LL-L "Language varieties" 2010.03.20 (02) [EN]

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From: jmtait <jmtait at wirhoose.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Names" 2010.03.18 (08) [EN]

Mark wrote:

 >.From: Mark Dreyer <<mailto:mrdreyer at lantic.net>mrdreyer at lantic.net>


Subject: LL-L "Names" 2010.03.18 (02) [EN]

>.Dear John:

.Subject: LL-L "Names"

.>You say:
>.Well, people from Shetland are not normally referred to as 'Shelties'.

>.Well, I beg to differ with you there, but times change, & usages too. My
sources may be two generations or so your elders. You talk about merchantÂ
ships - well, when once all trade & transport abroad went by sea, the sea
was the Shelties' natural habitat. I have heard a couple of your Shelties of
the older persuasion note that once there were more Shelties standing on
water than there stood on land. & they manned the vessels of ship-owners &
masters of all the nations of the North Sea. One was glad to take their
articles. You could rely on them.


Hi again Mark.

Yes - but what people are called in a specialised situation far away from
home can't be called 'normal.' Sheltie is a form which has been coined by
outsiders, not by Shetlanders, as the metathesis of t and l (Shelt- rather
than 'Shetl-) might further suggest. I would seriously advise against coming
to Shetland and referring to the inhabitants as 'Shelties'!

Actually there is no problem with a word to describe people from Shetland -
they are known as 'Shetlanders'. The problem I'm talking about arises in
that there is no readily available word to describe whatever it is they
traditionally speak, because there is no separate adjectival form from
'Shetland' as there is from, say, England (English), Orkney (Orcadian) or
Glasgow (Glaswegian).

There was just a big discussion about this on Shetlink in the thread started
by Michael Everson (most of the threads in this section are now started by
outsiders - Shetlanders rarely start any.) I'll try to summarise it, because
it's an interesting feature of the English langauge.

First, it's not unusual for internal areas in the UK not to have specific
adjectival forms. Some do - Cornish, Glaswegian, Orcadian, Liverpudlian, etc
- and some don't seem to (or at least not ones that come easily to mind) -
Yorkshire? Somerset? Edinburgh?  Shetland. Which ones do and which ones
don't seems to be almost accidental.

Secondly, even where adjectival forms do exist, the usage tends to be
different. In the case of countries we would usually talk about English
rather than 'England' beer, the Welsh rather than the 'Wales' language, and
the  French rather than the 'France' delegate. A few places in the UK have a
similar usage - Cornish (pasty) and Manx (cat) were mentioned. But even
where there is an adjectival form, it would be quite natural to talk about a
Yorkshire dialect, an Edinburgh pub, a Liverpool poet, a Glasgow policeman,
or Orkney cheese. Therefore, the usage for internal areas tends to be
different from that for countries, and the use of the name of the place as
an adjective is natural.

Where there is an adjectival form it is also used to describe the people,
although again there is variance in usage - Liverpudlians, Orcadians,
Americans, the English, the French, the Cornish, etc. Here the actual usage
seems to be related to the form of the adjective rather than the political
status of the place.

Shetland is one of the places - like Edinburgh and Yorkshire (as far as I
can think) where no adjectival form has - for some reason - ever evolved or
been developed. The people are known as 'Shetlanders' which can't be used as
an adjective.

The native usage in Shetland is to use the name of the place - Shaetlan,
variously spelt - as the adjective. So Shetlanders would naturally speak
about 'Shaetlan fock', 'Shaetlan wadder', and 'Spaekin Shaetlan,' much as a
Yorkshire person might talk about 'Yorkshire folk', 'Yorkshire weather', and
quite possibly 'Speaking Yorkshire.'

The problem with this expression is that, whereas it sounds perfectly
natural when you are speaking the native tongue itself, it does not
translate well into standard English. To write about 'Speaking Shetland', or
to use the word 'Shetland' as a description of the Shetland tongue both
confuses it with the place (eg: 'The Shetland accent' - are you talking
about accent in the place in general or an accent specifically associated
with the traditional Shetland tongue?) and sounds unnatural and illiterate.
(And there is also a question as to whether Shetland in the expression
'Speaking Shetland' should be regarded as an adverb - 'speaking in a
Shetland manner.')

The only option, then, is the expression The Shetland Dialect - which itself
is question begging because, and as Shetlanders themselves will be only too
keen to point out (in the dogged determination of many to prove that it is
impossible to write 'dialect' as a single entity) Shetland has a wide
variety of dialects. So do you use Shetland Dialect, which refers to this as
a sort of mass of variation rather than an entity? The semantic problems are
not thereby solved; and even if The Shetland Dialect were satisfactory in,
say, academic usage, it is too cumbersome an expression to use in everyday
writing - by, for example, an organisation which is writing about it
frequently, like ShetlandForWirds. Therefore, it tends to be reduced to
'dialect.'

Ironically, this is partly because even ShetlandForWirds write mainly in
standard English. Their e-mailings for example are mostly in standard
English. If they had written in 'Shaetlan' then the problem need never have
arisen, because there the term 'Shaetlan' would have done. As it is,
however, because they use the term 'dialect' in their writing they have
started to transfer it back into their spoken Shetland speech as well. You
thus have the ironic situation where 'dialect' promoters are more likely to
refer to it as 'dialect' than traditionaly speakers, who are still quite
likely to refer to it as 'Shaetlan.' (This was demonstrated by the fact that
the incoming speaker at Dialect '04 had picked up this term from everyday
speech, and so used it in her talk, whereas Shetland speakers were more
likely to refer to it by variations on (the) (Shetland) (Dialect).

Related to this problem of diglossia (or a non-bilingual perception) is a
spelling question. If you were to decide to use the term 'Shaetlan' how
would you spell it? Because the tongue is perceived as a dialect it has
normally been spelt by alterations to standard English spelling, with the
sole exception of the o" (O-Umlaut) vowel which has traditionally been
perceived as 'Norse' (although in fact it usually represents the Scots UI
phoneme, albeit with the Norse phonetics of the Shetland accent.) Exceptions
which have spelt it with Nordic conventions - usually for ideological
reasons and with no solid phonological basis - have never caught on.

In this type of spelling, the form AE has arisen by reversing the letters in
English words like 'peat', 'meat', etc, which are pronounced [e] rather than
[i] in the Shetland dialects. However, the next step - to accept that as the
default 'Shaetlan' spelling for the phoneme and use it even in words without
<ea> in English - seems to be a step too far in popular spelling (and would
probably be derided as 'purist' by the intelligentsia.) So while spellings
like 'paet', 'maet', and such are common, and while 'dyke' is often spelt
'daek' (it would be difficult to think of any other way to spell it)  'laek'
(Eng. like) is often spelt 'lik', even though does not rhyme with 'pick' in
Shetland speech, simply because it can be formed by dropping the final 'e'.

This leads to various problems:

In the case of 'Shaetlan', because the 'official' name 'Shetland' does not
have an <ea> in the spelling, the AE sound tends not to be regarded as a
distinctive sound, but just a 'dialect' pronunciation of the 'proper' E
sound in the 'proper' word. I was once told that 'Shaetlan' looks like a
spelling mistake - presumably because the English form doesn't have an EA.
The actual sound is quite like 'i' in standard English, but 'Shitland' - the
most obvious ad hoc change - obviously doesn't appeal. Added to that the
fact that the unstressed vowel (shewa) in the final syllable is close to the
sound of the phoneme [I] in Shetland. So those who want to spell
'phonetically' tend to insist that the second syllable be spelt 'i' whereas
those who are reluctant to deviate more than necessary from the 'proper'
spelling want to keep the 'e' in the first syllable even though it isn't
pronounced that way. And the fact that the D at the end is commonly dropped
in speech.

Ensuing spellings might be: Shetlan(d), Shitlan(d) Shitlin(d) Shaetland),
Shaetlin(d). You thus have the bizarre situation where it is not at all
obvious how to spell the name of a tongue even when you are writing in that
selfsame tongue, and where everyone and their dog will object to any
spelling other than the English one which does not represent the
pronunciation. The ideological opposition to any spelling standardisation,
or regarding anything other than the o" sound as a phoneme in its own right,
ensures that this problem can never be overcome.

The need for an expression to describe the tongue in standard English has
probably been felt for a long time. The word 'Shetlandic' goes back at least
as long as the 20th Century. However, because it has never been used for
anything other than the tongue (because 'Shetland' is the natural adjective,
as with 'Yorkshire') it has never become a part of normal usage. This is
probably because of several factors:

1. Because Shetland people until recently spoke 'Shaetlan' they therefore
used the word 'Shaetlan' to describe it, where it sounds natural. The
problem of what to call it in standard English scarcely arose, because
hardly anyone ever did it, and ad hoc variations on (The) (Shetland)
(Dialect) would do for occasional use when speaking to outsiders or writing
in standard English.

2. Where the term 'Shetlandic' was adopted by a small group of people - I
would imagine, almost exclusively editors of and writers in the New
Shetlander - it did not pass into everyday usage because (ironically) the
Shetland Dialect was so strong at that time that there was no need for such
an expression in popular usage because everybody called it Shaetlan.

3. Closely related to the above is another peculiarity of the perception of
the tongue as 'dialect.' This perception is what I will describe as
non-bilingual, although the linguistic description is diglossia. That is, in
contrast to an obvious 'language' like Gaelic where you either speak Gaelic,
or English, or both, and if you speak both you are bilingual, the Shetland
dialect was perceived as a exclusively a spoken form, the written form of
which was standard English. Just as there was no need for the native tongue
to be written - because you wrote in standard English - so there was
scarcely any need to speak standard English. Almost everyone spoke
'Shaetlan' and because it was closely related to standard English incomers
learned to understand it in a matter of months. Apart from people who had
been 'Sooth' or who worked in occupations such as teaching, many Shetlanders
of my father's generation spoke ropy English, peppered with Shetland
constructions and hypercorrections. There being no perception of
bilingualism, then, no need was felt of a 'translation' of the word or
concept 'Shaetlan' into standard English. Insofar as there was interest in
the Shetland dialect - and there was - it was mostly confined to its use in
verse, and to an ongoing obsession with (and reaction against) its Norn
origins, much of which can be described as mythology. To most people,
however, the local speech was not an issue - it was just what you spoke, and
did not therefore require an 'official' designation.

This has another outcome in that, now that the Shetland 'dialect' forms are
dying out, some Shetlanders see this (whether favourably or unfavourably
depends on taste) as a necessary adoption of the standard form. That is,
those who are in favour of the tongue dying out see this as a transition to
the 'proper' form which is identified with education and advancement. On the
other hand, those who resent it tend to see it as an unfortunate necessity
of circumstances. Neither has any perception of bilingualism - that is, that
you can both speak AND write both varieties, rather than one being the
spoken and one being the written form. The insistence of people who are
concerned is typically on the survival of the 'dialect' as a spoken form
without any interference from the areas which are traditionally the preserve
of standard English. Where written 'dialect' is used, it is seen mainly a
way of bolstering the spoken form, and not - except in the restricted area
of literature - as a written medium in its own right.

The need for a discrete standard English term for the tongue was therefore
felt only by a minority of people beginning at the start of the 20th
Century, and I became familiar with it mainly from the New Shetlander, and
also from its use outside Shetland in Scots language publications and by
Scottish linguists. John Graham, long time editor of the New Shetlander,
used both 'Shetland Dialect' and 'Shetlandic'. His editorship of the New
Shetlander spanned the 'oil era', when the native tongue could be seen to be
dying out at an accelerated rate, and it was clear that the traditional
position of the Shetland tongue as a spoken dialect in a diglossic
relationship with written English would not continue. There was considerable
emphasis in the New Shetlander at this time on developing the written
language (although the emphasis was still on literature, towards prose
writing away from the traditional emphasis on poetry.)

I suppose it could be said that, in the term Shetland Dialect, it would at
this time have been possible for either the Shetland part - the part
suggesting the identity of the tongue with a place - or the Dialect part -
the part suggesting its subsidiary status - to be emphasised. Use of the
term 'Shetlandic' emphasised the former. But with the retirment of John
Graham, and the emergence of a series of editors of the New Shetlander who
are firmly within the pericope of mainstream Scottish literary and
linguistic thought, the 'Shetland' emphasis has waned and the 'Dialect' part
has come to be emphasised. The opprobrium which is now attached to its usage
has arguably come about largely since I started to use it, although it was
never popular. In other words, whereas my intent - and, I'm sure, the intent
of those who started to use it - was to enhance the status of the Shetland
tongue, Shetlanders as a whole have reacted against this, with the result
that use of the term is now regarded as despicable.

Examples can again be found in the thread on Shetlink started by Michael
Everson. One correspondent said that the term Shetlandic was an attempt to
make the speech look Nordic, and was offputting because it was 'obviously
political.' Michael pointed out that only a small number of the Nordic
tongues have endings in -ic, and I pointed out that terms like 'dialect' are
political as well - it's just that they express the political views of the
establishment whereas 'Shetlandic' challenges those views. Unfortunately,
when these facts are pointed out, the originators of the comments do not
continue the conversation.

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