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Complex Numbers #985893 added June 18, 2020 at 12:14am
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Great Scots
I've heard Scots, the language, described as "what English might have been if it weren't for those bloody French."
So here's an article about Scots.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/scots-language
How the English Failed to Stamp Out the Scots Language
Against all odds, 28 percent of Scottish people still use it.
Despite the headline, there's a lot more to the article than just an examination of linguistic imperialism.
But there is another minority language in Scotland, one that is commonly dismissed. It’s called Scots, and it’s sometimes referred to as a joke, a weirdly spelled and -accented local variety of English. Is it a language or a dialect? “The BBC has a lot of lazy people who don’t read the books or keep up with Scottish culture and keep asking me that stupid question,” says Billy Kay, a language activist and author of Scots: The Mither Tongue. Kay says these days he simply refuses to even answer whether Scots is a language or a dialect.
Fortunately, the article does answer that question. Though I've heard it described as both, I'm fairly certain that this source is correct: it's a language in its own right.
What Scots really is is a fascinating centuries-old Germanic language that happens to be one of the most widely spoken minority native languages, by national percentage of speakers, in the world.
That's a fairly specific, and yet non-specific, statement, all at the same time.
Scots arrived in what is now Scotland sometime around the sixth century. Before then, Scotland wasn’t called Scotland, and wasn’t unified in any real way, least of all linguistically.
Most importantly to me, that was also before Scotch whisky, also known as the sweet nectar of the gods, was perfected.
Whether it's spelled "whisky" or "whiskey" is a regional thing, and I can never keep it straight, especially after drinking some.
The Anglian people, who were Germanic, started moving northward through England from the end of the Roman Empire’s influence in England in the fourth century. By the sixth, they started moving up through the northern reaches of England and into the southern parts of Scotland.
There are a few languages in the world that use the guttural "ch" sound, including Scots and German. I'd always wondered about Scots in this regard, but if its origins are Germanic (as are those of English), this starts to make sense.
But the first major break between what is now Scots and what is now English came with the Norman Conquest in the mid-11th century, when the Norman French invaded England. If you talk to anyone about the history of the English language, they’ll point to the Norman Conquest as a huge turning point; people from England have sometimes described this to me, in true English fashion, as the time when the French screwed everything up.
"The" time?
Also, I'd always heard that the history of England, as England, began in 1066 with the Norman invasion. Which is a bit like saying that American history started in 1776: it glosses over everything that came before and all the people who were calmly living there before some invasion or other.
But the Normans never bothered to cross the border and formally invade Scotland, so Scots never incorporated all that Norman stuff. It would have been a pretty tough trip over land, and the Normans may not have viewed Scotland as a valuable enough prize.
I prefer to imagine that a vast army of Normans marched north, and, upon hearing the ear-blasting noise of bagpipes, did a quick about-face, uttered the word "NOPE" in unison for the first time in human history, and double-timed it back south to Cornwall in an effort to get as far away as possible and still be on the same island.
I realize that there are some people who find those squeaky violations of the Geneva Convention attractive. But I'm pretty sure there's an entire circle of Hell reserved for pipers.
By about 1500, Scots was the lingua franca of Scotland. The king spoke Scots. Records were kept in Scots. Some other languages remained, but Scots was by far the most important.
"The problem with Scotland is that it's full of Scots."
The article then goes on to describe the aforementioned attempts to stamp out the Scots language.
Scots is a Germanic language, closely related to English but not really mutually comprehensible. There are several mutually comprehensible dialects of Scots, the same way there are mutually comprehensible dialects of English. Sometimes people will identify as speaking one of those Scots dialects—Doric, Ulster, Shetlandic. Listening to Scots spoken, as a native English speaker, you almost feel like you can get it for a sentence or two, and then you’ll have no idea what’s being said for another few sentences, and then you’ll sort of understand part of it again. Written, it’s a bit easier, as the sentence structure is broadly similar and much of the vocabulary is shared, if usually altered in spelling. The two languages are about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, or Norwegian and Danish*.
Unfortunately, I have little experience with other languages, so I have to take their word for it. But, again, it's pretty clear that Scots is its own language.
And even now, it's the butt of jokes. Like Yiddish, it's a language that's well-suited to comedy, even if the language itself is serious. Ever seen Scottish Twitter? I don't even go on Twatter and I've seen examples of it. I'm pretty sure there's a good sprinkling of Scots in there.
Scots faces a unique and truly overwhelming set of obstacles. It’s very similar to English, which allows the ruling power to convince people that it’s simply another (worse) version of English. The concept of bilingualism in Scotland is very, very new. And English, the ruling language is the most powerful language in the world, the language of commerce and culture.
I have a modicum of facility with the English language, and yet I wouldn't want it to displace other languages, however similar or different. Each language reflects its peoples' history and brings a unique perspective. Some people even assert that a different language causes one to think differently, to focus on different aspects of being (or, for some languages, becoming).
It's nice to be able to converse with people from all around the world, but that sometimes makes English speakers lazy. There aren't a lot of truly bilingual Americans; we generally aren't under any pressure to learn, say, Spanish or Mandarin, and those are two of the most widely-spoken languages. And yet speakers of those languages often have a reason to learn English, which objectively is a really tough language to pick up. This leads to assholes in my country going, "This is America! Speak English!" which I would find funny if it weren't so damn moronic.
And I don't know which would be worse: learning a language that's fairly close to one's own, or learning one that's radically different. I'd imagine that with the latter, you're challenged because every single word, and most grammatical constructions, are completely new to you. It would require a whole new way of expressing thoughts, especially if, as with Mandarin, the written symbols are also completely different. But with a similar language, I could see someone constantly tripping up and not knowing whether the word they want to use is the same in the other language or not.
Maybe when, or if, I feel comfortable enough with French, I could give yet another language a try.
But not if it involves me having to listen to bagpipes. |
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