Re: Flag of England

At 3:17 pm +0200 18/6/00, BP Jonsson wrote:
>At 14:17 17.6.2000 -0500, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>>I'm curious -- why England?
>
>Because English became English in England, and spread from there.
>
>>English has been spoken in parts of Scotland
>>for the better part of a thousand years.
>
>Scots is not English.
Depends what you mean by Scots.  If you define it narrowly as "Lowland
Scots'  you might have a case - the broadest forms of Lowland Scots are
well nigh incomprehensible to most of the rest of the Island.

But a large part of Scotland, geographically at least, is made up of the
Highlands & islands - there they speak excellent English.  Indeed,  many
Highlanders claim that the best English in Britain is spoken in Inverness.

The reason, of course, is that the forebears of the Highlanders learnt
their English as a second language and certainly did not want to learn the
Lowland formed since, in earlier times, there was not always great love
between Highlander & Lowlander.

>Did Norwegians speak Danish during that better part
>of a thousand years when Danish was imposed on them as a written language?
Probably not, but the situation is not the same.  Lowland Scotland used
English long *before* the two crowns were united under James VI of Scotland
who became James I and even longer before the two parliaments were united.
The language was never imposed.  And many Scots pride themselves on
speaking better English than most Sassanachs.

English has never been just the language of what is politically England
(and, indeed, for much of its history, it was not the L1 of all the
inhabitants of England) - and now it's spoken in one form or another in
mant areas across the globe.

IMHO it is an unhistoric & retrograde step to equate English narrowly with
England.

Ray.


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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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