Re: NATLANG: Scary Document

Joe:
> > > This is an official Scots translation of a Scottish Parliament report:
> > >
> > > It looks like some kind of Bastard child of English and Scots,
replacing
> > > words that aren't in Scots with completely unaltered english.
Hardly surprising, since English and Scots are sister languages, both being
the direct descendents of Anglo-Saxon in the British Isles. They are very
close. Most English words *are* Scots words, and vice versa. And also, of
course, English is the majority language in Scotland, and the language of
All Things OfficialT, including of course education, so it exerts an
enormous influence on Scots (and Gaelic as well).

> > > I have to say though, Scots is an interesting language.  More Germanic
than
> > > English.
How so? English *is* Germanic! 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.

John Cowan:
> >   In order to express the concerns of 21st-century
> > speakers, a massive influx of English loanwords (where else would they
> > come from?) is not only necessary but benign.
Indeed, and since the two languages are so close anyway, often the Scots
equivalent of an English word consists simply in altering a few sounds.

> >  In most cases, however,
> > it is straightforward to tell if a *sentence* is English or Scots.
> >  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.)

Tristan:
> Should that be '... heavily influenced by Scots'?
Or Scots heavily influenced by English! :)

> Well, if they'd bothered and had some sort of language body,
They do, sort of (the Scots Leid Associe), but it's largely ineffectual.
They campaign for Scots language recognition and so forth, and shoot
themselves in the foot by putting out material written in heavily anglicised
Scots (of the "Scots wha hae" variety) so that the average Scottish person
who does not speak Scots or only speaks a few words of Scots can understand
it with no difficulty, and then they get upset and when people say that
Scots is "just a dialect of English" and "not a separate language".

Scots academics mostly gather and bicker over how to spell Scots. When I was
at university in Aberdeen, some Scots activist friends of mine put out a
history journal entirely in Scots (called "Cairn"). Most of the response
they got from the Scots academic community was comments or complaints on the
orthography they decided on, with little or no comment on the fact that they
had just published the first academic writing to appear in Scots in 300
years.

> BTW.... What dialect are the Scots words borrowed from English borrowed
> from? I imagine it'd be quite funny if they took 'em from RP :)
I imagine it would be Scottish Standard English.

> When did Scots diverge? Is it Great Vowel Shifted?
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. 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. /nIçt/ vs. night,
/@'njUx/ vs. enough, etc.
Thomas

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