Re: USAGE: Scots

John Cowan screivit:

> It's pretty much like the situation in Italy, where there are various
> local dialects which are really separate languages, and then there
> are varieties of Italian which are influenced by those dialects
> and spoken in the same regions.
That's a good analogy! I hadn't thought of it before.

> The Scots literary tradition never died, though, and got a big
> boost in the late 20th century by the translation of the New Testament
> into Scots (only the Devil speaks Standard English).
Actually, the Devil speaks Scots as well. Though there's an appendix
containing an excerpt from Matthew 4 (Is that how you cite a Biblical
passage? I don't know) from a draft of the work, in which he does speak
English.

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Ted Saratoga screivit:

> John, Is there any website on the form of Scots used in the recently
translated Bible.??

I have never seen one. It's not particularly different from any other
variety of Scots, as far as I can tell, though the vocabulary is wonderfully
rich and "braid", as they say.

And it's just the New Testament, by the way, not the whole Bible. It was
published in 1985, though the author had completed the translation back in
the sixties.

>  Does it have a name.??
It's just Scots. The only dialect I can think of that sometimes goes by a
different name is northeast Scots, which is often called "Doric" by its
speakers.

> Has this helped to standardize the current language? Such things often do.
No. An artificial (in the sense of being a intentionally constructed mixture
of elements of various dialects) literary variety of Scots called "Lallans"
had already come into use (though it is not universally favored, by any
means; a number of writers and Scots language activists have a strong
preference for their own regional dialect) before the NT was published, and
that IMO has had much more of a standardizing effect.

> Most of us are familiar with some phonetic and vocabulary differences, but
what
> grammatical features has Scots that diffier from the English?? When is the
word
> order different??
Word order isn't very different. Being sister languages, Scots and English
are very much alike, in fact, though some Scots language activists do all
they can to force their Scots to be as different from English as possible,
just for political reasons. One major grammatical difference is that plural
nouns take singular verb forms, for example where English says "the children
are", Scots says "the bairns is". A nice, accessible, basic overview of
Scots grammar and usage is the book "A Scots Grammar"  by David Purves,
published in 1997 by The Saltire Society, ISBN 0854110682.

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John Cowan screivit again:

> >  John, Is there any website on the form of Scots used in the recently
translated Bible.??
>
> IIRC, there are twelve different varieties of Scots in use for various
> different people.
Really?! I don't remember that! I shall have to look at it again, more
closely.

> > Most of us are familiar with some phonetic and vocabulary
differences,but what
> >  grammatical features has Scots that diffier from the English??
>
> Well, one I remember is the use of "what" as a relative particle, which is
> ungrammatical in Standard English though common enough in the dialects.
> "Scots wha hae" should really be "Scots ut hae" (i.e. "Scots what have");
It's usually spelled "at" these days, though pronounced like "ut", i.e. with
a schwa. You do sometimes see it written in full as "what". I've never seen
the spelling "ut", though. And it should be "Scots at haes", according to my
native-speaking informants (plural nouns take singular verb agreement).

> Burns was correcting his Scots to make it more English here.
Most of Burns' Scots is very anglicised. I assume to make it more palatable
and/or comprehensible to an educated, English-speaking audience?

For what it's worth, I went to university in Scotland and I have some
friends there who are both native, fluent Scots speakers and ardent Scots
activists. If anyone on the list has any specific questions about Scots
(grammar, usage, current status, etc.) I could pass them on.

Thomas

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