LL-L "Grammar" 2010.10.24 (02) [EN]

Sun Oct 24 22:44:01 UTC 2010

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L O W L A N D S - L - 24 October 2010 - Volume 02
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>

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

From: FsKneX <fsknex at gmail.com>
> Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2010.10.17 (04) [EN]

John,

I agree with all your points.

> 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.'

I know the forms "I've gien" (because I say it myself) and "I gae" (because
I've read it in traditional Scots writing).

With 'I've gied hime the bucket', the "'ve" seems redundant. It should be "I
gied him the bucket". Or "I've gien 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.'

Really, I don't think he wants anything linguistically, he's just speaking.
This sort of writing seems pure condescension both towards the reader and
the subject of the sentence, and I would surmise from this that the content
can't be trusted.

> 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.

I think this indeterminacy is an illusion. If you confuse different
registers of a dialect, different idiolects, or even separate dialects, then
you may clump things together that don't belong together, and then imagine
that they're all part of the same process of language change. Then you'll
never figure out how the language is really changing, and you'll have to
resort to indeterminacy to make it all fit.

> 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.'

D'oh! Written in a hurry?

> 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.

Well, value judgements speak volumes. Rhetoric ain't what it used to be  :(

> 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.

This isn't really a criticism of the book, but Taggart seems rather poorly
done to me (or was, in the days when I used to watch it). The final straw
came when there was an episode with a Deaf man and his interpreter who were
using "sign language" that made it look like Deaf people only communicated
with random mime and great difficulty. One of those moments that make you
realise you're watching a programme that's really indifferently made, and
then you begin to see all the other mistakes and can't watch it any more!

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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