Re: NATLANG: Scary Document

Thomas Leigh scripsit:

> True, Scots preserves some Anglo-Saxon
> lexical items which have been lost in English, and has absorbed more
> Scandinavian loanwords than English, but otherwise both English and Scots
> have gone through more or less the same developmental processes separating
> them from the rest of the Germanic languages.
I think it's fair to say that Brito-Germanic is the least conservative branch
of Germanic, and English is the least conservative language of the branch.

> > >  Thus, "Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled" is not Scots, but English heavily
> influenced
> > > by English:  grammatical Scots would require "Scots ut hae".
>
> Actually, "Scots at haes"; plural nouns take singular verbs (so "they are",
> but "the bairns is", etc.)
Yeah, I learned that last night (thanks to www.scots-online.org).

> Or Scots heavily influenced by English! :)
As you will.  And of course the "English...English" version was a blunder.

> I'm not sure when it diverged - I want to say sometime in the Middle English
> period, but I'd have to look that up.
Even after technical divergence, there was a lot of interchange going on.
The GVS happened in several steps from about 1450 to about 1650, but
Scots was sociolinguistically separate a century before.

> It is mostly Great Vowel Shifted, with
> the exception of A-S /u:/, which usually remains /u:/ in Scots where it
> diphthongised into /aw/ in English. Also, A-S /i:/ became diphthongised, but
> stopped at /@j/ in Scots where it continued on to /aj/ in English. Also,
> Scots famously preserves /x/, which English lost, e.g. /nI )Bçt/ vs. night,
> /@'njUx/ vs. enough, etc.
In NE Central and Ulster dialects, the diphthong "ea" remains at its
Shakespearean value of [e], though it has become [i] in the rest of Scots
as well as in English, with the sole (?) exception of the word "great".
This apparently shifted with the rest, but then moved back in the last
17th or early 18th century, probably as a result of dialect mixing.

--
They do not preach                              John Cowan
  that their God will rouse them                jcowan@reutershealth.com
    A little before the nuts work loose.        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
They do not teach                               http://www.reutershealth.com
  that His Pity allows them                         --Rudyard Kipling,
    to drop their job when they damn-well choose.   "The Sons of Martha"

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