LL-L "Grammar" 2010.10.20 (01) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 20 October 2010 - Volume 01
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From: FsKneX <fsknex at gmail.com>

Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2010.10.17 (04) [EN]



Thanks to Sandy and Ron for replying to my query about language
simplification. Perhaps I should have explained the background.
(Incidentally, I hope this post gets through, as I am sending it from my
gmail account).

I came across this book ('Scotspeak - A Guide to the Pronunciation of Modern
Urban Scots' by Christine Robinson and Carol Ann Crawford, Published by the
Scots Language Resource Centre.) in a charity shop in Elgin, and it was
obvious that it had belonged to an Elgin college student - Elgin college
being part of the UHI (University of the Highlands and Islands.) Putting two
and two together, I looked up the UHI website and found that this was the
only textbook on language, apart from the Concise Scots Dictionary,
specified for the language part of the course in Scottish cultural studies
which I had helped to write recommendations for, and which had been intended
to focus on the varieties of the North (the UHI area) and particularly the
Northern Isles. Christine Robinson, the Edinburgh academic who had been
drafted in to take charge of the course, had rejected my recommendations for
introductory textbooks with the comment that better things had been written
since. It would appear that a handbook on urban Scots pronunciation intended
for actors, written by Robinson herself, in an academic course intended to
emphasise the varieties of the UHI area, was such a textbook.

The viewpoint taken in this text seemed to me to be remarkable. For a long
time I have been answering questions like 'Why do the Poles speak such a
complicated and difficult language' with the reply that it wasn't difficult
for Poles to speak Polish, and that this was an outside view apparent only
to learners whose languages did not have those characteristics. But here was
a coursebook in an academic setting apparently supporting the view of
certain forms of language as 'easier' which I have for a long time been
dismissing as a naive and uneducated view of language. I have to consider
whether I have been wrong all along.

First of all, there are one or two technical points in the article that I
wondered about.

1. 'If we compare the Scots past tense and past participle of 'gi(v)e',
which for many speakers are both gied, with the English gave and given, we
can see that, in this instance, Scots is just a but further down the road of
simplification.'

I have never personally come across anyone who says 'gied' for both the
preterite and the past participle - of course, there are many Scots speakers
that I haven't come across, so this might very well be correct. However, in
my experience, people who say 'gied' for the preterite use 'gien' for the
past participle, and those who merge them use 'gave' for both. I wondered if
Sandy, Andy or anyone was aware of the use of phrases such as 'I've gied
hime the bucket' rather than the common 'I've gave him the bucket.'

2. 'He wants the past tense and the past participle to be the same - he just
hasn't quite settled on which form to choose. And this is how language
change often works. There may be a period of choice before one form becomes
dominant.'

I wondered whether there is any documented evidence for language
simplification proceeding in this indeterminate way. I had always imagined
that it went in a certain direction - that, for example, the preterite might
disappear in favour of the past participle, or vice versa, or even that one
verb might prefer one form and another verb another. I'm forced to wonder
whether language simplification actually proceeds in this way, or whether
the situation we see with the indeterminate use of 'did' and 'done' actually
depends on both of those forms being current in standard English rather than
any definable process of simplification within Scots.

3. 'As anyone who has even learned a foreign language knows, strong verbs,
the ones that change their vowels to make past tense or past participle, are
very difficult to learn.'

This strikes me as an odd statement. I'm not an accomplished polyglot, but I
was under the impression that most families of languages did not share the
Germanic characteristic of having both strong and weak verbs, or even the
need for such a terminology. In French or Greek surely all verbs could be
described as 'weak' , and in Hebrew, all could be described - if you had any
need to make such a distinction - as 'strong'. I can't get my head around
the idea of strong verbs being a general bugbear in the learning of
languages to the extent that anyone who has 'ever learned a foreign
language' would recognise it.

Further to these comments are the value judgements implied in the phrases
'Thank goodness English is getting easier' and 'Occasionally Scots lags
behind. For example, many Scots still use 'gotten' as the past participle of
get.' The entire impression given - in a course which, as I keep saying, was
originally intended to support the more conservative varieties of the North
- is that the mainland urban dialects are 'further down the road' of this
desirable ('thank goodness') process of simplification, whereas the more
conservative ones - which still use forms such as 'gotten' and 'pitten - are
lagging behind.

Whatever might be said about such a document as a guide for actors in
Taggart (a Glasgow based detective programme), I personally am appalled to
see it as the only academic textbook in a course intended to emphasise the
varieties of the UHI area. As this approach seems to have gained total
approval in all the areas of Scots promotion in Scotland, my views are
irrelevant there, but I wondered how they would be seen in the context of
linguistics generally, and perhaps particularly minority language issues in
general.

John M. Tait.



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