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Lingua Scotia

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Anonymous

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The BBC report a intiative to create an online archive of Scotland's different laguages:

'Academics are trying to gather together as many examples as possible of how people north of the border write and speak in their own tongue.

The results will be placed in an electronic archive - the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) - which will be made available to the public and academics alike over the internet...

...She [Dr Fiona Douglas of the University of Glasgow] said that Scots and Scottish English represented the two extremes of a "linguistic sliding-scale".

She said that Scots had different choices - depending on their social class, education and location - about where they fell on that scale.'

Any Doric speakers out there?
 
I seem to recall reading that the lowland Scots (ie Edinburgh, etc) have spoken 'English' for as long as the English themselves, since the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain extended that far north.

Any more info, folks?
 
But it is hoped that the project will eventually expand to include Gaelic and non-indigenous languages such as Punjabi, Urdu and Chinese.

Can anyone tell me what this is all about, I spend a fair amount of time in the Glasgow area and when I'm in a Chinese restaurant or an asian newsagents, the accent is typical Glaswegian.
 
I'm from the SouthWest of Scotland. Many years ago I got into a conversation with an old sheep farmer from Orkney. I could really only understand about one word in three. This was not the Gaelic. This was a `Scots' dialect with a strong old Scandanavian influence.

I've read that Easteren Scots is closely related to ancient Anglo Saxon Northumbrian, perhaps even older. There are many words in Scots closely related to modern Dutch.

e.g. He's ben the hoose. [He's in the house.]
in = Scots (ben) / Dutch (binnen)

or: gang awa [go away]
go = Scots (gang) / Dutch (gaan) [to go]

Needless to say there are more. There is also a close similarity in pronunciation between many words in Scots, Northumbrian and Frisian (a very proudly, seperate, dialect in the North East of Holland).

Creating a national identity by delineating and celebrating difference is an ongoing process in the development of nationhood. So I'm told.
 
Your posts are very interesting, any chance you could leave out the symbols, theyr'e a bit off putting.
 
p.younger said:
.....I spend a fair amount of time in the Glasgow area and when I'm in a Chinese restaurant or an asian newsagents, the accent is typical Glaswegian.

2nd or subsequent generation, schooled in this country, so they pick up the local accent, even although at home Urdu, Chinese, whatever is the language of choice. Doesn't this happen in your neck of the woods?

The kingdom of Lothian was invaded and annexed by Edwin of Northumbria (or possibly his successor - no written records!) in the 7th (or maybe 8th) century, but became part of Scotland in the early 11th century, maybe late 10th (this is all from memory, and I'm no good with dates :) ) Under the agreement/treaty, the people of Lothian were to be allowed to keep their own ways and practices, and not be 'Scotified' by the new rulers, and SE Scotland became a sort of conduit for Anglo-Saxon ideas into Scotland - when the neighbours weren't arguing, of course!

So the same Anglo-Saxon language will probably have been spoken north and south of the border from about 7th to 11th century, but then diverged as Lothian was influenced by the various Scots tongues, and Northumbrian by those further south.

If/when I get time (next year, probably :( ) I'll hunt out some links.
 
p.younger said:
Your posts are very interesting, any chance you could leave out the symbols, theyr'e a bit off putting.
He's obviously using a non-UK keyboard, so he'll need to adjust his language settings.
 
Does my previous post look better now? I hope so. I think it's a browser problem. VB is optimalised for MSIExploiter. I was using NS6.

Thanks for the tip. I couldn't see the copyright signs at all.

Here's hoping.
 
Of course there's the Egyptian/Spanish connection in Scotland... according to (mainly Irish) folklore, Scotta, daughter of a Pharoah, left with her entourage and ended up in Scotland (after she became queen to Bile, an early Spanish Celtic king and one of the original true Irishmen, although accounts differ on who she was actually married to - some say the son of a usurped european ruler living in Egypt).

Although the name Scotta is mentioned throughout the versions of the tale, the details change. A web search for the gal should serve to confuse most people...
 
The story about the Scots originally coming from Ireland also occurs in an early part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.
 
rynner said:
The story about the Scots originally coming from Ireland also occurs in an early part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.

They set up the kingdom of Dalriada (modern Ayrshire, near enough) - as before, sources/links later......

(Remember the song 'So much to do, if I only had time....' Currently know how the poor sod felt :D )
 
There used to be a Chinese Chippie near where I lived in Manchester. The owners were patients of my father's and spoke English with a faint but noticable welsh accent having been brought up there. Dad asked them one day if the spoke chinese with a welsh accent and the answer was yes and this made difficulties because . . .
Great grand parents spoke native chinese (of whatever region)
Grand parents spoke chinese with an Edinburgh accent having been brought up near Faslane but they had moved to Cardiff to run a business there.
The current couple having been brought up in Cardiff spoke chinese with a Welsh accent but grand parents couldn't understand them so parents had to translate
The children of this couple spoke Chinese with a Mancunian accent. These children could not be understood by their grandparents so to speak to the great grandparents 2 sets of translation were involved! :cross eye
 
I do understand what you mean. But why would people living near Faslane end up with an Edinburgh accent?
 
As most of the 'old lags' on the forum are aware, I'm approximately a Scottish Briton, and speak English as both a first and second language (often oddly, and never briefly).

I've made a number of previous mentions in the past that due to my (long-deceased) maternal grandfather's lengthy service during the 1920s/30s in the Indian Army, I unwittingly-absorbed quite a lot of Urdu / Hindi vocabulary & phrasology (by which I mean to a Kipling-plus standard, via our family argot). It's also an older British person thing, a lateral inheritance from "the wars" and military service, but is utterly& completely lost upon the vast majority of indigenous Brits under 50 yrs of age (it might as well be Klingon, for them).

I've always had just enough Urdu to get myself into trouble in shops owned by Scots-Pakistanis (and to a rarer extent, Scots-Indian /Scots-Sikh shops), or for a bit of fun.

I now find myself in the crazy situation that I speak considerably-more Urdu that the three (Scotland-born) Pakistani children of a local shop owner that I've known well (and been a customer of) for over quarter of a century.

These twentysomethingyear-old young shop-wallahs have barely a couple of words of spoken/understood Urdu between them, which is a source of great hilarity to both their father & mother (whilst I stumble over my stock joke Urdu phrases, the Burra-sahib (Dad-boss?) takes great pleasure in telling them how "why can none of you lot manage to speak Urdu like our good Scottish customers?!" - he has no mercy upon them (which I suppose is his right, but he must be blamed for failing to bring them up as properly-bilingual....all these grown-up children have had numerous visits to family (and for tours) in Pakistan, but they just don't develop any Urdu knowledge *at all*).

I felt a surreal horror in accidently telling the eldest of these Scottish-Pakistani people that their 'bungalow' was called that....because the name (and arguably the architecture) is Hindi/Urdu. She was stunned....which is quite worrying.

When I consider the current massive linguistic diversity in Scotland (including, as well as 'The Big Three': English/Scots/Gaelic; plus vast amounts of spoken Polish / other Eastern European etc) I do really worry that the whole lot....with the exception of a tiny amount of Scots vocab/accent and a smidge of statutory Gaelic.....will just be a homogenised / simplified / Americanised English, in less than two more decades.

I *am* speaking from experience. Poles and Italians who settled in Scotland in the 1940s became utterly-integrated, linguistically, in just over a generation. I've seen the same substantially happen in Canada (excepting of course, Quebec, and the just-holding-on Nova Scots).

Hmm....I wish I could have even just a radio time-machine. That could let me hear how Scotland will sound, in 2121. Because I think I can guess....

But why would people living near Faslane end up with an Edinburgh accent?
Perhaps because the OP is mixing-up Faslane with Rosyth? Nuclear submarines do that all the time

(EDIT - is 19 years & 12 days the longest-ever gap between sequential posts on the forum? Or have there been cases of even-longer periods of suspended animation?)

(EDIT2 - since I strongly-suspect a great many people in England have a.....fictional understanding of Scottish geography (and therefore fail to detect either the error, the irony, or all of the above) I'm going to translate the statement through the powers of illustrative translocation
But why would people living near Faslane end up with an Edinburgh accent?
"But why would people living near Liverpool end up with a Norfolk accent?"

(Well, at least I tried....)
 
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There are many words in Scots closely related to modern Dutch.

e.g. He's ben the hoose. [He's in the house.]
in = Scots (ben) / Dutch (binnen)

or: gang awa [go away]
go = Scots (gang) / Dutch (gaan) [to go]

Needless to say there are more.
Two that have always struck me are the Dutch words for 'cow ' and 'church' which are 'koe' (pronounced 'coo') and 'kerk'. Almost identical to Scots terms for the same things.
 
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