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| davidwelsh Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5530 days ago 141 posts - 307 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, Norwegian, Esperanto, Swedish, Danish, French Studies: Polish, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, Mandarin | Message 33 of 41 11 March 2010 at 12:47am | IP Logged | |||||
Nope, just my personal experience. I was very active in the independence movement for some years and met lots of people who actively supported Scots. 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 34 of 41 11 March 2010 at 11:34am | IP Logged | |||||
I have been very active in the pub drinking movement for many years. I meet a lot of people in pubs who speak Spanish. I do not assume that there is a general trend for supporters of Spanish as a language to be supporters of heavy drinking. I would suggest that there is always an element of "self-selecting set" to these things.... 3 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 35 of 41 11 March 2010 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The question: what is your 'zero hypothesis', i.e. the one you assumes to be true until somebody turns up with some real evidence? Given that we have groups that actively campaign for Scots as an independent language and groups that actively campaign for Scotland as an independent country, would your basic assumption be that they to a large extent are overlapping or that they hate each others guts? Until proven otherwise, I am inclined to believe Davidwelsh' hypothesis, i.e. that the Scots language supporters also support political independance.
I'm personally quite neutral on this question. If I had only known Robert Burns' Scots then I would probably support the language claim, but almost everything in presumed Scots I have heard on the internet is far less different from other kinds of English, and hearing those clips I feel more like calling it a dialect (because otherwise I would have to deal with an overwhelming number of English languages in the world). It reminds me of the situation in Germany, where Low German clearly was an independent language up to around 1500, but since then it has crawled towards High German while steadily loosing its foothold among the population. I have dabbled a bit in Scots myself (though mostly as a written language) and there I have to treat it as an independent language, but that's only a question of methodology, it has no bearing on the 'real' status of Scots. Edited by Iversen on 11 March 2010 at 3:28pm 2 persons have 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 36 of 41 11 March 2010 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
Here's a quote from a Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party MSP, Shadow Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Alex Johnson:
Several problems: Robert Burns on the whole wrote in English with various Scots words. Burns is not suitable material for consideration of Scots as a language. Most real Scots speakers aren't the guys you hear on the net, but older people you'll run into in a rural village. Glaswegians in particular are prone to state that they speak Scots, when the only Scots forms they use are the negatives (dinnae, winnae, wuidnae etc) and "aye". A lot of the so-called Scots I've seen on the internet exists as a translation of text presented in English, and is a better study of source-language interference in translations than of Scots. Most Scottish people haven't studied any languages to any depth and their notion of orthography is based in almost its entirely on English. Vowels in particular suffer for this, with A commonly being rendered as a Modern English A, not the Low Germanic A as is still present in Dutch and in fossilised ancient words in English like "was", "fall", "talk" while AI (probable the closest approximation to Modern English A or Dutch AA) is rendered as English. The old OU digraph (probably borrowed from French orthography in the Middle Ages) has been rewritten as OO to match English, hiding the fact that sea channels like the Sound of Mull are and always have been pronounced like the Norse "sund" which they are derived from. So Scots is a language, but sometimes the people who seek to legitimise it are the people worst placed to do so. 3 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 37 of 41 11 March 2010 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think we are seeing the same thing in different ways: there is a continuum between true Scots (which has its own variants) and the English dialects further South all the way down to Kent (or South Africa). If you consider the most distant versions then they definitely look like different languages, but the clips on the internet are not really that extreme, and there is an undivided continuum between Scots and the Southerly variants of English, not only geographically but also inside Scotland. And that speaks for seeing the whole thing as one language with a wide variation spectrum. Which is actually similar to the situation of not only Low German, but also Occitan, both of which without any doubt were full and genuine languages during the Middle ages. But now they have been reduced to something like a suburb status with built-up areas all the way to downtown. Edited by Iversen on 11 March 2010 at 10:26pm 2 persons have 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 38 of 41 12 March 2010 at 12:30am | IP Logged | |||||
That's pretty shaky ground, because by that token Portuguese and Spanish are the same language. What we know of as standard Portuguese is southern Portuguese. Follow the dialect spectrum to the north, and find yourself slowly speaking more and more like a Gallician until you find yourself in Gallician and start speaking slightly more like Spanish because of recent influence. Then you head east, where Gallician slowly blends into Asturian, which is much more like Castillian, and you can follow this unbroken path right into the heart of Castille. And employing reductio ad absurdum, imagine a Basque-Swahili creole. You could have a full, unbroken dialect spectrum between Basque and Swahili, but you could never, ever declare that Basque and Swahili had become "one language". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kottoler.ello Tetraglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6004 days ago 128 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Mandarin, French Studies: Japanese, German | Message 39 of 41 12 March 2010 at 5:53am | IP Logged | |||||
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Completely off-topic but interesting tidbit:
There once existed a Basque-Icelandic pidgin due to Basque traders commonly venturing to Iceland in the 17th century. I really wish I could hear what that sounded like, but just its very existence makes me pretty happy. Ok, now back to the real discussion! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5557 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 40 of 41 12 March 2010 at 9:54am | IP Logged | |||||
Wow, a fascinating concept. And the scary thing is, Cainntear, I'm even now contemplating it! Must resist... (lol) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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