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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| it is Auld Scots that may give us some real clues about the origins of English |
'Sfunny this: it's a recurring theme.
On looking at Chaucer for the first time, I found it illuminating to read it in a Scottish accent -- not that that means I think Chaucer did -- and Ishmael said something similar.
And on some website I saw recently, they say the Anglo-Saxons said "coo" and "hoose" for cow and house, "as the Scots still do" -- without explaining how the Anglo-Saxons had any influence where they did not conquer, of course.
Actually I've heard several times that "Scots is close to Middle English"... but I don't know any reason to suppose Scots to be any closer to its roots than any other dialect (of any other language). (Linguists, on the other hand, make a living out of dreaming up reasons for this.)
Anyway, Old Scots of even, say, a thousand years ago, is scarcely any closer to the origin of English than we are now. How can we be sure it is more representative... more representative of what?
This idea that language follows a sort of continuous, sliding scale -- and, hence, we can extrapolate with a high degree of confidence -- comes from the linguists... but they have ballsed it up completely. We assume continuous variation, too, but the only "scale" we know of is flat -- and, as any engineer will tell you, you can't extrapolate from that.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Brattle may be an obscure word but it's English. And it doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with something called a "corn-rick" -- a word I've never even heard of! |
If you lived in an English-speaking part of the world, you might have. {I have, and not just because I've seen The Wicker Man: the proper one.}
| And what the hell is so hard to understand about a "paddle"??? Has he never played tabble tennis? |
Actually, pattle -- gotta be a variation on paddle -- is a specific tool, "a small spade with a long handle, used chiefly to remove earth adhering to a plough" -- but that is precisely why it is worth reading and understanding these things as they were first written.
We have modern poetry: why do we need corruptions of old ones?
The next bit quoted (not the next verse) is more obscure:
I doubt not, whiles/meanwhile, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun/mun/must live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
It's a small request;
I'll get a blessin with the lave,
And never miss it.
icker = an ear of corn (not maize), but no one seems to know what daimen means, other than the context here of "the odd ear of corn". "Damned"? Fabricated by Burns?
thrave = technically, two usually-12-sheaf shocks of corn; or, figuratively, a whole lot of corn.
the lave = what's left.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | This is the first time I've seen any Burns, by the way. |
Same here!
And it's perfectly obvious to anyone who hasn't been taught otherwise that this is a put-on accent that relies upon the reader already being aware of accepted spelling and phonetic conventions associated with standard received English pronunciation.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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On a point of information, to what extent was Burns 'making it up'? Since Scots (Lallan, Inglis...what exactly did they call their own language?) had been a written language since the late Middle Ages, surely Burns must have been writing in a 'Standard' style, no matter how many conscious dialecticisms he included.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Since Scots (Lallan, Inglis...what exactly did they call their own language?) had been a written language since the late Middle Ages.... |
I believe nothing until I see examples.
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Brian Ambrose
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it is Auld Scots that may give us some real clues about the origins of English
'Sfunny this: it's a recurring theme |
'n ah keep tellin yer. That's cos auld Scots is Pictish, Pictish is English.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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I'm sorely tempted to agree... but what makes you so sure?
(It's either English or Nordic, in my mind. Not Celtic or NoneOfTheAbove.)
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Sometimes epistemology is no help. Knowledge is needed - at least as the starting point. Can anyone assist?
_________________
Oliver
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Brian Ambrose
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There were five documented languages in this country in 800AD. Four of them are known, and none are anything like today's (or Chaucer's) English. The English language just appears out of nowhere. The other one of the five, Pictish, we know nothing about; it has apparently disappeared. We've gained a language, and we've lost a language. What's the chance of that, eh?
What we do know about Pictish is that it was (at least) the language of middle Britain, and that it moved north and was spoken by the Scots, before allegedly disappearing. In view of the discussion here then, it would not be surprising if early Pictish/English was spoken in what we now regard as a Scottish accent.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Sometimes epistemology is no help. Knowledge is needed - at least as the starting point. Can anyone assist? |
I would have thought it would in this case. You apply Occam's Razor. We know there are two languages in Scotland -- English and Gaelic. We know that the Picts were a warlike bunch from the far north; we have reason to believe the English were a bunch of patsies in the south, forever being overrun by the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Welsh, Irish etc. Replace Picts with Gaels and Bob's your uncle. Do ye have any Scotch uncles, ghillie? It's always fascinating asking a Scotsman (a highly educated Scotsman) how he comes to be speaking English. Then just sit back and listen to the special pleading!
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AJMorton
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | Actually I've heard several times that "Scots is close to Middle English"... but I don't know any reason to suppose Scots to be any closer to its roots than any other dialect (of any other language). |
My auld da and I have a theory about this and it in no way clashes with Mick's ideas. Chaucer's English was spoken in southern and central Scotland and England. But England suffered from Johnson. Scotland didn't. So, the Scots have a spoken language closer to Chaucer than to modern English because ours was not standardized to the same degree as it was in the south.
The talk of Burns made my ears twist round like a couple of satellite dishes. Burns was a poet living at the very end of the 18th century. He used poetic licence as well as phonetics to make certain words rhyme and others to make you smile. If you read his letters, they are written in graceful English and not poetic, near fictional, Scots. His focus was on dialect and regional accent (Ayrshire) and not language or national accent.
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Brian Ambrose
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It may also be of interest that King Alfred lamented the fact that there were no common English-speakers that were educated in Latin south of the Humber. Which makes little sense if he was talking about Anglo Saxon, the establishment language of the south. If he was, in fact, talking about 'our' english, then the idea that common usage and education in English/Pictish had a northern bias makes sense.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| We know there are two languages in Scotland -- English and Gaelic. We know that the Picts were a warlike bunch from the far north; we have reason to believe the English were a bunch of patsies in the south, forever being overrun by the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Welsh, Irish etc. Replace Picts with Gaels and Bob's your uncle. |
We know there are three languages in Scotland -- English, Gaelic and Norse.
| So, the Scots have a spoken language closer to Chaucer than to modern English because ours was not standardized to the same degree as it was in the south. |
Not bad. Only...
Standardisation is via literacy. Received Pronunciation is not a regional accent from anywhere in the British Isles: it's an artefact of education.
Is Scotland less well educated than England?
To say Scotland has retained its dialectical accent as distinct from RP merely puts it on a par with all the regional English dialects, none of which has any particular claim to being closer to Chaucer than any other, as far as I can tell.
| He used poetic licence as well as phonetics to make certain words rhyme and others to make you smile. If you read his letters, they are written in graceful English and not poetic, near fictional, Scots. |
You have 'studied' Burns, then? And you confirm what Ishmael said at first sight of him. Excellent. We must be doing something right around here.
| It may also be of interest that King Alfred lamented the fact that there were no common english speakers that were educated in Latin south of the Humber. Which makes little sense if he was talking about Anglo Saxon, the establishment language of the south. |
Why, because it goes without saying that anyone educated in Anglo-Saxon would have been educated in Latin, too?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Is Scotland less well educated than England? |
Praps it's the other way around: Chaucer et al are interpreted as being Scots-like because Scotland has heavily influenced the formulation of RP?
Bah-th/bath: Are Scottish and RP vowels typically long, unlike most England-ish vowels?
If there is no reason to think the dialects develop at different rates, then the apparent antiquity of Scots must be a function of what has been said about the development of the dialects.
Middle English is taken to be much more German-like than Modern English. Is that because of the Norse connection in Scotland? Vikings, Picts and the Celtic Church overlap somehow: considerable cultural influence (Celtic/Viking art), early writing (Pictish inscriptions in Norse), world-class Latin scholarship (according to Pryor), early writing (Irish the first vernacular). While Scots appears to be especially old-fashioned because their spellings were not the ones standardised upon?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I cannot accept Brian's point about Alfred and 'English'. All the Anglo-Saxons -- and one might say, especially King Alf -- used the term English as a synonym for Anglo-Saxon. As for 'educated people' he didn't think of the local population as 'people' at all.
*Imagine Jefferson lamenting the fact that English wasn't much spoken in Pennsylvania -- he would be referring to the large German-speaking population
*Imagine Jefferson lamenting the fact that education was lacking among the people of Virginia -- he'd be referring to white people. It being taken for granted that black slaves would be uneducated.
PS Strewth, I'd quite forgotten there is a native substrate under all this which didn't even reach Jefferson's (..er..my) consciousness.
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