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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5839 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes  Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 41 of 69 21 July 2010 at 10:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I don't find that offensive. You could argue that they ARE the same language with different accent and spelling - and nobody is making any claims about which pronounciation is right; all are right, depending on where in Scandinavia they come from. Plus these languages have ALWAYS been considered separate and belong to separate nations. The situation in Scotland is different as I understand it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 42 of 69 22 July 2010 at 11:32am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Scotland is recognised as a "constituent country" of the UK -- the constitution of the UK recognises that each of Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England is a different country. The UK is a sovereign state, not a country. Scots and English have been considered separate for centuries. Before the union, the language of lLowland Scotland was called Scottis or Scots. At the time of the union, there was a conscious effort in some quarters to eradicate "barbarous" Scots and replace it with "civilised" English. When the Scottish king James VI took over the crown of England, all his writings were translated from Scots to English. Modern rural Scots still preserves many of the grammatical features taken out of James's writings - it is far more like Middle Scots than like Standard English. The current tendency to view Scots as a mere dialect of English is very recent indeed, and while it may be the most common lay view, that does not make it any more true. There are plenty of Spanish people who describe Gallician and Catalan as dialects of Spanish, but they aren't. Edit: I just had a look at a couple of dates. Scots was spoken in the kingdom of Scotland (through conquest) about half a millenium before the end of the Kalmar Union. The Union of the Crowns of Scotland and England happened in the early 1600s and the Union of Parliaments in the early 1700s -- this is all roughly consecutive with the Swedish empire. If Sweden had taken over all of Norway at that time, and if it still owned Norway to this day, do you think people would feel any differently about Norwegian than some people do about Scots? Scots and English have a much longer history of separation than the Scandinavian languages, and as a consequence, Scots and English are more different in everything but accent than Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. The fact that most Scottish people do not speak Scots anymore does not change this fact. Edited by Cainntear on 22 July 2010 at 8:16pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5783 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 43 of 69 24 July 2010 at 11:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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The problem is the name, but it is you that is misusing it. The French spoken in the Basque Country is not "Basque". The English spoken on a Navajo reservation is not Navajo. English has displaced Scots just as it displaced Navajo and French displaced Basque. The contact effects of Scots in Modern Scottish English is not the evolution of Scots, it's mere contact effects on English, and with each generation, these contact effects are lessened. It is not a modified version of Scots, it's a modified version of English, so the language name shouldn't move to a new language. [/quote] Its the evolution of Scots. I can't think of any similies elsewhere but its really not at all comparable to modern navajo speaking American. Scots speak in the Scots dialect, its what they've always done, it isn't some alien language imposed on them anymore than it is a alien language imposed on all English speakers- which is true to an extent, it is a centrally imposed standardisation. In spite of this though Northumbrian remains Northumbrian despite moving closer to standard English, Georide Geordie, Nortfolk Norfolk, Tyke Tyke, West Country West country, you get the point. Perhaps a good comparison could be Skånska. Skånish was once upon a time a dialect of Danish. Today however it is a dialect of Swedish. This is not simply because politically it is part of Sweden (though that was the key reason for the shift) but because it has been more and more influenced by Stockholm Swedish and so moved towards that norm rather than the Copenhagen one. The only diifference with Scots is that there is no alternative Copenhagen way of speech to counterweight the London one. Despite modern Skånska not being the more Danish way of speech of old though and instead being something understandable to their fellow Swedes the Skanians still speak Skånska. In the UK there is either one English or about two dozen. It just makes no logical sense to say Scots is the only dialect special enough to be a language. Not to mention rather offensive. I dearly hope this Scots language stuff goes out of fashion rather quickly. Maybe once a independance referendum is beaten and we get democratic reform which means things up north aren't a case of a two horse race between labour and the SNP. Edited by Tyr on 24 July 2010 at 11:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5328 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 44 of 69 27 July 2010 at 9:02am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
French is just Spanish with a French accent, creative spelling, and some different words. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 45 of 69 03 August 2010 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Tyr,
You've built an entirely circular argument -- Scots is a dialect because... Scots is a dialect. Let's get one thing straight: Scots is not a dialect. Whether you agree it's a language or not, if you cannot accept that Scots is not a dialect then you have lost the argument, because it can be trivially shown that Scots is not a dialect. How? Doric. Border Scots. These are just the two best known dialects of Scots, and quite possibly the two most different. But while there are enough differences to consider these different dialects, there are enough shared features to describe them as a family of dialects. What do you call a family of dialects? Difficult one. I say that, if there are enough shared similarities, you call it "a language". You may disagree.
Why not? OK, let's take a different example. Hindi is an Indo-European language, so is related to English. Indian English is a dialect of English, but it has features with their origin in Hindi (heavy use of progressive tenses, reduplication of "also", numeric concepts such as "krore"). So by your reasoning, Indian English is "the evolution of Hindi", therefore Hindi is a dialect of English. ... and you're about to cry that it's not the same thing. Where is your line? You haven't given any justification for where a language sits. You've just said that Scots isn't one.
And here we get to the centre of the problem: standardisation. Ignore it. There are languages without any defined standards, and we still call them languages. Standards are an artificial imposed norm. They are inherently political and have no place in the objective study of how people speak. If we want a norm, we need to look at a statistical norm, which goes back to the regularity of deviation of the Scots dialects from the English dialects (Northumbrian dialects excepted). My argument is that there is enough of a statistical norm that there is justification for calling it a language. Your justification is basically that you don't call it a language, so it isn't.
A) They speak a different tongue now than they did a few centuries ago -- they simply chose to use the same name. B) You're still not listening to me -- Scots and Scottish Standard English are veeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrry different. SSE is what happened when Scots speakers started speaking English. Scots is what Scots speakers continued to speak. It has been affected by English, but it is still the more Danish way of speech of old. There are two distinct statistical linguistic norms in Scottish Anglo-Saxon speech -- and you are calling them the same thing which is totally unscientific and unjustifiable.
Why is offensive? As I say, Scots is not one dialect. Is it offensive to the Dutch to say that Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are North Germanic languages but Dutch isn't? It isn't, because it isn't! That's how linguistics works.
Right then. Who was it that was accusing me of being politically motivated earlier? Scots has sweet FA to do with the SNP. I have never seen the SNP produce anything in Scots. Their website is entirely in SSE. Their stationery is branded bilingually in Gaelic and SSE. The Scots on the Scottish Parliament website was put there by the Labour/Lib-Dem coalition in line with their responsibilities under the European Charter for Minority Languages, which was signed and ratified by a Tory government at Westminster. Scots is a question of self-identity, not a political football. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5783 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 46 of 69 04 August 2010 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Because other dialects are just as valid as the Scottish ones. To set up Scots on a pedestal but not other dialects is offensive.
A: So where do you draw the line where Skanska stopped being Danish and became Swedish? There wasn't a sudden 'oh look, our flag is blue now. Better start speaking differently', it naturally evolved. Its the same language. It just evolved. B: Scots speak Scots. Things change. Modern Scots may use the same name but it has more in common with standard English than the Scots of 400 years ago.
They have an enourmous impact on how people speak. The upper classes will strive to speak the standard way and the lower classes will follow them. With the media and everyone on TV speaking a certain way that people follow becomes even stronger. The whole idea of Scots somehow splitting away from English at a certain point in history and becoming its own language is just utterly wrong. The two nations have been in contact forever and constantly influencing each other. If Scots had been standardised and spread as a standard and Scotland not joined England then it may have became another language. As it is though the only standard in the country is standard English.
Because there is no accepted strict scientific definition of a language. Its largely a case of 'I know what a goat looks like when I see one and that sir is a sheep'. I suppose one definition used by linguists is mutal-intellegiability...which Scots would certainly fail. But then so would a few real languages. And no. That wasn't my reasoning at all. Scots is the name given to the English varieties spoken in Scotland, not to a special seperate language. That it was once very different to London English and now less so is just evolution, not the Scots speaking a different language to that they did before as they never 'really' spoke a different language- if Scots were to be a language it would only be one like the Scandinavian languages, not a totally different language. There are lots of cases of this kind of thing in Scandinavia. Skanish I've mentioned and I believe Jamtland is the same. They have their own names, they are the same language, they just get grouped under something different.
So Scots is a language purely because I'm chosing to group them all together as Scots rather than speaking of the Scots dialects? You know what I mean. Of course Scottish English is varied. But then people group American English together in this manner even though it has varieties within itself too. You're picking at hairs there.
American English is a language? North East England English a language? Irish English a language? Its the way it works. To someone from around my hometown we have dialects that vary from town to town. We see clear differences between them. To people from outside the area though its all just north east English. I'd wager the same is true the world over. Its not important and it doesn't mean its a language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 47 of 69 04 August 2010 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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If Scotland had remained an independent country then we might have a situation today where Lowlands Scots had evolved even further away from 'Standard' English (from the Southern part of Great Britain), and then it would certainly have been incomprehensible to the average Londoner or US American. With a standardized writing that actually was used in books and newspapers, use in schools, churches and government and an independent history that dates back to some Northern dialects of Middle English (or its precursor) you would have all the elements that normally characterizes a language. But things have turned out differently.
When I eavesdropped on Scotsmen speaking to other Scotsmen earlier this year I heard most people speak with a pronunciation that clearly differed from 'Southern' British English - but I heard very few distinctly Scots words. I know that such words exist because I have seen them in texts, but they are apparently not common in the daily talk of ordinary Scotsmen. You can discuss whether the result is Scots that have moved towards standard English, or English that have sucked up the pronunciation patterns of the real Lowland Scots, but the result is clearly English with Scots pronunciation. This clearly ressembles other cases of linguistic cannibalism, such as French spoken with an Occitan patois, Northern dialects of German which have sucked up some words and pronunciations from Low German ('Platt') and Skånsk, which is the result of a deliberate attempt to force a Danish-speaking population to swich to Swedish (without the Swedish occupation the Scanians would probably have sounded more or less like dialect speakers on Bornholm). The point is: it doesn't matter that a population once had a independent language if it chooses or is forced to abandon it. In the case of Scotland we have a few speakers of Gaelic, a few speakers of real uncompromised Scots - and a lot of people who have made a compromise with the language of a mighty neighbour: they speak it, but in their own way. And in the long run the particularites may be eroded so that they end up speaking like the celebrities and reporters on TV. That being said: if you want to learn Scots you'll have to treat it as an independent language - otherwise you can't keep it separate from 'ordinary' English. Edited by Iversen on 19 March 2012 at 11:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 48 of 69 05 August 2010 at 10:44am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Agreed. This is SSE -- Scottish Standard English, Standard Scottish English or simply just Scottish English.
I disagree with this definition, because it disadvantages the true Scots speakers. Scots still exists and is spoken in a way that varies very little from the literary Scots of the time of the union. SSE speakers speak in a tongue that is statistically more similar to English than to Middle Scots. How can you define something which is 90% English and 10% Scots as Modern Scots, when there are people, albeit a minority, who speak 90% Scots, 10% English? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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