f13.net

We want tae mak siccar that as mony folk as can is able tae find oot aboot whit the Scottish Pairlament dis and whit wey it warks. (http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vli/language/scots/index.htm)

I thought this was the work of a prankster until I showed it to someone more familiar with the Highlands.  Nope - 'Scots' is considered an official language.


At first, I was stunned.  Then I went back to reading it aloud in the voice of Begby from Trainspotting.

Scots!  Defend this silliness!  Next, l33t speak will be considered an official dialect.

(They also have the presentation in an English Sign Language Flash movie for the deaf.  No word of a Morse code mp3 file for the blind - yet.)

Scots is proudly the language of lowland Scots. People speak to each other in a mix of English and Scots. It has been written down for hundreds of years - haven't you ever read a poem by Robbie Burns?

My favourite bit is "Forby yon, gin ye’re deif or speech impairit and a textphone uiser, ye can contact the Pairlament's textphone nummer." Scots has never been particularly PC, and I love how hearing-impaired is still deif, but dumb is speech impairit.


To A Louse
On Seeing One On A Lady's Bonnet, At Church
Robert Burns
1786

    Ha! whaur ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie?
    Your impudence protects you sairly;
    I canna say but ye strunt rarely,
    Owre gauze and lace;
    Tho', faith! I fear ye dine but sparely
    On sic a place.

    Ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner,
    Detested, shunn'd by saunt an' sinner,
    How daur ye set your fit upon her-
    Sae fine a lady?
    Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner
    On some poor body.

    Swith! in some beggar's haffet squattle;
    There ye may creep, and sprawl, and sprattle,
    Wi' ither kindred, jumping cattle,
    In shoals and nations;
    Whaur horn nor bane ne'er daur unsettle
    Your thick plantations.

    Now haud you there, ye're out o' sight,
    Below the fatt'rels, snug and tight;
    Na, faith ye yet! ye'll no be right,
    Till ye've got on it-
    The verra tapmost, tow'rin height
    O' Miss' bonnet.

    My sooth! right bauld ye set your nose out,
    As plump an' grey as ony groset:
    O for some rank, mercurial rozet,
    Or fell, red smeddum,
    I'd gie you sic a hearty dose o't,
    Wad dress your droddum.

    I wad na been surpris'd to spy
    You on an auld wife's flainen toy;
    Or aiblins some bit dubbie boy,
    On's wyliecoat;
    But Miss' fine Lunardi! fye!
    How daur ye do't?

    O Jeany, dinna toss your head,
    An' set your beauties a' abread!
    Ye little ken what cursed speed
    The blastie's makin:
    Thae winks an' finger-ends, I dread,
    Are notice takin.

    O wad some Power the giftie gie us
    To see oursels as ithers see us!
    It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
    An' foolish notion:
    What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
    An' ev'n devotion!

Is it true that you can't go into a Scottish pub and order a black and tan?

(http://www.beerappreciation.com/Images/black-n-tan.jpg)

It is.

Tale is now in the hospital with 3rd Degree Burns.

 :uhrr:

We also have our own version of wikipedia:
http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Scots is a language?

What next, ebonics? :awesome_for_real:

That is fucking awesome.

Fowk an illiterate society is more like it. Amirite?

I can't believe I've never heard of this before now. Months, nay years, of entertainment will come of this.


Airt an Cultur, bitchez.

Wow, I have never been so happy to be from the Outer Hebrides than I am now.

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/39720/miscellany/ot/scots_computer.png)

Nice.  Would that be a Mac?

Knock off abacus called... well, balls. I can't find what it's called. Why?


They haven't discovered "math" yet.

The posting guidelines (http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Keepin_a_caum_souch_whan_the_editin_gets_hot) are great.  We could learn so much from the Scottish - if only we could understand them.


Truar wards navar spookan.

Noob.

Math is a word invented by Americans, whose fucking embarrassing version of English was popularised by settlers of little education, whose linguistic errors and misspellings became official and at odds with the rest of the English-speaking world.

Scotland correctly calls it maths (short for mathematics).

Mathematics is the study of fuck. The structure of fuck. A room of fuck. And Chynge.

The thing I find baffling is that they have wikipedia articles in Cornish, which has been a dead language for ages, notwithstanding random attempts to revive it.

Dab it I will.

We had a brief reading from "To a Louse" last night on the Eve Vent channel.

Actually, for me the strange thing is that several of those wikipedia article use two or three forms of Scots, picking the more elegant words from each, so as to avoid using English terms.  I moved around when young, so I'm fluent in Lallans and Doric, and can easily understand the Fife and Borders dialects, too, and there are bits of each in there.

Lorimer, who translated the New Testament into Scots a couple of decades ago, was one of its best modern writers:


One nice thing about Lorimer is he gives different dialects to different characters.  So Peter speaks in the north-eastern voice of the Broch, and the fishing villages.

Edit: to link it back, the first line of that - "Gin I speak wi the tungs o men an angels, but hae nae luve i my hairt, I am no nane better nor dunnerin bress or a rínging cymbal" - is inscribed in the floor at the entrance of the Scottish parliament.

This is the funniest shit I've ever read.  They actually call that a language instead of just English with a mouthful of dick.  They actually have a written language that reads like someone doing a bad impression of a Scot.  "OY YE GOB GIT ORF MAH SHEEP!"

I eagerly await your visit whereapon we will visit the Clansman pub and I will announce loudly, "So, whit wiz thon aboot sucking dick, ya fucking yank ?"

I will then leave you to the tender ministrations of the assembled crowd.

 :why_so_serious:

Or the Sarry's Heid by the Barrowlands.

One thing these texts miss out, of course, is the incredibly rich, varied and widespread use of the word "fuck" in Scots.  We're good at saying it - it fits most Scots accents very well - and so we roll it out constantly.  Fred MacAuley says that he stood behind a supporter at a St Johnstone football match who was voicing his disapproval by shouting "Fuckin' Boo"

A couple of days ago I had a CSR tell me that she was not going to help me until I calmed down.  I told her that I was quite calm and explained the issues again. 

She told me that unless I stopped swearing she would hang up.

...

Oh, I see. 

The word "fuck" is used in the same way that the words "uh" or "um" are used in American Mid-Atlantic dialects.

Scots probably has more in common with old English, rather than being descended from what we think of as English.

The language I've been trying to understand that is descended from English is Tok Pisin from Papua New Guinea (aka Pidgin English). Here is the fran pes (front page) of the Tok Pisin Wikipedia http://tpi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran_pes

And an extract from the PNG entry: http://tpi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papua_Niugini

Read it again and see:
Papua New Guinea am a one-fellow country (i.e. it's all one country) belong region Melanesia belong Pacific. Ground belong country i stop long (stays) isten (not sure what that means) have belong New Guinea Island and two long old narrow-fellow island also New Britain, New Ireland, Manus and plenty more.

The Lord's Prayer in tok pisin:

    Papa bilong mipela
    Yu stap long heven.
    Nem bilong yu i mas i stap holi.
    Kingdom bilong yu i mas i kam.
    Strongim mipela long bihainim laik bilong yu long graun,
    olsem ol i bihainim long heven.
    Givim mipela kaikai inap long tude.
    Pogivim rong bilong mipela,
    olsem mipela i pogivim ol arapela i mekim rong long mipela.
    Sambai long mipela long taim bilong traim.
    Na rausim olgeta samting nogut long mipela.
    Kingdom na strong na glori, em i bilong yu tasol oltaim oltaim.
    Tru.

Both Scots and Tok Pisin are pretty interesting to study from a linguistic angle - Scots for being an excellent example of an in-between point between English and an entirely different and mostly unrecognizeable language (which it would have no doubt developed into if it wasn't for mass printing), and Tok Pisin as a pidgin language, which are incredibly interesting languages to study, often being created by slaves sharing different mother tongues as well a different language than their owners. 

Tale, the book The Power of Babel (yes that's a P) had a fair sized chunk dedicated to various pidgin languages and how they form, including Tok Pisin.  Decent book if you're interested in linguistics from a more historical perspective anyway.

I dunno about that.  I think that mass-printing (given that there are very few printed works in Scots) has done very little to crystalise Scots.  Rather, I think that mass media have marginalised Scots.  As a Scot, I'm also not hugely worked up about the fact that Scots is doomed: English is a fine, flexible language and our ability to speak it as natives gives us a competitive nation.  It would be terrible to be a country wedded to the fading grandeur of their old language and to suffer because of that, or to be constantly trying to protect it from loan-words from its dominant neighbour (bonjeur France!)

I love the sound of good Scots, though: it is less altered from Anglo-Saxon than modern English (read Beowulf in some Scots accents and you're probably not a million miles off: it certainly makes it easier for a Scot to understand), and its vocabulary reflects the cultural links of the country with our trading partners in Holland, northern Germany, France, the Baltics and Scandinavia: kirk, ken, dreich etc.

As a more serious answer to WUA, the  runs to 12 very weighty volums (http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/dictionary of the Scots Language[/url)

So, uhm, what did Scotts talk to each other in around the time of the Roman Empire? Serious question.

It's complex and there are fuzzy bits, due to the lack of written sources.  We know that by the third century onwards AD the Scots come across from Ireland, bringing with them a Goidelic language called Primitive Irish.  Before that the Picts probably spoke a Brythonic language a bit like that spoken in the Isle of Man today.  Basically, the Celtic language group at one time stretched from Turkey (Galatia, named after the Celtic Gauls) all the way to Poland, Spain, France (various places called Galicia, Gaul etc) and the British Isles, who had a separate development called Insular Celtic.  The Irish form (Goedelic, ultimately Gaelic) displaced the Pictish form (Brythonic, closer to Wales, Brittany and Manx).

Simple, huh?

The Irish only really turn up after the Romans withdraw from their foothold in Southern Scotland, btw.

What Engels said - despite the fact that the Romans drew a line on the map and called everything above it "Caledonia", there wasn't really a Scottish nation state at that point. (They were still in Tribal phase then, hadn't hit Civ. :grin:)

Pottery-making is a bastard to research if it is always raining too much to find dry wood.

Shite.

And nowt changed.

To be fair, a lot of medieval scholars will tell you that the first modern nation state developed in 13th century Scotland.

That makes it your fault that Bush is the leader of the free world.

This is all just crazy talk.

Hoots!

It's quite fascinating from a linguistic point of view.

Being a German native speaker and having communicated with the Dutch (Dutch sounding and looking like misspelled German in any imaginable way) I wondered if there possibly was any other "un-even" pair of languages.

Well, here it is.

Dutch is the classic example, but isn't one of the Hochdeutsch group a closer match?

You possibly mean what is known as "flat German" ("Plattdeutsch", free translation), which is spoken in the more northern parts of Germany.

However, unlike Dutch - which to a non-speaker is only comprehendable if you know German, English -and- have a feel for when to guess the rest of a sentence based on the context - "flat German" is perfectly understandable.
Having said that, I'm not from Germany, but here in Austria we have SO many dialects that it leaves you wondering if what you hear really -is- German.

Perhaps your comparison is correct, though, as I don't know how Scot "feels" to English native speakers - to me it is just like Dutch, where I have to guess half the content and read aloud to get the rest. To you it might just be a light accent :uhrr:

I meant Hochdeutsch, although Plattdeutsch would be as good an example.  Each is a group of regional variants.  Plattdeutsch might be a better example, I suppose, since they tended to diverge and develop alongside - rather than evolving from - the dominant language.  Much like Scots and English with Frisian.

Bork bork bork bork bork.

So it's alright for the Gaels to speak their English dialect, but not for the Brythons to use their version of one of the original British languages?  :grin:

This is it.  I can understand it much better if I (try to) speak it, but there are plenty of words not in English.  The rest just sounds like you're really drunk or maybe just came from the dentist.

It's fair to assume it's your first guess.

I'm going to have to insist that anyone who tries to make a serious argument in this thread do so in Scots.

The Gaels speak a Godelic language.  It's us Lowlanders that speak Frisian dialects.

The difference is the Gaels actually *speak* it. Cornish might as well be Sindarin or Quenya at this point - you could probably find more people who'd understand the latter two.  :-P

The fact that the statement made perfect sense to me is rather depressing.

Ha. But the kids in my neighbourhood west of Edinburgh would have said "Di ye ken Grand Design?" and written "Do you know Grand Design?".

....


I always do.

I understood everything that came out of every Scot's mouth while I was there, and I even had a homeless guy explain the monetary system to me.  We were like "We will give you this ten if you tell us what all these coins are worth."  Perfectly understandable.  Even the old codgers in the pub, late at night.

So he got £10 AND a story about Americans?

Yep, was his lucky day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3xzDGF4fW4&feature=related (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3xzDGF4fW4&feature=related)