LL-L "Language varieties" (was "How do you say ...?") 2002.04.17 (04) [E]

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From: "John M. Tait" <jmtait at wirhoose.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "How do you say ...?" 2002.04.16 (03) [E]

Matthew wrote:

>I'd love to know what other Scot users of this list think... perhaps I
>am
>being overly dogmatic and "Oof" is acceptable in some dialects.

I think there are several sides to this question. First of all, there
_is_ a tendency among some Scots to be aware of only their own dialect,
and regard others as being 'wrong'. I have usually found it to be the
case that people regard _their_ variations from standard English as
being all right, but _other_ variations from standard English as being
objectionable. In danger of being non-PC (but in agreement with various
research findings suggesting sex differences in attitudes to language) I
have found this tendency mostly among women.

Two examples:

1) Some friends of ours cited, as a reason for moving from Perth to
Aberdeenshire, the fact that their children were beginning to speak with
a Perth accent, and in particular, were using the demonstrative 'thae'.
Our friends come from Caithness, which has a very distinctive dialect,
which however does not include this word. Therefore, as it differed both
from English and from their own dialect, they found it objectionable.

2) My sister in law, who comes from Lerwick, regards certain
pronunciations used by my brother and me (for example, pronouncing _saa_
(saw) as [s{:] rather than her pronunciation of [sQ:]) as 'hideous'.
This, I think, is because in this case her pronunciation of the /a:/
phoneme - which is regular in some parts of Shetland - is the same as
her English pronunciation, whereas our pronunciation is different from
English. She was shocked when I pointed out that her pronunciation of
_hand_ as [h{:nd] uses the same vowel that we use in _saa_, whereas my
brother and I say [hA:nd], as we do when speaking English. In other
words, she noticed, and found objectionable, our variations from
standard English, but was completely unaware of her own.

Note that my sister in law finds these variations in Shetlandic
objectionable in spite of the fact that she is a speaker of Shetlandic
(as I said, her pronunciation of _saa_ is regular in parts of Shetland,
where /a:/ is pronounced [Q:], and is not an Anglicism) and not a
monoglot English speaker, or 'Knapper'. This is therefore not the same
thing as 'posh' speakers of standard English who regard dialect as
'wrong' per se, though arguably that would be the ultimate conclusion of
such attitudes. To return to the Caithness example, my friends would not
have objected to Caithness dialect, which they both spoke. But -
ironically (or perhaps not, in view of some other comments I have been
making recently) at a conference on Scottish culture - I encountered
another Caithnesian (again a woman) who regarded her local Caithness
dialect, which she did not speak, as 'disgusting'.

There is a common core of Scots, as Matthew says, but there are also
very many dialectal variations. Grund/groond; twa/twae; whaur/faar;
gweed/gid, are only some examples. Some of these can be covered by
diaphonemic spellings - e.g. 'gweed' and 'gid' can usefully be spelt
'guid'. Others - such as twa/twae - can not.

There is also a tendency for words to become obsolete in one dialect but
not in others, with the result that some words which were once common
Scots - such as eg: spier, gar, ilka - are now confined to certain
dialects, and tend to be regarded as belonging only to those dialects.
My wife's boss, who comes from Glasgow, was very surprised, on coming to
the North East, to find that the word _ken_ was actually used by real
people, even though it is still common in many parts - perhaps most - of
Scotland. This is an inevitable result of the fact that Scots is
regarded by the establishment as dialect, and not taught as a language.
The West/East division in the use of wean/bairn is well known. It is
therefore quite possible for someone to fail to recognise certain words
as Scots, or to attribute them to someone else's dialect.

The downside of this is that it is possible to justify almost anything -
typically hotch-potches of colloquialisms and archaisms cemented with
English syntax - as 'Scots' using the excuse of dialect variation.

As regards _oof_, CSD cites this with the meaning 'wolf', along  with
_wowf_. But, although CSD doesn't say that this form is archaic or
obsolete, I suspect it is almost so - perhaps because the animal is
extinct in Scotland, and we therefore learn about wolves at school and
through English media rather than informally in Scots, as we might learn
about _doos_, _yowes_, _tods_ and _corbies_ - all animals which can
still be seen, and are referred to by their Scots names by Scots
speakers. I have seen the form _wowf_ used in literary Scots, but have
never heard either it or _oof_ used in spoken Scots.

Perhaps the phrase 'Watter o Oof' doesn't sound Scots, not only because
of the word _oof_ (after all, obsolete words might occur in place
names), but because its construction doesn't look like a natural Scots
placename. It looks, in fact, like a word-for-word translation of the
original - rather as many writers are apt to translate e.g. 'Those who
live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones' word by word as 'thae wha
stey in gless hooses shoudna thraw stanes' rather than the natural
'thaim (th)at bides/steys in gless hooses shoudna (thraw*)/fling/wap
stanes.' Sandy Fleming's comprehensive discussion of this when it was
first posted took that into account.

(* to me, _thraw_ in Scots means to twist, etc. not to throw away, and
this is the main meaning given in CSD, although the meaning of throw
away is mentioned.)

Perhaps the phenomenon of dialect obsolescence co-inciding with standard
English is most notable (though less noticeable, because most people
don't notice it!) in the case of grammar. Scots speakers from places
where certain features of traditional Scots grammar - such as the use of
singular verbs with plural nouns - have become obsolete are likely to
object vehemently to these features in Scots writing, as they conflict
with the standard English grammar which they learned at school. On the
other hand, the same people may not notice features of their own speech
such as the convergence of past participles and preterites ('I done it';
'I seen it'; 'I've gave') even though these are not traditionally Scots
(with the exception of 'I've went', where it is the English verb which
is defective) but are common features of colloquial English in parts of
England and America as well, and are arguably the result of non-standard
Anglicisation rather than standard Anglicisation.

John M. Tait.

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