LL-L: "Language politics" LOWLANDS-L, 10.MAR.2000 (07) [E]

[Lowlands-L Administrator]

 =======================================================================
 L O W L A N D S - L * 10.MAR.2000 (07) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
 Posting Address: <lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org>
 Web Site: <http://www.geocities.com/sassisch/rhahn/lowlands/>
 User's Manual: <http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/1.8c/userindex.html>
 =======================================================================
 A=Afrikaans, Ap=Appalachean, D=Dutch, E=English, F=Frisian, L=Limburgish
 LS=Low Saxon (Low German), S=Scots, Sh=Shetlandic
 =======================================================================

From: John M. Tait [jmtait at altavista.net]
Subject: LL-L: "Language politics" LOWLANDS-L, 06.MAR.2000 (02) [E]

Sandy wrote:

>Also, Scots won't die out just because it's English that's taught in the
>schools - it would have died out centuries ago if this were the case. When I
>was a child I would come home from school and my parents would correct any
>mistakes I made in my Scots as a result ("It's 'licht', no 'light', "it's no
>'shoes' it's 'shuin'") and even correct grammatical errors I made purely
>within Scots ("It's 'bid', the'r nae sic word as 'bydit'). This phenomenon
>seems a lot rarer these days. A language dies out because people decide it's
>not worth the trouble of passing on to their children. This is the
>experience of Norn and Cornish, whereas Welsh, which was much more
>ferociously suppressed in schools than either of those, is the only one
>that's not in danger of dying out. It only died out in the industrial south
>east, due to an influx of immigrant workers from England (very much as with
>Glasgow in Scotland).

This is a very important point. What Sandy describes is very much my own
experience as a child - the way we spoke had rules which were corrected,
just as English had. I would never have been allowed to call my parents
'du', for example. And the use of an Anglicism, such as 'find' [f at ind]
instead of 'fin' [fIn] would have elicited a sharp repremand. (Boy, whit's
du spaekin laek yun for?) This constituted a bilingual education - you
learned English at school and through the media, and Scots elsewhere.

This is strikingly different from the situation I see in, for example, my
sister's family (she lives in Scotland, not Shetland!) where the parents
and grandparents talk to one another in Scots, but immediately switch to
English to talk to the children. The concept of Scots as the natural way to
speak has gone. In the next generation of this family, it will have
disappeared completely. Intermediate stages can be seen in, for example,
families in Shetland where, in an otherwise Shetlandic-speaking family, the
parents address their children as 'you'. The concept of the traditional
distinction as being correct has gone, and has been replaced by the English
pattern.

The usual pattern is that better educated people speak English to their
children whereas less educated families do not, with the result that the
language changes from a community language to a sociolect. The children of
parents who bring them up to speak English may of course learn Scots from
other children, but because it is learned mostly from less academic
children it is perceived as slang.

It is in this situation that reinforcement of Scots in schools could, I
believe, have a considerable effect. If children who speak a sort of Scots,
and hear Scots all about them, were to be taught that it is not slang, but
a language like any other, and introduced to it in written form just as
they are introduced to English, their perception and use of it would be
different. However, this would only be likely to have an effect if Scots
could be taught as Sandy learned it - i.e. that there is such as thing as
correct Scots, as opposed to either English (e.g. licht as opposed to Eng.
light) or non-standard constructions which are no more traditional in Scots
than in English (e.g. 'them beuks' as opposed to traditional 'thae' or
'that' (NE) beuks). Children, parents and teachers are unlikely to
accumulate much respect for something which can never be either right or
wrong - while the only way to be correct remains to speak standard English,
the pressure will all be in that direction. However, as the entire fashion
in linguistics and literature is opposed to 'correctness' in language, but
doesn't effect that concept as far as it applies to standard English, the
results can be easily imagined.

John M. Tait.

----------

From: John M. Tait [jmtait at altavista.net]
Subject: LL-L: "Language politics" LOWLANDS-L, 05.MAR.2000 (03) [E]

Ian wrote:

>The question then is how to go about it. I must confess I'm not too sure
about
>"merging" dialects. Most major languages have standards based on the
dialect of
>a single area. In 1947 a "standard Irish" was proposed with a spelling reform
>and modern grammar, but many if not most speakers still reject it precisely
>because it was an artificial merger. People would rather have a real standard
>they can go and hear, rather than an invented one. The result, in the case of
>Irish, is that most Irish speakers can't speak or understand the
"standard", so
>that when they come across enthusiastic learners neither can understand the
>other!
>
>It may be, of course, that you end up with two or three standards. In the
case
>of Scots, you would probably have one for Ulster and one for Scotland (and
>possibly even a separate one for NE Scotland as opposed to the south). In
time,
>the standards themselves may merge.

As far as Scots in Scotland is concerned, the differences in _grammar_ are,
I think, not so much dialectal as:

1. Traditional Scots grammar of the type found in what might be called
'older modern' Scots writing, and more conservative (mostly rural) modern
dialects. This includes features such as (syntactic) singular verbs after
plural nouns but not after plural pronouns and (morphological) verb
paradigms such as finnd-fand-fund; pit-pat-pitten; tak-teuk-taen, etc.
These features are common to traditional Scots from the North to the
Borders - even Shetlandic.

2 (a) Features which appear to be relatively recent borrowings from
standard English, such as the use of plural verbs with plural nouns; the
relative use of 'wha' and 'which'; etc.

2 (b) False analogy with standard English, such as the use of 'speir' to
mean 'request'; 'gar' to mean 'fabricate', etc. These occur mostly in
literary writing.

3. Apparently more recent borrowings from non-standard English, such as the
convergence of preterites and past participles (either: I taen, I'v taen or
I took, I'v took); the plural form 'yous';  the use of 'ane' as an
adjective; etc.

Apart from 2(b), which is mostly a literary phenomenon, I would guess that
these tendencies exist in most Scots dialects. In other words, the
differences are not between dialects (though these do exist) so much as
between traditional and more recent colloquial Scots. This means that any
attempt to standardise grammar would fall foul, not so much of regional
interests, as of sociological ones. There is a strong assumption among many
proponents of Scots that Scots is however Scots speaking people speak; and
that to introduce any standardisation, such as traditional grammar, would
be no different in terms of imposition from teaching English grammar.

This viewpoint is reinforced by the bad example of 2(b), which can always
be cited to illustrate the dire results of Scots which strays from the ad
hoc representation of speech per se. (Boy, aren't we talking Latin here
today!) The fact that the bad example results, not from the standardisation
of Scots grammar, but from the writing of 'Scots' with mostly English
grammar, is not evident to people who neither know nor care what
traditional Scots grammar is.

In The Scots Language - its place in education - there are a few articles
and snippets in Scots. In one case, translating parts of an article for a
non-Scots speaking readership, I found I could translate word for word
without any change of word order. In another, of the few Scots snippets
which occurred, there was scarcely one which didn't exhibit some
characteristic of English analogy foreign to traditional Scots grammar.
This is Scots written by the people who are proponents of Scots in education.

My personal view is that traditional Scots grammar is the only type which
has any possibility of providing the basis for a common Scots grammar,
because it is the only one which can genuinely be represented as common to
Scots, as opposed to more recent innovations which tend to be localised or
equated with slang. However, the popular dichotomy is between contemporary
urban Scots, as championed by the majority of writers and Labovian
linguists; and Lallans-type Scots, which is essentially Scots vocabulary
with English grammar. The idea of promoting traditional Scots, as spoken in
rural areas, is repudiated by most fashionable literary and linguistic
thought (held mostly by people who almost always speak and write English,
and thus never come up against the problems of using Scots for general
purposes.) Atween twa stuils the erse faas throu.

Ron wrote:

>Personally, I feel that the task of standardization tends to look more
>formidable than it really is.  This is so when there is no standard
>orthography.  By "standard orthography" I mean a system that can be used
for all
>varieties of the same language.  This is not tantamount to standardizing the
>*language*.  It only means coming up with one system to be used to write all
>varieties of this language.  At the moment, in the case of Low Saxon, due to
>lack of phonological knowledge among those involved, the tendency is to
want to
>write not only German-like but also "phonetically," i.e., "the way it
sounds."
>This includes writing a good deal of redundant phonetic detail.  This written
>phonetic detail tends to disguise what all the varieties have in common,
namely
>in most cases the same underlying phoneme that ought to be represented by the
>same character(s) in all the varieties.

I agree that orthography, rather than grammar, is the main sticking point.
Unless Scots speakers can see that 'pair', 'peer' and 'po"r' are the same
word, common grammar will be an irrelevant issue, because they will be
predisposed to regard spellings such as <pair>, <peer> or whatever as being
proof of irreconciliable differences anyway.

John M. Tait.

==================================END===================================
 You have received this because your account has been subscribed upon
 request. To unsubscribe, please send the command "signoff lowlands-l"
 as message text from the same account to
 <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org> or sign off at
 <http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html>.
 =======================================================================
 * Please submit contributions to <lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org>.
 * Contributions will be displayed unedited in digest form.
 * Please display only the relevant parts of quotes in your replies.
 * Commands for automated functions (including "signoff lowlands-l") are
   to be sent to <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org> or at
   <http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html>.
 * Please use only Plain Text format, not Rich Text (HTML) or any other
   type of format, in your submissions
 =======================================================================