about haggis or .."
Ah, haud yer wheesh as mah mither used tae say.
No really, she did. Apparently I moaned quite a bit as a kid. Now a parent myself, I must say its a very useful saying.
Looking at some of the pages, its like that editor read some Broons cartoons in the Sunday Post and decided that they could speak Scots.
I'm from the exact other end of GB, but spent several years living in Scotland. At least in the Glasgow area, "haud yer wheesht" with a definite 't' on the end was still widely used in the late 80's. Also "awa and bile yer heid" which never seemed quite as confrontational as it was clearly intended to be.
It's "och aye the noo", at least spell it right.
And while it may be a cliché, I live in Scotland and will swear upon a stack of technical manuals that I have heard a genuine Scottish person say it. Although to be fair, I suspect they may have been making friends with the whisky bottle shortly before.
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Make them rewrite all the pages into proper Scot & run it past the Scot equiv of an English Teacher for grammar, punctuation, etc until they can earn a passing grade.
That's hardly in the spirit of Wikipedia, even being "peer-reviewed" isn't exactly its strong point.
I once had an edit removed on Wikipedia with the comment from a moderator "your edit is correct, but the previous posting cited a reliable source that had inaccurate information, and so I had to favour that edit over yours even though it's factually inaccurate"
Anyway, I'm going to let the quote from Amy Pond at the end of this video clip sum up Dalriada better than I ever could. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvfLPwis6pk
My favourite one was the wikipedia entry for Tesco that claimed the local one had been refused planning permission and not built. I queried that as the building clearly existed and had been operating for some time.. Indeed I do my weekly shop there. The change was rejected as reality contradicted what was in the mind of the wikipedia editor in the US who clearly hadn't seen it therefore had deemed it not to exist.
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Wikipedia is not impartial, but instead is significantly corrupt because it actively allows, even encourages, such corruption/censorship of fact and language, which is why Infogalactic had to be created, to at least fix some of the damage. Wikipedia, in it's current form, should not be regarded as a trustworthy reference, since much has to be with verified.
At the very least the admin of the Scot wiki section should be banned and a competent cultured Scot recruited to repair the damage and do the job properly. At best, Wikipedia should be removed from the perverted control of an ex-porn-mogul, and all the biased staff/helpers replaced, so that a true work of scholarship can be built.
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Is numpty a Scots word then?
The first time I ever heard it was 20 years ago as an expat in Belgium. From someone from Gloucestershire - who told me it was a local word. I hear it quite a lot nowadays, so it's either become more popular or I used to be "numpty-blind".
Wee hake round the internet seems to give a skiffy that it's of Scots origin.
However, please feel free to use this word and any others.
I don't think Scots are generally very precious about our national things. I think we like to see other nationalities try out kilts etc. They usually start out thinking they're putting on a skirt and doing drag then they feel the masculinity bubbling through the tartan and usually end up really enjoying it.
I'm happy to borrow a few Scots words. Isn't the joke about english that:
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
And I'm certainly extremely enthusiastic about culturally appropriating whisky, on as regular a basis as possible. Except for Caol Ila - which is so ridiculously peaty that it should be used for growing plants in.
But I'd appreciate it if you'd be a bit less generous about sharing your shortbread. And maybe keep all of that North of the border. Also my friend seems to have found an infinite stock of a Christmas themed ginger flavoured Irn Bru, which I regard as something suspiciously close to chemical warfare - did Barr's ever sell the vile stuff in Scotland, or is it a vast practical joke on the english?
Is toil leam IRN BRU (that's actually Gaelic, not Scots, and is taken from the Duolingo course)
Yes, Irn Bru is sold in Scotland, and is made in Scotland - fra' girders!
Yes, it's a foul chemical concoction, but it's the only thing to drink with your haggis pudding supper after an evening on the bevvy. It helps to cut through the oil and fat.
Ah, happy memories. Actually I used to sometimes have it with my steak pie supper - the chippie used to deep-fry the pies. Obese? Moi?
It's not the normal Irn Bru I'm objecting to. It's this ginger abomination. Or, Chrimbo Juice as Barr's called it.
"Except for Caol Ila - which is so ridiculously peaty that it should be used for growing plants in."
When I was at their visitor centre they were very free with the 12 year old unpeated. It's absolute nectar, although not cheap and described by their man doing the tasting as having notes of mango. I didn't get any notes of mango personally. I quite like the regular 12 year old as well, but I don't mid a peaty whisky except for Laphroaig which has too harsh a finish for my taste. Octomore is very nice, but unfortunately means you can taste nothing else afterwards.
Shortbread is almost always around at New Year, it's a traditional first foot gift these days. Chocolate Chip shortbread is nice, if not traditional, the normal stuff is a bit too buttery for my taste.
Now, as someone who's only experience of Whisky is getting the odours from mates who are imbibing, all I can say is that Laphroaig makes me thing of Jeyes Fluid.
Actually, one night, a mate left his fiancé holding his glass while he popped out to water the porcelain. She explained that she had a theory - he would get a glass of this stuff, then leave her holding it while he popped out, as a means of warding off any potential suitors intent on chatting her up. The odour is certainly powerful enough for that.
> I think we like to see other nationalities try out kilts etc. They usually start out thinking they're putting on a skirt and doing drag then they feel the masculinity bubbling through the tartan and usually end up really enjoying it
Kilts[*] are great at music festivals :)
Though it's worth noting that as per the font of all 100% reliable wisdom known as Wikipedia, the modern style of kilt was probably invented by a bloke from Lancashire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilt#History
[*] Though my black and red leather kilt does tend to make my Scottish mates snicker. Still, it's nice and airy, goes well with Stompy Boots (tm) and it's easy to wash mud off...
When I was younger I thought it strange that the UK didn't recognise Scots as a language when it was recognised internationally.
It was also thrashed out of schoolkids as English had to be used or the tawse came out. I well remember the pain. One particular sadist in my school made sure your hands were a couple of inches above his desk when he struck head-on rather than from the side, making sure your knuckles were bleeding as well as stripping the skin from your wrist.
The older I have become, the more I realise that the difference between a dialect and a language is mainly about power and politics.
Why were you downvoted, as the quote goes, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy" (I've linked to Whackypedia for ironic effect).
> outlived their usefulness to construct a politically-useful "identity"
Yes, that is essentially what the Prussians, Russians and Austrians said about my native language in the late XVIII and XIX centuries, as they were reacting to various independence movements. I'm sure it was also said about the languages of many Native peoples' subjugated by various flavors of Anglosaxons.
Curb your cultural imperialism, mate.
I'm sure it was also said about the languages of many Native peoples' subjugated by various flavors of Anglosaxons.
True, but I recall being inflicted with certain Northern Irish Politicians attempting to speak Irish.
As to street signs and other language demands - you don't see Trekkies demand that Klingon also be added...
you don't see Trekkies demand that Klingon also be added
As I understand it, one of the biggest social pressures in Czechoslovakia was linguistic: "Czechoslovakian" essentially meant "Czech" and "Slovakian" was consider "Bad Czechoslovakian". Slovakian people were considered stupid, and the evidence was that they spoke "bad Czechoslovakian". Even to this day, we have the same problem in Scotland -- that speaking like yer mammy is taken as a sign you're thick, and speaking like someone from miles away is taken as a sign you're sophisticated.
It is not as much a matter of identity [i]construction[/i] as it is of "identity positivity" -- what's being called "reclaiming" these days. For people to stand up for the identity [b]they already have[/b] and defend their right to speak [b]in a way they already do[/b] is very much not "construction".
Quite the opposite, in fact. The real "constructed" identity is the one that denies variation and tries to impose a single uniform cultural identity on diverse peoples.
There are many people inside the independence movement that want nothing to do with Scots, and there are many outside the independence movement that support it. Same with Gaelic. Neither is a party-political issue.
Language is indeed power and politics... but it's also so much more. When you think and form ideas, language helps structure those ideas. If a language has a particular concept then it's easier to form and communicate new ideas around that concept. I fear that as we lose languages, we lose those concepts that are unique to the cultures that spawned them.
I'm a big fan of Scots, it's more lyrical than English and allows for terse, humorous exchanges that lose their bite if done in English.
This is doubly true in France, where the state has traditionally had an almost homicidal disdain for regional dialects. You can still find old signs from schoolyards in Brittany saying 'It is forbidden to spit on the ground or speak Breton' or 'Speak French, be clean'.
Funnily enough a Briton (ie someone from the northern side of La Manche, not from Brittany) was elected to l'Academie a few years back. I mean the organisation tasked with keeping the French language pure. Them's the one's who object to le weekend and le blue jean etc.
lol: bloke wot speaks the lingua franca is tasked with keeping another lingua franca clean!
Scots is a language. But this is complicated because there is a continuum of language here, between Scots and English. At one end there is English with a Scots accent and a few odd local words (much like the Wiki) - clearly just a dialect, easily intelligible to speakers of standard English, and this progresses steadily with different people as more vocabulary changes and, importantly, the grammar starts to change, until you have true Scots, whether Doric or whatever. This doesn't seem to happen so much with other languages (although I could be wrong) - is there a smooth continuum of speakers between Dutch and German? It could be argued that it happens to an extent in Wales - with full blown 'Wenglish' taking the place of Scots. There's a lot of English in it, but there is a lot of Welsh grammar and vocab which takes it away from just being an English dialect.
If you want to know more about the Scots leid, go to oorvyce.scot or follow them on @oorvyce
And try this as a starter
"Whit wye shuid we be carin aboot Scots?
Scots is a leid thit is integratit intae Scots cultur, is pairt o wir identity, an is whit maks oorsels different fae the rest o the warld. A wheen o fowk hae an attatchment tae the leid fae bairnheid an their hames wi'oot even kennin it. Scots has ayewis hid spikkers at aa livvels o society, fae aa backgruns an fae aa waaks o life."
There actually is a continuum: It is called Platt, or Plattdeutsch, and is spoken throughout the East of the Netherlands and, say, from Luxembourg all the way into Ostfriesland and even further north.
Being Dutch I even recognize traces as far East as Berlin. Both in German and Dutch it's only recognized as a dialect.
Much of the linguistic peculiarities actually show all three to be derived from Saxon..
The seperate grammars stem from the 17th century classicist obsession with grammar as such.
Don't get me started on the treatment of Welsh by the powers-that-be...
But it survived - nearly a third of the population speak it today, and that's growing.
Interesting that support for Welsh independence is growing fast - now at 32% (but compare that to 55% in Scotland). Even 49% in England think England should be independent - but they may have mixed the question up with Brexit!
Decades ago at an open day at Aberystwyth University I encountered groups of the local schoolkids (I was a PhD student there at the time). What they spoke was very interesting; their teachers always addressed them in Welsh and they understood this perfectly. In between themselves, they always spoke grammatically correct English.
That is the crux of the matter: languages are for talking to people with, not for distinguishing you from other people with. If a language does not allow communication, then it isn't actually doing what language is supposed to be doing. Thus all this government-sponsored life support for languages is quite likely a waste of time.
" Thus all this government-sponsored life support for languages is quite likely a waste of time. "
That is a perfectly logical argument, because we all know Wikipedia is run by the Scottish government.
You see, once you join in on a discussion about a news article and say something about government/subsidies/taxpayers, you inadvertently show that all the talk about government money is just a smokescreen to present your bigoted opinions as calm rational analysis...
"Life support for languages"? Or funding to correct an institutional imbalance?
Use of some of the Celtic languages has declined (although many are now increasing again) - often because of uncontrolled immigration by non-speakers, many with the same attitude as Brexiters living in Spain. It's their colony and they will continue to shout in English at the stupid locals, and demand warm Stella. Thankfully some incomers become part of the community, learn the language and immerse themselves in the culture. Even so, if a group of Welsh-speakers are joined by a monoglot English speaker they will usually (out of misguided politeness) switch to English. This does not help the language survive.
In Wales we have many incomers who have little English and no Welsh. They often come because their homes have been bombed and are starting a new life with nothing. But they set to and learn both languages - quickly. Their children attend Welsh-medium schools. These are the people we need.
But the pressure of the 'default' imported language, omnipresent in the media, films, radio & TV, coupled with generations of effort by governments and individuals to 'down-grade' the importance of language, in some cases even to extirpate them completely - - Scots, Gàidhlig, Gaeilge, Gailck/Manks, Cymraeg, Kernowek have all suffered - means that some positive action (not just funding) is needed to redress the balance.
It's more complex than just beating the language out of people. It's also about the opportunities that language affords you, and as technology widened communication, you get less languages because learning the more common language and ditching regional languages profits people more.
So, the unifying of languages in England starts with the printing press. If you want to read a book, it's probably going to be in English rather than Cornish, so you learn English. Trains facilitate greater distance travel. Then telephone and internet. English is now the global lingua franca because the internet has brought so much trade. No-one is beating it into Indian and Chinese kids. They want to learn it.
Trying to keep languages alive by government intervention is ridiculous. We throw a load of money at BBC Alba despite every viewer knowing English, most as their primary language. it's like having a load of old network stacks installed on PCs, when everyone's running TCP/IP.
English is fine as a lingua franca, as is Swahili. And that's why people around the world are keen to learn English. But few people in China want to stop speaking Chinese. Being bi-lingual or multi-lingual is actually the norm for a majority of the world's population. And being a monoglot English speaker doesn't help you during business negotiations when you can't understand what the Dutch negotiators are whispering to each other!
Language is a key part of a culture, and a mind-set. The way that different languages deal differently with ideas and concepts can be eye-opening, and help to explain cultural differences. Going from one language to another is not just a matter of translating word-by-word with a dictionary (as Pedro Carolino showed with "English As She Is Spoke") - it's more like Worzel Gummidge swapping heads.
Interesting mis-spelling of 'Welsh' as Welsch - because of course 'Welsh' is derived from a Germanic word used by the Saxon economic migrants who came to Britain a while back. It basically means 'foreigners'. I believe Wallonia comes from the same root, as does the district of Wels in Austria, Valais, Wallachia etc. And the '-wall' in Cornwall.
That's why more and more of use insist on using the proper name 'Cymru' for our country, and Cymraeg for our language. Hopefully it will catch on in England as well.
> you want to include your local dialect as a language?
Yyyyyeah, great logic, except Scots is a language. If your rule for determining whether or not a language is worthy of the name boils down to whether or not it looks and sounds a lot like another one, then half the languages in existence right now would fail that naive "test". Don't be so reactionary. What's it to you anyway? Do you begrudge any other language its right to exist, and if not then perhaps ask yourself why single out Scots?
Genuine question - what is the difference between a dialect and a language?
I grew up near the town of Rowell (Rothwell) where the local 'language' was limited to there and the neighbouring town of Desborough. I say language as many English words were replaced by different words or phrases and there were significant grammatical differences.
During the last century the local BBC Radio Northampton actually produced serious series about it as well as generally p155 taking when someone rang in and 'accidentally' dropped in a little Rowell into the conversation.
New teachers in the schools would take weeks to learn what the kids were talking about and we were even advised to take elocution lessons before we went on to the higher education establishments in the relative metropolis of Leicester, only 20 miles away.
Anon only because the above contains PII
In my opinion 'language' is what you use when you wish to be understood by someone not from the immediate area. 'Dialect' is what you use at home.
<late edit>Teaching kids what is local dialect and when to drop it in favour of formal language is an interesting problem. How to do it without seeming to denigrate their dialect?</late edit>
However, Anon only because... Ooops.
My french friend would always say that english was just a dialect of french - or she'd say patois / pidgin-french.
Although I'm sure I read a thing somewhere that pidgin-english should be (or actually is) recognised as a language in its own right.
Obviously she was going for comic effect, but I'd say that's not true because english is such a weird mix of germanic, norse and french. But we are either too stupid or lazy to cope with their complicated grammar, and so have dumped most of it.
I'd imagine this is a topic that linguists spend many a happy hour discussing. Or linguistics studens spend many a tortured hour writing essays about.
Mutual comprehension would be one criteria. But because language is so tied into identity - it's also a massively political question - meaning there's probably no right answer.
If you've got hours of your life to waste, an interest in the subject and can put up with a podcaster who's not got the best speaking style - then have a listen to "History of English", by Kevin Stroud. The name is misleading, as he's put together a podcast that combines linguistics, history and archaeology (amongst many other things) to cover how the original Indo-European language evolved into the modern languages we now know. It's very geeky, and heavy going, but every so often I listen to a few episodes and it's really well done.
But we are either too stupid or lazy to cope with their complicated grammar, and so have dumped most of it.
I'm not sure that's true as we appear to have retained as much of the complicated grammar as possible... particularly where it is contradictory. Learning English is often largely about learning exceptions.
The grammar of English isn't particularly complex – the orthography on the other hand. But that's just what you'd expect given the several hundred years of coexistence with French. The grammar gets worn down to something that's manageable by both sets of speakers but the pronunciation and the way that it's rendered goes off in all sorts of wild and woolly ways.
There are always corner cases. By that standard, en-GB and en-US would be different languages, but the mutual intelligibility is so high that I don't think anyone seriously disputes that they're dialects of the same language, however many counterfactual jokes we may make.
Genuine question - what is the difference between a dialect and a language?
I believe that's the matter of serious debate amongst "proper" academic linguists. I've a nasty feeling the definition I know, which is was if they're mutual intelligible it's a dialect, otherwise it's a language is considered dated and wrong now. An English speaker can, with only time being exposed to it, probably get there head round scots and vice versa. The same is certainly not true of gaelic. Thus scots could be a dialect and gaelic a language.
The same is certainly not true of gaelic. Thus scots could be a dialect and gaelic a language.
Or wait for official recognition. AFAIK the Scottish government recognises Gaelic and English, and hasn't standardised or translated stuff into 'Scots'. If/when it is recognised, that will create opportunities to grab funding and power over creation of the official 'Scots'. If that's hypertext, then regional variations might be more easily supported, or it'll lead to further North/South divides over whether lowlanders and weegies are true Scotsmen. Or figuring out if 'Scots' is the most appropriate name for a dialect.. I mean language comprised mostly of loan words. Which may or may not lead into micro-independence and the dozen or more original Scottish Kin.. Persondoms springing back into existence. Or schoolkids can look forward to studying Macbeth in the original 'Scots'.
Interesting. I live in NE Fife and find the people who were born around here to be very easy to get on with. I think there is some prejudice against Fifers from the old industrial area in the south-east (mainly mining), but that is the case wherever miners lived and worked (I'm from South Yorkshire, and I've experienced far too much of it).
Have you ever lived and worked in the Kingdom of Fife? As an Englishman, I felt I was in a foreign country. Even the Scots think Fifers are weird.
I've visited a few times, and like the place. Main weirdness I noticed was something all too common, ie the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible around St. Andrews. If they were off clubbing haggis, it makes some sense, but signs warning about 'proper attire' less so. Unless that meant 'ridiculous attire'. I'm afraid I'm with Mark Twain when it comes to that 'sport'. Nice place though, and visited Falkland Palace, which may explain some of the weirdness.
So basically envy, and maybe some linguistic drift as an accident of history. So thinking it was a Pictish 'kingdom', then a Royal centre and gained wealth via trading with the Dutch and Scandinavians. Which lead to some.. frictions and invasions, as well as probably explaining why the Acts of Union go on about salt. But a nice place for a spot of hunting/shooting/fishing, unlike the dark satanic mills of Glasgow and Edinburgh. But a bit of a linguistic melting pot, ie Pictish/Celtic so Irish Gaelic with some Dutch, Norse, French and English thrown in.. Which to me is also interesting wrt the idea of 'Scottish' given Scotland's rich history and varied influences.
Does this mean that Scottish and Irish Gaelic are just dialects of Gaelic?
As I understand it, it's a bigger difference than a simple dialect now, even in Ireland there are three recognised dialects. Irish & Scottish gaelic started out as the same language but diverged over centuries, 'helped' by some spelling reform of Irish 80-odd ago.
"Genuine question - what is the difference between a dialect and a language?"
This is one of those questions which doesn't have a very good answer anymore.
Originally, it was mostly about writing - Language has a standardized written form and dialect is just the crazy things poor people say when the fail miserably to replicate it in sound form. This was considered a pretty good definition back in the early 1700s when linguistics was just starting out as a discipline and 'civilisation' was considered to stretch from roughly the mouth of the Danube to the Welsh border, and there didn't seem much point in leaving it's boundaries to study what people outside them were doing. The rest of the world was, after all, full of weirdos who couldn't speak proper languages anyway.
However, paradigms change, and it was eventually pointed out that there's loads of people who don't actually use writing who are, none the less, using distinct languages. Like, everyone alive prior to about 3000BC, for starters, along with most people prior to 1800 and a fair number still around today. At that point, though, the classification had become too useful to dispose of, despite the fact that the original definition of their difference was now recognized to be bollocks. So linguists started having to come up with increasingly complex justifications for the categories to exist because they were conceptually too handy to get rid of. It's now hard to find a meaningful explanation of the different that doesn't involve at least some kind of chart, and usually 2 or 3 with multi-page explanations.
There's a lot of this in social sciences. Anthropology has a similar problem with 'race', which was so embedded in the literature when people started questioning the concept's definition (turns out it hasn't actually got one; no-one noticed this for the first hundred years or so of using it) that it's now very hard to get rid of it. But even harder sciences like Biology have issues with it tho - a lot of the classification work in Linnaeus's taxonomy turns out to not really make a lot of sense once you have a better understanding of biology than you could get from a 2-week course in the early 1700s, and the whole thing had to be hastily retro-fitted to follow the phylogeny of organisms after Darwin. There's at least a couple of radical modern biologists who have started to question whether even the idea of species is actually a useful way of categorizing life.
Not just biology either. Look what astronomers did to Pluto. The bastards! And yet does Neptune count as a planet under the new definition - if it's failed to get round to clearing Pluto out of its orbit?
It's a problem if you're stuck with scientific definitions that totally differ from language.
I was listening to some program or other talking about nuts and berries. Almost none of the fruits we'd call berries (strawberry, raspberry, blackberry etc) are actually classed as berries. The banana is though, so perhaps we should have strawbs and cream and bananaberry milkshake? Which sort of leads to the question, why not come up with some new definitions? Also, quite a few nuts aren't actually nuts.
I can cope with the tomato being a fruit, my Nan made tomato jam. But the raspberry and blackberry really ought to be berries. It's in the bloody name.
Equating a genuine language with a written form is problematic. In China, there is a single written form, but many different spoken languages. The spoken languages are usually mutually incomprehensible, but written Chinese is a common means of communication, at least among the educated. The Chinese writing system has the advantage that it makes no attempt to represent spoken sounds, but represents concepts and ideas.
Your first sentence is spot on. Unfortunately everything that follows is an old myth. Chinese characters are a single written form only in much the same way that the Latin alphabet is a single written form. They certainly don't guarantee mutual intelligibility in the languages that use them. A single character will have a certain pronunciation in any given Chinese language (and a different one in a different language – put (typically) two together and you have a composite symbol that represents a spoken word* not a concept or idea. As with any other language the written form is primarily a way of recording the spoken form – It's just Chinese just a lot more ad hoc in the way it does that recording.
*Or something like it. For example, 'kung fu' is accidentally two words in English because Chinese characters are written without any sort of word grouping, but it could just as easily have been transliterated as 'kungfu' and no one would be saying it wasn't a word. On second thought, t's probably better not to talk about words and just refer to the things that have dictionary entries whatever they are.
"Genuine question - what is the difference between a dialect and a language?"
Same as the difference between art and porn - you know it when you see it. The problem is that as much as us humans love categorising things (and that's not necessarily bad, categories are often useful), very few things actually exist as discrete categories with nice hard lines separating them. Language and dialect are among the many things where it's mostly obvious when something clearly falls into one or the other set, but there's a whole pile of things that straddle the wide blurry border between them. Scots falls squarely in the middle of that. A dialect is a minor variation within a language, right up until the variation isn't quite so minor any more.
My Father-in-Law had a very strong Rugby accent, as in "I'll tek it oop to the gerridge an mek it work". My eldest daughter had a similar accent, and while studying at Bradford University, she was accused of being a Brummie, which annoyed her immensely. She now lives and works in Stroud, and to my cultured Estuarine ear, she sounds more like she's speaking Pirate. I expect that, as a cross between Essex Boy and Cockney, I will be heavily downvoted for being a regional snob.
We all have accents, and there's nothing wrong, and a lot right, with that. It's one of the charms of our not so vast island that we all sound quite different, depending on where we come from.
It's the folk that think one accent is somehow "superior" or more "proper" than all others that are annoying, although thankfully the BBC sounds a lot more reflective of all of the UK nowadays.
(I'll admit, there are some accents that I'm not particularly fond of the sound of (it would be interesting to work out why, is it just unfamiliarity?), but as long as we can all understand each other, that's the important thing.)
In the region of the Netherlands where I grew up, the local language used to be West Frisian, which to someone schooled in regular Dutch would only seen tangentially related to that language. In many ways it was similar to the Frisian language which is spoken across the water that splits the Netherlands in half.
I was 'was' and 'used to be' because while growing up, I never learned it, nor did any anyone else around me. Only my grandparents and those of a similar age still spoke it. For my parents and myself it remained limited to a few West Frisian words that slipped into daily usage. This quite unlike Frisian, which not only has an official status, is being actively protected from vanishing and may even have its own Wikipedia language section.
Part of me regrets never learning West Frisian and never being able to read the books in West Frisian that my grandparents had lying around, but another part of me accepts that this is the way of things. So many languages and dialects have vanished over the years (or are being actively discouraged like Bokmål in Norway in favour of Nynorsk), that a line has to be drawn somewhere.
Preserving an entire language's vocabulary and grammar in books and other references? Yes, please. Having fun 'learn to speak in <language> classes for anyone who wants it? Heck yes. I mean, we're doing it for Klingon and Elvish as well.
Duplicating the entirety of Wikipedia's content in that language? Not when there's no real interest and thus no large number of volunteers. I'd rather see the English side of Wikipedia get spruced up more instead. Still plenty of stub articles in there as well as those that are in bad need of updating :)
Of course, it's a free encyclopedia, so it'd be wrong for me to tell others what they should do with their time. Just don't make a dog's breakfast out of it like this bloke did.
Although I agree with the article that this will have done quite some damage to the Scots language, it has also created near unprecedented attention to it. It will likely mean that Wikipedia can suddenly expect a whole bunch of true Scots speakers as editors to fix the mess. How to approach this, though? Over 50,000 entries is quite a lot.
Perhaps put all these articles in a sort of unpublished mode? I once created a Wikipedia lemma on something in my field and I remember it being in some kind of limbo state until it was approved for publication (after working through all the suggested improvements). If they would do that with all these pages and then look at the most popular (most linked to or most visited) and tackle those first with an army of actual Scots speakers you could start making a dent in a responsible manner. It could even make an interesting project for language students.
From experience of working on a large open source project (and its associated wiki), the issue would probably turn out to be the number of people who complain about it and are willing to help put time and effort into fixing it, as opposed to just the complaining part, would be a depressingly small fraction...
Agreed. It is good to learn that the Scottish Wiki editor is not Scottish, but it is no use banging on his head for the problem. The real problem is that there are no Scottish people editing the Scottish wiki.
Get some real Scots on there and the problem will solve itself. And if no Scots can be bothered, then maybe it isn't a problem.
Shock an aw: US teenager wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia
But Michael Dempster, the director of the Scots Language Centre based in Perth, takes a more ameliorative approach and says he is now in conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation about the prospect of properly re-editing the teenager’s contributions.“We know that this kid has put in an incredible amount of work, and he has created an editable infrastructure. It’s a great resource but it needs people who are literate in Scots to edit it now. It has the potential to be a great online focus for the language in the future.”
I didn't even ken this existed. I edited my first Wikipedia page last week when I saw some washed out Hun had been faking the football tables to inflate Hearts and demean Hibs and Celtic. So much work for daftie sectarian vandalism.
Scots does seem to be partially ignored in favour of Gaelic.
Yet it is part of the same family as English.
It is interesting to see the similarity in words with English as well.
Written down some of it is quite readable to a native English speaker.
An example in Kirk (as in James T) this is Scots for Church, such similar words.
But then it shares ancestry with English via Middle English.
Isn't the history of languages fascinating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Frisian_languages#Anglic_languages
Also Norwegian for church is "Kirke", same with "bairn", "braw" for example.
"Efter" to mean after is the same in Swedish and Danish, "etter" in Norwegian.
"Flit" , as in to move house is "flytte" in Norwegian."Hoose" is "hus" Norwegian, Swedish & Danish".
There are many others, there is an awful lot of Scots with links back to Scandinavia.
There weren't really centuries of war with England though - relations were pretty normal in the grand scheme of things for medieval and early modern European states.
The borders were a law unto themselves, so that there was pretty much permanent armed force required for centuries - but that was as much banditry as anything else. Although there was raiding by border lords, they seem to have cooperated against the bandits as often as they were fighting each other.
Edward 1 had a good old go at conquering Scotland, as to a lesser extent did Edward III - but other than Henry VIII's Rough Wooing - relations seem to have been a lot more normal in other periods. If England was fighting in France, then there was a risk that the Scots would launch a cheeky invasion, to see what they could get - but because England didn't really keep a standing army for most of its history the only time when it was ready to have a go at the Scots was usually when an army had been raised to go and nick a bit more of France - and that army was normally all needed for use in France.
England and France have been at war far more than England and Scotland. Who else has had a Hundred Years War? Black Death Stopped Play...
A Dutch colleague made a point of telling me about the Dutch raid on the Medway. He said, "They probably don't tell you about that in your English history classes"
I replied, "You do realise I am Scottish, not English don't you? I was never taught any English history. My ancestors probably cheered your victory."
"...there is an awful lot of Scots with links back to Scandinavia...."
It's interesting how much of the Swedish version of Wallender was understandable to our (Scots) household.
Side note: My grandad was in Belgium in WW1 (terrible muddy place, he said it was). He said that German prisoners could understand you if you shouted at them in broad Scots. But I think the rifles helped...
Further side note: bits of this reply were translated from the original scots as I went along - like my primary school teachers insisted I should do. (Thanks Mrs Tunn)
Isn't that supposed to be a difference between the English and American accents too? The Americans have the rhotic R, and us English swallow our Rs and don't properly pronounce them.
Whereas the Scottish can roll there Rs - although the French are surely the champions at that. Perhaps it was enough to make a foundation for the auld alliance... We'll take on the non R-saying bastards! Arse to the lot of them!
Or the 3 River Wye's in England, if you include the one that runs between England and Wales. Given that wye means river (or running water). So the river Wye means the River River.
Or there's Topenhow in Cumbria, which is made up of three words all meaning "hill". But sadly a quick google suggests that Tor and Pen can both mean hill, but together might mean the top of a hill, in which case we're down to it only being called Hill Hill.
I don't think it's asking a local, so much as it reflects local living - and nobody travelling much. You only need a name for your little local stream if there are more than one. Otherwise you can just say, "the river", and everybody knows what you mean. It only matters if it's navigable and connects to other places, such as long rivers like the Thames.
I think it is someone asking a local the name of a river, they say river.
And why the Russian for railway station is "вокзал" (Vauxhall). Supposedly when standing outside Vauxhall station in London in the mid-19C and asking "what is that" (expecting "the station"), a visitor was told "that's Vauxhall".
The result is tens of thousands of articles in English with occasional, and often ridiculous, letter changes – such as replacing a “y” with “ee.”
Just a week ago, I was up in Scotland, and having seen a picture in my room there with a title of 'McButterflee', wondered if 'butterflee' was a Scots word for 'butterfly', Googled it, and of course, ended up at the relevant Scots Wikipedia article. Given that I saw the word elsewhere first, I'm assuming that much, at least, is accurate.*
On another note, I must be somewhat understanding. Back in the early days, despite knowing rather little Russian, I played a relatively major part in getting the Russian Wikipedia going. But I was quite conservative in my edits, and mostly worked on the infrastructure to get it presentable, templates and such. The only reason I was doing even that much was just that practically no one else was doing anything for it yet. From the looks of things, that goes for Scots Wikipedia, as well.
* Of course, I'm also aware of the possibility that the artist may have gotten 'butterflee' from Wikipedia, assuming the work was made in the past 7 years. But it does seem to turn up in other sources that probably didn't come from Wikipedia in turn.
As Frankie Boyle observed when playing to his home crowd in Glasgow, they swear so much that "fucking" just means there's a noun on the way. Would have made for some more interesting edits:
In fucking Greek meethology, the fucking Minotaur wis a fucking creatur wi the fucking heid o a fucking bull an the fucking body o a fucking man or, as describit bi fucking Roman poet Ovid, a being "pairt fucking man an pairt fucking bull". The fucking Minotaur wis eventually killed bi the fucking Athenian hero Theseus.
I'm fairly sure we can write cunt here. It was a word I knew as a seven year old although I never knew it had a sexual reference, like cock. Or twat.
A twenty year old woman at Sky TV told me she was shocked when a seven year old in the street asked her, "Do you have a spare cigarette ye old cunt?". He was literally slapped down by a slightly older peer who said, "Dinnae swear. Show the old bint some respect."
Liz Fraser once walked out of a radio interview when the interviewer used "the c word". And she wynched Jeff Buckley, Californian sex god.
Wynch is an interesting word because most Scots don't recognise it (French Kiss) but it is regional. Lowland Scots isn't a simple language, it is a combination of several local languages.
Fifty years ago in Flintshire it wasn't desperately unusual to hear Welsh referred to as a servants language, which was actively discouraged by ambitious parents on the grounds that if you wanted to get on you had to have a strong command of English.
The opposite is now true with Welsh being de rigueur for the sharp-elbowed middle classes. A noticeable number of English migrants (for example author and Plaid candidate Mike Parker) have enthusiastically adopted it and on occasion have managed to entirely rub up in the wrong way local native speakers with their insistence on supposedly correct grammar and pronunciation.
It must be a problem with languages that have gone into serious decline and recovered. English has just evolved, naturally and uncontrollably. Not that we don't have pointless arguments about grammar, but nobody runs the show.
The academie francaise, tried to keep things in order, but appears to have mostly failed. From what I've read they've sort of given up on policing french nowadays. Le Weekend won.
But it must be easier for self-appointed (or government-appointed) people to try and police a langauge where actual effort is being made to resurrect it, and grow it by getting others to learn it. Then you can just see them ignoring the people who grew up speaking it, or deciding there must be a rule where people speaking it natively would do things differently depending on local patterns of speech.
When politics and language get mixed up, things can get very interesting.
Many people know that in the north-east of Spain there's a region, Catalonia, with a substantial* independence movement and its own language, Catalan. Fewer people know that Catalan actually has three main dialect groups: east Catalan (spoken in Barcelona, and hence the "prestige" dialect), Balearic (spoken in the islands of the same name), and west Catalan, spoken in a large area of rural Catalonia and most of the southerly neighbour of Catalonia, the Valencian Community.
Now, as far as Valencian politicians are concerned, Valencian is a separate language to Catalan. As far as Valencian linguists are concerned, Valencian is another name for Catalan. When the Valencian government established its own Academy, the academicians wrote a dictionary which defined Valencian as Catalan and were nearly sacked for it.
To throw an additional spanner in the works, Valencian academics (in general, not just linguists) were used to taking their lead from the older Barcelona-based Academy. Valencian as taught in schools and, especially, universities is much closer to what you'd hear on the streets in Barcelona (more influenced by French) than in Valencia (more influenced by Spanish). So there is also a non-party-political pressure group which tries to get official Valencian to reflect street Valencian rather than the east Catalan dialect: i.e. to promote the real situation that Valencian is an identifiable dialect of Catalan.
* As of the past 10 or so years.
Valencian as taught in schools and, especially, universities is much closer to what you'd hear on the streets in Barcelona (more influenced by French)
That's interesting. I speak French but not Spanish, and when I was in Barcelona I found it curious that I could read Catalan newspapers after a fashion, even if I couldn't understand the spoken language.
I had the same experience. Picked up a local paper to find out what was on, and when the big firework display was. Plot spoiler, there was a massive thunderstorm and it was cancelled - and we got stuck in a nice restuarant unable to leave, and the waiter liked me because I was the only one who'd drink his weird apple brandy stuff. Which was lovely, so I had 5.
But my bad spanish meant I struggled with the paper, until I accidentally picked up the catalan version. Which I could read easily - because of all the french looking bits. Bugger all idea how to pronounce it though.
I was surprised by how little english people spoke, I suspect that's changed in the last 20 years. But was able to get by in my rubbish spanish.
I wasn't even aware that this was a thing, I certainly wasn't crying out for someone not from Scotland to be brunging grammatical atrocities in to wur mediums.
The Wiki title page looks to me like it was written for tourists, similar to menus at pubs on Rose Street in Edinburgh. Only thing missing was a cheesy tartan background and some bagpipe music.
I worked in an international organisation in the Netherlands and was still getting used to Dutch pronunciation and names. A French developer asked me to look up the internal phone book and contact Poland Roos, but the name wasn't there.
Typical French, he got angry and shouted at me, "Poland Roos! Poland Roos!"
I asked him to write it down. Paul Andrews.
Typical acerbic Dutch, when I said I was going to night classes to learn their language I was told, "Don't learn Dutch, learn English". They couldn't understand my brogue having learned their English from the BBC World Service.
Although British English was the official language the Dutch would often break into Dutch in meetings to exclude everyone else, so I taught the English (Indians) how to speak lowland Scots so we could exclude the Dutch. If ye meet any Hindu engineers frae Reading wha speak in Scots ye ken why.
I recently taught a Spanish lass in Edinburgh lowland Scots in exchange for her teaching me Spanish. I was dead proud when she emailed me from Spain saying her family were fair flummoxed by how peely wally (pale) she was.
I used to post on forums under the pseudonym 'Drew Kitt". Even Scots didn't get the joke for years - drookit means soaking wet. Not to be confused with glaikit (stupid) or sleekit (cunning).
I reckon some of the best Scottish novels are Lewis Grassic Gibbons Sunset Song trilogy. It's not in lowland Scots, it's Doric which to most Scots is kind of like Shakespearean English to modern English weans.
When I was working on a site on northern Germany, I was afflicted by a stomach bug I picked up from a Belgian motorway services. I was carted off to the ambulance room, where I was questioned by the nurse regarding my illness. Some time later, the doctor entered the surgery carrying a clipboard. He was surprised that I was English, he thought I was Dutch because I spoke German like a Dutchman. The northern Germans were not fond of the Dutch back in the late 80s.
The Dutch hate the Germans more than the Scots hate the English.
In the late 90s a blonde Scottish friend and her daughter visited me in north Holland. They were walking down the street when a Dutch woman washing her car turned her hose on them. She screamed WTF, and the assailant immediately apologised, saying, "Sorry, I thought you were German".
The common words weren't what I taught my English comrades. Plus the accent was a fog screen.
I was at a meeting of international peace protestors in Scotland who were speaking in Flemish to exclude me, they must've thought I was a spy. Flemish is basically Dutch so I caught some of it. The guy ended on "Waarum?", and I chipped in, "Waarum niet?"
Why? Why not?
Their faces fell and blushed?
"Do you speak Flemish?"
"No, but I know waarum niet."
"While very nearly all Scottish people speak English, the Scots language was apparently still spoken, read, or otherwise understood by nearly 30 per cent of Scotland's population according to those responding to a 2011 census."
The authors of the 2011 census realised that many people in Scotland would not know whether they spoke Scots, so they provided a number of recordings of people speaking it. If you could understand any of them, you could reasonably say you understood Scots. There was a great variation between them, and I think that most people in England would have been able to understand one of them, so I'm not convinced it was a useful question.
An interesting example of moral outrage in the defence of something (the Scot language), preventing something that would have likely protected the very thing. How little the person who commented “Proposer should educate him/herself in linguistic diversity” must have looked into this. Sadly, it feels like this is the way things are increasingly being run in government.
Rather than whining about one overenthusiastic amateur, perhaps acknowledge that without them it would appear that the Scots Wikipedia would have been pretty much devoid of any other content - don't complain if you didn't contribute!
/I think I need coffee
Ah’ve bided in Scotlan’ fir 33 o ma 38 years an fir the life o me, I canna recall onywan e’er usin’ Scots tae blather tae onybody, ken?
Now, if I may use the Queens, as it’s easier to type. As someone born and bred in the northlands, I’m not convinced it is a language, rather than just a very short branch of English. It certainly sounds like English with an accent, with the exception of a few slang words (in the same way that someone from Bristol will throw in a few “Gert”s).
If you want a distinctive dialect that is a clear branch, then you need to go to Aberdeen (Not at the moment though), where Doric is a language all of its own.
... locked in a room with books only by David Crystal -- I'm reading a hardly used copy of his 2004 "The Stories of English" and now I'll have to look into the pages where he mentions or discusses the evolution of Scottish English. The appendix has some 20+ entries for that general subject. Those who have a copy, or a Kindle (tm) download, might find some relief on pages 488-490.
Many of my fellow Americans -- US type -- hardly know enough to recognize quotations from Shakespeare, and at 76, my own memory is nothing to be proud of; could it be that the Wikipedia source knew less?
If you see Doric written down then you can crack the code. However when it is spoken it is not just the words, it's the pronunciation. For most of my life I could understand any pigeon English speaker more than any Aberdonian.
I think I remember, but I might be wrong, that Doric was the language of the Kingdom of Northumberland which stretched up the east coast. I could Wikipedia that assertion but what's the point?
I am surprised anyone thinks this was done manually. In the late 70's/Early 80's I worked for Lotus Development in the UK where we mostly translated Lotus products into European languages until the powers that be decided we were competent enough to be allowed to work on the actual code for a new version of Symphony. There was a program going around at the time which took a text file as input, and spat out a 'translation' into 'beattalk' or something like that. 'Ask' became 'Ax', 'string' became 'chitlin' and '!' became 'What it is mama!' - you get the idea. Some wag took all of the English text extracted from the application (i.e the stuff we sent off to the various translators in the different countries around Europe), ran it through the program, and built a copy of Symphony using the 'beattalk' translations. It amused us for an afternoon before we got back onto the serious business of implementing 'minimal recalc'.
Given that that seem to be over 50,000 Wikipedia pages of English translated into 'Scots' with what appear to be find and replace translations , I suspect our joker had a similar application. The surprise is that all of Wikipedia has not been thus translated, that is certainly what I would have done if I had realised that nobody was checking!
A wheen of local eight year old wains were throwing stones over a garage which were hitting cars on the other side. As the only upstanding adult present I upbraided them and bid them explain themselves. Their football was on top of the lock-ups and they were trying to knock it down. "Why don't you just climb up and get it?"
They couldn't climb. I was mortified, and explained when I was their age every child in the street would climb up there every day and they should be ashamed of themselves. I asked why they didn't just give one of their peers a punty up. They didn't know what that meant so I gave a kid in a Celtic shirt a punty up so he could retrieve their ball.
I was walking away when he shouted he couldn't get down. I said, "Dreepy down!"
None of them knew what that meant.
It means dangling down from a ledge by your fingertips from a ledge to lower your drop. The word was lost and so the technique was lost.
My unco uncle told me when I was 17, "Don't take this the wrong way, but when I was your age I was more of a man than you."
How could I take that the wrong way? But I repeated it for the eight year olds who didn't know how to climb or dreepy.
Billy Connolly had a lyric about saying fuck in front of your granny - "They not only said it, they did it as well".
That'd be the fount, or font, of wisdom. A fountain of wisdom would be spraffing it everywhere.
[Frankie Boyle : When I was a teenager my penis could spray sperm on the ceiling. Now I'm 50 it's more like Tim Robbins escaping through the sewers in The Shawshank Redemption"]
And not only Wikipedia. The general level of literacy on the web is low and declining, as is the verbal competence of many who broadcast over the airwaves.
A politician recently interviewed on Radio 4 declared that he had a come up with "pacific policy" to solve some social problem or other. I'm sure he didn't mean either a calm and placid one or one relating to a large ocean. He just couldn't distinguish the difference between "pacific" and "specific".
Because nobody is apparently taught either formal grammar or etymology these days at school, words have ceased to be selected (and sentences ceased to be constructed) according to their intrinsic meanings and have become mere noises connected by loose association with vague concepts.
Not at all surprising from Wikipedia. These are the same people whose "Sockpuppet Investigations Team", supposedly their best of the best, closed down my Wikipedia account and banned me (and some other poor bastard) from editing because they suspected me of being a sockpuppet of that account, based on one edit I had made within minutes of that user. It was one of the few meaningful Wikipedia edits I'd ever made and certainly convinced me that trying to contribute my time for the good of the community was a fool's errand.
In the north east of Scotland, there is doric, which may be a dialect of Scots. For a taster of what it is like, have a look at Jonny Gibb of Gushetneuk https://archive.org/stream/johnnygibbofgush00alexuoft/johnnygibbofgush00alexuoft_djvu.txt
The first chapter throws you right in at the deep end... enjoy.
CHAPTER I.
JOHNNY GIBB SETS OUT FOR THE WELLS.
" HEELY, heely, Tarn, ye glaiket stirk ye hinna on the hin
shelvin o' the cairt. Fat hae ye been haiverin at, min ?
That cauff saick 11 be tint owre the back door afore we win
a mile fae hame. See 't yer belly-ban' be ticht aneuch noo.
Woo, lassie ! Man, ye been makin' a hantle mair adee
aboot blaikin that graith o' yours, an kaimin the mear's tail,
nor balancin' yer cairt, an' gettin' the things packit in till 't."
" Sang, that 's nae vera easy deen, I can tell ye, wi' sic
a mengyie o' them. Faur 11 aw pit the puckle girss to the
mear ?"
" Ou, fat 's the eese o' that lang stoups ahin, aw wud
like tae ken ? Lay that bit bauk across, an' syne tak' the
aul' pleuch ryn there, an' wup it ticht atween the stays ;
we canna hae the beast's maet trachel't amo' their feet.
Foo muckle corn pat ye in ? "
" Four lippies gweed mizzour will that dee ? "
" We 'se lat it be deein. Is their trock a* in noo, aw
won'er ?"
" Nyod, seerly it is. "
Well, that illustrates a sound-change I've long suspected. Some English dialects make a phonemic difference between "w" and "wh", which is "w" with a puff of air. I have long suspected "wh" would change into "f" given other sound and stress changes - it appears to have done so in Te Reo Maori in relation to other Polynesian languages, so Maori has "whare" pronounced with the "wh" pronounced "f", while Hawaiian has "hale" and Samoan has "fale".
"Fat hae ye been haiverin at, min ?"
I followed the establishment of this word. It was a 1980s derogatory Fife word for Glaswegians who would holiday there, mostly spelt WeeGee or Ouijie. Wee Glaswegian. "How do you make a Ouijie board? Take away his Tamazapan"
Only Glaswegians spell it weegie, because that is how daft they are.
Another good Fife word is nectar, an amplifier of extra, as in nectar special (the most special).
I once had a stramash with the self styled "Glasgow Anarcho-Feminist collective", because they were a' ba'heids but partly due to their name. None of them were Glaswegian, two of them were police informers, and one of them strangled young women.
'Wee' is a big word in lowland Scots. I ken ye use it in English too, but it is far more significant here. Wee man, a child or pathetic adult male.
A Fife biker explained the source of the phrase the first time I heard it, back when. Your guess is probably contributory, but I trust my source. Fifers consider Glaswegians as dwarves, or hobbits at best.
[That'd make me an elf!]
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