LL-L "Resources" 2002.02.22 (04) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 22.FEB.2002 (04) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: "John M. Tait" <jmtait at wirhoose.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Resources" 2002.02.20 (10) [E]

Sandy wrote:

>While there is a lot of value in this sort of material, I have
>to stick my neck out here and question in what sense this could
>be said to be the "golden age" of written Scots.
>
>I suspect that this sort of writing is somewhat artificial -
>while the gentlemen of those days may not have seen anything
>lower-class about using characteristically Scots words (as
>people tend to do now), they are nevertheless taking pains
>to distinguish their language from that of common speech. I
>think this sort of thing is borne out by the existence of
>contemporaneous writings where some are very like these letters,
>while other writings (uaually less pretentions, eg Maggie Lauder
>or The Wife o Auchtermuchty) are much more like Scots as it is
>spoken now.
>
>You may note that writing like this is much more like standard
>English than anything in Scots since Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns.
>I think these three writers (leading lights amongst many others)
>deliberately wrote in the language as it was spoken, and _this_
>is what established modern Scots as a literary language, without
>which the more upper-class writings would have eventually merged
>with modern standard English, leaving spoken Scots as a dialect
>with no literature.
>
>So for me, the golden age of written Scots started when this sort
>of writing stopped!

I agree with Sandy here. This sort of Scots _did_ eventually merge with
standard
English, giving the Scottish English we have today. It comes across as very
stilted formal writing, hesitating between the spoken Scots of the writer
(which
he admits to having largely forgotten) and some sort of idea of what written
Scots should be like. I'm afraid, though, that I don't know whether that
standard
would have been the standard English of that day, or a standard Scots based on
the Edinburgh dialect, but itself already influenced by English (and perhaps
also
Latin) models.

Unfortunately, though, this sort of writing didn't stop - you still get
examples
of it, produced either by people who don't themselves speak Scots, or by those
who do speak Scots, but feel constrained to follow the dictates of standard
English grammar when they write it.

In some ways, this article is as revealing about the attitudes of academia
towards Scots as it is about the linguistic characteristics of the letters
themselves. Firstly, the Golden Age which the writer refers to is obviously in
the past - the implication being that the age of Scots as a language is past.
Secondly, the writer probably doesn't have the natural feel for Scots which
would
allow him to criticise this Scots as Sandy has done. It is a remarkable
feature
of Scots studies that they can be undertaken by people who know Scots only
from
passive models, and who can then sometimes go on to criticise real Scots
writing
on the basis of such models - as exemplified in a review in the most recent
Lallans magazine, where the reviewer castigates a poet for using singular
verbs
with plural nouns, which she describes as 'fashious' and 'aff-pittin'. Is it
only
in Scotland that the natural and traditional use of a language can be
criticised
in an ersatz form of that language by people who probably don't speak it
themselves?

Unfortunately, the idea that the sort of writing used in these letters
represents
a Golden Age encourages people to copy them. This produces an artificial form
of
Scots which allows the literary establishment - who believe that Scots should
be
used only for off-the-cuff 'experimental' writing (or, in other words, as a
slumming medium for effete English-speaking literati and linguistic
dillettanti)
- to dismiss all formal use of Scots as artificial.

Here endeth the lesson...

John M. Tait.

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