LL-L "Resources" 2013.05.14 (01) [EN]

Tue May 14 17:12:23 UTC 2013

=====================================================
 L O W L A N D S - L - 14 May 2013 - Volume 01
lowlands.list at gmail.com - http://lowlands-l.net/
 Posting: lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org
 Archive: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/lowlands-l.html
 Encoding: Unicode (UTF-08)
Language Codes: lowlands-l.net/codes.php
 =====================================================

From: Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com>
Subject: "Ailis’s Anterins i the Laun o Ferlies " (Alice in Synthetic
Scots) published by Evertype

Evertype would like to announce the publication of Andrew McCallum's
translation of “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” into Synthetic Scots,
“Ailis’s Anterins i the Laun o Ferlies”. The book uses John Tenniel's
classic illustrations. A page with links to Amazon.com and
Amazon.co.uk<http://amazon.co.uk/>is available at
http://www.evertype.com/books/alice-sco-synth.html . Bookstores can order
copies at a discount from the publisher.

>From the Introduction:

Lewis Carroll is a pen-name: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was the author’s real
name and he was lecturer in Mathematics in Christ Church, Oxford. Dodgson
began the story on 4 July 1862, when he took a journey in a rowing boat on
the river Thames in Oxford together with the Reverend Robinson Duckworth,
with Alice Liddell (ten years of age) the daughter of the Dean of Christ
Church, and with her two sisters, Lorina (thirteen years of age), and Edith
(eight years of age). As is clear from the poem at the beginning of the
book, the three girls asked Dodgson for a story and reluctantly at first he
began to tell the first version of the story to them. There are many
half-hidden references made to the five of them throughout the text of the
book itself, which was published finally in 1865.

Ailis’s Anterins i the Laun o Ferlies is a translation of Lewis Carroll’s
classic tale into synthetic Scots.

Synthetic Scots is the name given by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid to a project
that sought to rescue Scots as a serious literary language from the cloying
sentimentalism and the music-hall self-mockery into which it had
degenerated by the early 20th century. This project was prefigured in the
work of writers like Violet Jacob and Marion Angus, Robert Louis Stevenson
and George Douglas Brown. Alongside MacDiarmid, the project was pursued by
Robert Garioch, Alastair Mackie, Alexander Scott and Sydney Goodsir Smith;
while, in more recent times, Edwin Morgan’s translations of European
poetry are among the most powerful examples that we have of synthetic
Scots. In Morgan’s translations of poets ranging from Racine to
Mayakovsky, Brecht and Neruda, there is an affirmation of the Scots
language which amply demonstrates its expressive power, often outdoing the
heights and depths of sensibility that might be possible in English. They
also confirm MacDiarmid’s estimation of the potential of a reinvigorated
Scots as “a vast unutilised mass of lapsed observation made by minds whose
attitudes to experience and whose speculative and imaginative tendencies
were quite different from any possible… to-day. It is an inchoate Marcel
Proust—a Dostoyevskian debris of ideas—an inexhaustable quarry of subtle
and significant sound.” —The Scottish Chapbook Vol 1, No 8, March 1923

Synthetic Scots is a literary rather than an oral phenomenon. No one speaks
synthetic Scots, though it does draw on all of the language’s various
regional dialects. It also draws on the Middle Scots of the great Makars of
the 15th and 16th centuries and the “Scots of the book” or “Standard Scots”
that emerged during the late 17th and 18th centuries, and which is embodied
by writers such as Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns, Sir Walter
Scott, Charles Murray, David Herbison, James Orr, James Hogg and William
Laidlaw. Modern synthetic Scots is also very much a “language of the book”,
the vocabulary and orthography of which can often appear artificial—and
even contrived—to those few native Scots speakers who remain. The chief
sourcebook of the originators of synthetic Scots was Jameson’s Etymological
Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808), which was the standard
reference work for the Scots language until the publication of The Scottish
National Dictionary in 1931. Writers and translators nowadays have the
magnificently comprehensive and definitive Dictionary of the Scots Language
from which to draw their materials.

Synthetic Scots had and continues to have a profound effect on creative
artists in Scotland. It even inspired the contemporary Scottish painter,
John Bellany, who—on encountering MacDiarmid in the 1960s—made it his
aesthetic project to “paint in Scots”. It has hardly reached the general
public, however; it is not taught in schools, it is almost entirely absent
from Scotland’s print and broadcast media, and it does not enjoy anything
like the governmental support that Scottish Gaelic enjoys. It remains
pretty much exclusively an experimental language of poets and writers,
which is exactly what it set out to be. In that respect, synthetic Scots is
perhaps no different from the “Scottis” of the great Makars or the “Scots
of the book” of the 18th century revival.

Ailis’s Anterins i the Laun o Ferlies is offered as a contribution to the
canon of synthetic Scots texts. Because the original is such a popular and
well-loved tale, skillfully crafted in simple, clear and undemanding
language, but losing none of its literary excellence for all that, the hope
is that Ailis will contribute to making Scots more accessible to both
Scottish and non-Scottish readers alike.

“[A]mong our new dialecticians, the local habitat of every dialect is given
to the square mile. I could not emulate this nicety if I desired; for I
simply wrote my Scots as well as I was able, not caring if it hailed from
Lauderdale or Angus, from the Mearns or Galloway; if I had ever heard a
good word, I used it without shame; and when Scots was lacking, or the
rhyme jibbed, I was glad (like my betters) to fall back on English… Let the
precisians call my speech that of the Lothians. And if it be not pure,
alas! what matters it? The day draws near when this illustrious and
malleable tongue shall be quite forgotten… Till then I would love to have
my hour as a native Maker, and be read by my own countryfolk in our own
dying language…” —Robert Louis Stevenson, Underwoods (London 1887)

—Andrew McCallum
==========
Michaael Everson
Evertype, http://alice-in-wonderland-books.com

=========================================================
Send posting submissions to lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org.
Please display only the relevant parts of quotes in your replies.
Send commands (including "signoff lowlands-l") to
listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org or lowlands.list at gmail.com
http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html .
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/group.php?gid=118916521473498
 ==========================================================
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lowlands-l/attachments/20130514/3f75a987/attachment.htm>