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davidwelsh
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5289 days ago

141 posts - 307 votes 
Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, Norwegian, Esperanto, Swedish, Danish, French
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 Message 33 of 41
11 March 2010 at 12:47am | IP Logged 
elvisrules wrote:
davidwelsh wrote:
The fact is that supporters of Scots as a language tend (as a general trend, and not of course exclusively) to be supporters of Scottish independence. Seeing Scots as a separate language from English strengthens the justification for Scotland being an independent state.

Those who view Scots as a dialect of English tend (as a general trend, and not of course exclusively) to be supporters of the British union. Seeing Scots as a dialect of English strengthens the justification for Scotland being in a union with England.

I'm sorry but I don't think that's true. Do you have any statistics to support this?


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.
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Cainntear
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
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Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
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 Message 34 of 41
11 March 2010 at 11:34am | IP Logged 
davidwelsh wrote:
The fact is that supporters of Scots as a language tend (as a general trend, and not of course exclusively) to be supporters of Scottish independence. Seeing Scots as a separate language from English strengthens the justification for Scotland being an independent state.


davidwelsh wrote:
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.

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....
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Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
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 Message 35 of 41
11 March 2010 at 3:24pm | IP Logged 
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

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Cainntear
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
Joined 5771 days ago

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Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
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 Message 36 of 41
11 March 2010 at 4:46pm | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
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.

Here's a quote from a Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party MSP, Shadow Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Alex Johnson:
JohnsonsView wrote:
All that taxpayers money supporting Gaelic education and broadcasting while I, brought up as a Scots speaker, appear to fall outside that particular loop. I still believe however, that the Scots language is one of the most impressive jewels in Scotland's cultural crown.[/url]
http://www.wakconservatives.com/johnstones_view_2008-02-01.h tm

Here's what I think is the only safe zero hypothesis:

The percentage of active nationalists who support Scots as a language is larger than the percentage of active unionists who do, or the percentage of the general public who do.


[quote=Iversen]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,

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.

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Iversen
Super Polyglot
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Denmark
berejst.dk
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 Message 37 of 41
11 March 2010 at 10:17pm | IP Logged 
Cainntear wrote:
So Scots is a language, but sometimes the people who seek to legitimise it are the people worst placed to do so.


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

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Cainntear
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
Joined 5771 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 
Iversen wrote:
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.

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".
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kottoler.ello
Tetraglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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128 posts - 192 votes 
Speaks: English*, Russian, Mandarin, French
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 Message 39 of 41
12 March 2010 at 5:53am | IP Logged 
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!
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Teango
Triglot
Winner TAC 2010 & 2012
Senior Member
United States
teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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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 
Cainntear wrote:
...imagine a Basque-Swahili creole.

Wow, a fascinating concept. And the scary thing is, Cainntear, I'm even now contemplating it! Must resist... (lol)


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