LL-L "Grammar" 2000.10.28 (01) [E/S]
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Sun Oct 28 22:23:27 UTC 2001
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L O W L A N D S - L * 28.OCT.2001 (01) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at scotstext.org]
Subject: "Grammar"
> From: Candon McLean <candon3 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Grammar
>
> Fit like!
Ay, ye see it aa! :)
> Andy Eagle made some intersting notes on Scots
> subject/verb agreeement. I'd like to add that the use
It was me, actually.
I'm writing to answer you and Ron's questions and suggestions,
but firstly some comment on what Ian wrote:
> From: "Ian James Parsley (Laptop)" <parsleyij at yahoo.com>
> Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2001.10.26 (04) [E]
>
> Ron and Candon,
>
> Indeed, the 'Verbal Concord' issue in Scots is awkward historically.
There
> seems a lot of inconsistency right through to the present day. It is
> complicated further by some linguists who believe, possibly with some
> justification, that whether the subject appears adjacent to the
> verb affects the issue.
Of course the biggest source of written inconsistency is in the
use of English forms by writers. It's enlightening to take samples
of a text where the author doesn't completely succeed in
eradicating the "stigmatised" grammar from his writing. In the
novella "Mrs Goudie's Tea Pairty", for example, the English forms
are more common, but why are the Scots forms there at all?
Comparing with the quality of the rest of the book, they can't
just be mistakes. And if they're not mistakes then the fact that
they exhibit the "non-contact" forms must mean that whether the
subject appears adjacent to the verb _does_ affect the issue.
On top of this, I hear these things in real life and I know Scots
is spoken this way! It's true that different speakers use different
grammar, but this is also true of English.
A good paper on the historical development of verb concord in
Scots can be found in "Studies in Scots and Gaelic" (Canongate
Academic, 1994, ed. Alexander Fenton, Donald A. MacDonald),
entitled "Evolution of Verb Concord in Scots" by Michael
Montgomery. While by no means comprehensive (the texts
sampled don't seem to me varied enough to cover all phenomena
in this area of grammar), the historical approach does show
that verb concord isn't exactly chaotic - there is a lot of
inconsistency but it can be categorised through various
historical influences.
The basic observations of this article are that:
1. Nouns have followed this verb concord pattern since the
earliest written Scots;
2. The verb "to be" was originally excepted from this rule;
3. The rule was gradually transfered to the verb "to be" but
the process was never completed;
4. The influence of English in Scots education and writing
gradually eroded the rule, although as any country speaker
will tell you, this process is also incomplete.
You see how observation 3 explains some inconsistencies - for
example in the Montgomerie song which I quoted and explained in
my original post. Observation 4 I discussed above. It means that
Middle Scots tends to be more consistent, having less influence
from English grammar, but unfortunately when it comes to modern
(say Ramsay onwards) Scots writers, the trend is clearly to
deliberately avoid traditional Scots verb concord.
This could simply suggest that, as with many languages, the
written traditions have diverged from the spoken, if not for
the fact that most of these writers _are_ trying to put down
their actual speech forms - but without wanting to sound too
ignorant. Take, for example, this present-tense poem by W L
Ferguson, a Merse (Berwickshire) farmer writing in the 1940s,
describing his writing process:
I sit an fidge, an scart my lug;
My heid's a sodden cloot, mon;
I snap my chafts like Geordie's dug,
But fient a soond comes oot, mon!
I drap the pen an steer aboot,
...
Most Scots speakers will read this and not think twice about it,
and indeed most Scots writers would write like this. But once
the fact that this is actually the "habitual present" is pointed
out, a Scots speaker becomes permanently uncomfortable with the
poem. It's hard to imagine a Merse farmer _speaking_ this way,
and the following seems much better (if you can ignore the slight
alteration of the rhythm):
I sits an fidges, an scarts my lug;
My heid's a sodden cloot, mon;
I snaps my chafts like Geordie's dug,
But fient a soond comes oot, mon!
I draps the pen an steers aboot,
...
Of course, in a "pure" present tense, this would probably start
"I sit and fidges...", but such a tense is rare in modern Scots
speech: these days a Scots speaker normally inflects _all_ verb
forms when telling a story or describing habit in the present
tense. Indeed, when a Scots speaker tells a story or personal
anecdote in the present tense, the present historic tends to
swamp all other considerations, though you'd never suspect this
for a moment to look at the literature. This goes to making it
difficult to investigate the more structured present tense forms
we've been discussing, though as I said there's no doubt that
when all other possibilites are subtracted from the literature
(I've done this using a database on some of the ScotsteXt works)
there are still examples of this verb concord form where adjacency
is significant.
So basically what we have is a study made challenging by the
"to be" verb being inconsistent, and then the gradual erosion
of the "pure" forms by the diametrically opposed influence of
school English (fewer inflected forms) and modern spoken Scots
(more inflected forms).
> With regard to 'says I', that strikes me as a 'narrative past' form, or
> 'habitual', which is still present in most Ulster Scots dialects
> (particularly in Antrim). Because of verbal concord it's not always
> immediately apparent, but all habitual clauses, or clauses with adverbs
> expressing irregularity, must take a habitual form (ie root form plus
> suffix -(e)s) in Antrim dialects.
I think that speach tags are a separate consideration.
"Thinks I...", "...says I", "qo I" seem to be an idiom
(or grammatical feature) that survives even in texts
where the author eradicates as many other Scots verb
concord forms as possible. I imagine you're right about
the origin, but it seems to have been taken up as a
separate phenomenon in the minds of speakers and writers.
Some of Candon's questions (I think all of Ron's have been
answered by the above?)...
> "I grip fast if the ground be good
> And fleets where it is false;"
>
> Here, "grip" is in direct contact with the personal
> pronoun
> "I", and so loses the inflection, whereas "fleets" is
> distant
> >> from it and so retains the inflection.
>
> This is very interesting. Can you tell me what it
> would be with out the "if" clause?
I'd say, "I grip fast and fleets" since the second verb is
still non-adjacent to the subject pronoun. However, as with
the next example, a modern speaker would normally use the
present historic or habitual here and say "I grips fast an
fleets".
> E.g. would we get something like: A see the wifie an
> hear_s_ the lass?
No, because this is the present historic (ie your using
present tense froms to narrate a story that took place
in the past. In Scots the verb is inflected even when
in contact with a personal pronoun: "A see_s_ the wifie
an hear_s_ the lass?" In fact this "present historic" is
very common - while some of us will vary our speech by
use of the past tense and so on, some speakers hardly
seem to use anything else, filling their mouths with
sibilants!
Of course, one other thing that makes a study like this
challenging is that the "thee/thou/thy" forms have mostly
died out in Scots, so spoken examples are hard to come by.
This is still an important concern for me in proofreading
the ScotsteXt texts, however.
I was reading Dunbar recently (a Middle Scots poet whose
writing is considered closer to the speech of his time
than most of his fellow "Makars"), and noticed his unusual
use of the second person singular (from "The Birth of
Antichrist"):
"Thow suffer me to wirk gif thow do weill"
and
"Trest weill thy truble neir is at ane end,
Seing thir taikinis, quhairfoir thow mark thame rycht"
Dunbar seems to use no inflection with "thou", although he
can be (only apparently?) inconsistent (from "All Erdly Joy
Returnis in Pane"):
"Quhill thow hes space se thow dispone,
That for thy geir, quhen thou art gone,
No wicht ane uder slay nor chace;
Thyne awin gud spend quhill thow hes spais."
However, comparing this word by word, perhaps he is
consistent - although he seems to use uninflected
forms for uncommon verbs, it's "thow hes" both times.
Maybe Dunbar will reward further study!
Sandy
http://scotstext.org
A dinna dout him, for he says that he
On nae accoont wad ever tell a lee.
- C.W.Wade,
'The Adventures o McNab'
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