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| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5783 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 57 of 69 06 August 2010 at 5:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
This is a huge problem I see with the Scots language- it doesn't reflect the situation on the ground. Wheras Scots amongst themselves speaking Scots with each other will use 95% words completely usual to all English (random number pulled out my arse) written Scots will use 30% words not found in standard English, and mangle the spellings of another 60% so they look different. I suppose if Scots were to be more standardised it could be a 'language'; but a artificial one ala Esperanto. It has little in common with the real organic Scots.
Crushing Scotland's culture after Bannockburne? I think you've made a bit of a mistake there. I'm guessing you're thinking of Culloden- and after that it was the highlands had their culture crushed. The crushers were largely the lowlanders- i.e. the folk who speak Scots. With the Norwegian comparison: I think the problem with that comparison is that Norway entered into an environment which already had a long established system of 'one language' considered as two with Swedish and Danish. To add a 3rd language onto that was a simple matter. With Scots however...there's one English. Even the very varied varieties you get outside of Europe aren't considered seperate languages. There's no prescedent for it.
Except the dialects of English are just as unique and different as Scots is from standard English. To use your Italian example its like saying Venetian is a language but Neapolitan isn't. Edited by Tyr on 06 August 2010 at 5:23pm 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 58 of 69 06 August 2010 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Oh for pity's sake. The situation on the ground is not that "Scots amongst themselves speaking Scots with each other will use 95% words completely usual to all English" but that Scots among themselves speak English. There are still people who do speak actual, genuine Scots to each other, though they are a minority. I'm not the only person who says this -- have a look at Iversen's post. The orthography of Scots is not "mangled to look different" -- it is a continuation of a very old tradition with a reasonably phonetic basis. It is far easier to work out the pronunciation of an unknown word written in Scots than in English. As for standardisation, I'll say again: that's a total red herring. Picard/Chti isn't standardised, but this does not lead it to being regarded as simply a dialect of French. All languages consist of various dialects. If one of them is considered a standard -- fine. If not -- fine. Standards usually mean the imposition of one person's way of speech on others, and this is a practical impossibility in the case of minority languages. When language revitalisation is a community effort it has to serve the whole community, and standardisation is by nature exclusive, not inclusive. Some standardisation has occurred in (eg) Basque, Catalan, Gaelic and Irish, but there is still a lot of resistance to this among different dialect groups. For example, the standardisation of Catalan has largely been rejected by the Valencian and Balearic communities as unfairly favouring the dialects within the autonomous region of Catalunya.
You're still talking about "Scots" as a single dialect, which is as nonsensical as calling everything between the Watford Gap and the border a single dialect and call in "Northern". Scots covers a massive geographical area -- about half of Scotland -- so there's a heck of a lot of variation in there. The dialects of Scots are even more different from each other than the dialects of English are from each other. Linguistically. Yet there is a very significant number of feature that appear consistently across the dialects of Scots that do not occur in any dialect outside of the Northumbrian/Anglo-Danish areas. This I was told by the English Language department of an English university.
No, you're not listening to me. It's like saying that Teremano is a dialect of Neopolitan and that Veronese is a dialect of Venetian, because as I keep trying to say, most speakers of Scots are not speakers of simply "Scots" but of "Border Scots", "Doric" or whatever. Everything I have read from anyone who has actually looked at the reality has said that Scots is statistically a distinct language. And it was in fact an English Language course at an English university, under English teaching staff that convinced me, a nationalist Scotsman, that Scots was in fact a language. Except... wait... some pseudonymous layman on the internet just told me that some of the leading academics in the field are wrong without any data to back himself up, so I'd better rethink my opinion.... Edited by Cainntear on 06 August 2010 at 6:06pm 1 person has 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 59 of 69 06 August 2010 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Correction - I meant Culloden
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| Tyr Senior Member Sweden Joined 5783 days ago 316 posts - 384 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish | Message 60 of 69 07 August 2010 at 1:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
That is irrelevant. As we've established all dialects have sub dialects. In America they speak broadly of just 'British English'- including all the Scottish and English dialects. In individual regions you get people who can recognise the dialect of people from the next town. If it'll make you feel better I'll rephrase: Except the dialects of English are just as unique and different as the Scottish dialectS are from standard English. My meaning is the same either way.
Not particularly. The newsreaders on local TV in Scotland- they're speaking Scottish standard English. Downplaying their dialect a lot so they can be understood by everyone, even those recently arrived in the area from afar. This is a very different way of speach to that of a bunch of blokes in a pub somewhere in Glasgow.
Scots isn't the only dialect that can look alien if spelled phoenetically.
Standard English though didn't come about as a case of one dialect being imposed on the others. It was created to try and be fair to everyone- though it rather screwed over the Midlanders in this. A lot of what is in modern English has a basis in the north rather than the south. I'm not getting what you're talking about overall here though.
I don't see how the two are exclusive. Venetian is a language and Neopolitan isn't. The two can then be divided into dialects themselves but it doesn't spoil how unfair and unnatural this recognition would be.
Yeah, of course, all academics are agreed Scots is a different language. Sure. A quick search of google scholar shows me this is incorrect. Many papers out there speaking of the Scottish dialect and some discussing whether Scots could be a language with clear evidence against as well as for. Appeals to authority don't cut it. Even despite this being one of those subjects which people will only care to really write about if they tend towards the language side. Edited by Tyr on 07 August 2010 at 1:14pm 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 61 of 69 07 August 2010 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Just a few comments.
When I visited Scotland I didn't visit any pubs. But I listened to people at railways stations, in trains and busses, in zoos, shops and other places who spoke not to me, but to each other. So I didn't form my opinion of the speech of ordinary people in Scotland from the news in TV. Actually I didn't watch the news at all. As for the status of Neapolitan few would argue that it is or ever was a language. But the situation about Venetian is more problematic. We once had a discussion here on HTLAL about the Northern Italian 'dialects', because it was said that they really were languages (and the Ethnologue defines them as languages - as is wont for that source). I did a rather comprehensive search for materials from different epochs, and my conclusion was that the things I could find up to something like 1400-1500 was rather exotic, not least that from Venezia and surrounding areas - maybe even to the extent that it formed a natural bridge to Romantsch. But already in the works of Goldoni the Italian (read Tuscan) influence was clear, and nowadays it is difficult to defend that the language spoken by people in Venezia and on the mainland is anything than Italian. Maybe there are still traces of the Venetian-that-could-have-become-a-language somewhere in the countryside among the old generation, but it must be moribund by now. In that respect Venetian is a good parallel to the fate of real Scots, except that the local government of the region does nothing at all to promote Venetian as a language. The third comment is that even though I mistook the place where Robert the Bruce won a decisive victory over the British army for the one where the Bonnie Prince Charles lost his last battle (shame on me!!), this doesn't change the conclusion: the Earl of Cumberland primarily went for the highland language and culture, but by doing this he definitely strengthened the grip of the British on Scotland as a whole. And the lowlanders who went along with this policy had no interest in promoting their own Scots as an alternative to English. The pronunciation survived because radio and TV had not yet been invented, but most writing would be done in English. And apparently there isn't enough basis for an active printing industry based upon real Scots, whatever that is. To Cainntear and Tyr: your posts are getting longer and longer, but it doesn't seem that you can agree on anyting. Couldn't each of you just do a short and clear summary of your positions and accept that 'the twain shall never meet'? Edited by Iversen on 07 August 2010 at 3:12pm 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 62 of 69 08 August 2010 at 7:33am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Wait, let me get this straight. From what I understand Scots and English were quite
different at one time. Now, since Scotland is not independent anymore and the status of English in the world today, Scots has been influenced by English, making it look and sound somewhat similar. So, a language can evolve to be a dialect of a related language? If Spanish started influencing Catalan a lot more, would Catalan cease to be a language and start being a dialect of Spanish? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5353 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 63 of 69 08 August 2010 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I found an interesting quote about Scots from scots-online.org:
I looked up Blind Harry's Wallace, and to me it just looks like Middle English, as opposed to Scots. Instances such as the above really just make me question the whole idea of Scots and English being not one and the same, just dialects or varients. edit: Just to extend my thoughts on this a bit more, since I did not have much time when I made the above post. If Scots and English are different languages, I find it interesting that these pieces such as Wallace can be considered both Middle English and Scotts. That would lead one to believe that the languages are not so divergent as some suggest. Regarding the Scandinavian influence in terms of vocabulary in Scotts, for example. I really do not find this to be a good way of differentiating tongues, namely because South African English, for instance, has influences and vocabulary from Afrikaans, african languages, and so forth. Finally, although professors are smart, I find it dangerous to make decisions solely on their ideas and thoughts. I have met some very intelligent and leading professors of their fields, but have also known some which are not so good, so it really depends on a case-by-case situation. Edited by tracker465 on 09 August 2010 at 6:32am 1 person has 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 64 of 69 09 August 2010 at 11:09am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
It probably could. According to the ortodox kind historical linguistics languages (and dialects) can only diversify and eventually die out, but not coalesce. But in practice a language or dialect can be so heavily influenced by another that even central features are lost. Or more precisely, the void between the two lamguages or dialects is being filled out with a linguistic continuum where it is difficult to say where one begins and the other stops. In that situation the weaker language in its 'pure' form is almost certain to lose ground, even to the extent that it is seen just as a dialect of the stronger variant. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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