LL-L "Language policies" 2002.09.05 (02) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: "Ian James Parsley (Laptop)" <parsleyij at ukonline.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language policies" 2002.09.04 (02) [E/S]

Yes John,

When I say '100% real thing' I mean 'good Scots'. Good Scots will, by
definition, display huge influence from Standard English. People who
write
Scots trying to distinguish so much from Standard English that they make
up words are not writing Scots any more than those who write Scottified
English.

And yes you can do it by degrees, but there are certain *indicators* of
a
text that is genuine Scots - ie not *too* artificial or invented, but
not
just English with Scots words and the occasional grammatical form thrown
in.

I guess I would approach it more from Lorimer's position - I am a
'passive
Scots speaker' in that I have family who speak it but was not brought up
with it myself (at least not directly), and I am a linguist both by
academic
qualification and (partly) profession, so I have a 'feel' for language.
On
that basis I reckon I can tell a Scots text - ie one that finds the
above
balance. Of course, native speakers can do likewise.

What would be interesting would be to go through texts and identify
precisely what these 'indicators' of the correct balance for a genuine
Scots text are.

Last year I did an interesting test involving some of our fellow
Lowlanders
which provided one possible model for how to do this. I took a brief
English
text that had been 'translated' into 'artificial Ulster Scots' -
complete
with inventions, obsolete words used out of context, and bizarre
'maximally
differentiated' spellings. I passed it on to four Scots speakers, one in
Ireland and three in Scotland, and asked them to translate the English
without seeing the 'artificial Ulster Scots'. From the results you could
guage the markets of an 'artificial, maximally differentiated' text
compared
to the genuine thing. These included:
- Deliberate respelling of perfectly English words with no precedent for
any
different in Scots.
- Use of certain words at some stage in the text almost irrelevant of
the
text (in the 'artificial' texts you nearly always find the words
'forder'
and 'heft', for example, almost irrelevant of the subject, used to mean
anything from 'lift' to 'expand').
- Completely random use of different verb forms, including -s suffix
thrown
in apparently randomly, and 'bis' and 'is' used interchangeably.
- Unquestionably wrong semantic use of a word - such as 'speir' for
'ask'
or 'screive' for 'write', even where they're not appropriate.

It is, of course, natural even for the
well-trained-linguist-and-native-speaker to want to differentiate Scots
clearly. Nonetheless, I think there are parameters within which native
speakers and 'linguist-passive-speakers' (like me) will operate, and I
think
most Scots enthusiasts on this list would recognize a genuine Scots
text.
Nonetheless, it would be interesting to define these parameters!

Regards,
Ian James Parsley.

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