From: cwilson@gssec.bt.co.uk (Colin Wilson)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Accent and Dialect, the politics there
Date: 17 Nov 92 16:13:25 GMT
Organization: BT

In article <1992Nov16.174723.24154@maths.nott.ac.uk>, anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker) writes:
|> In article <1992Nov13.181748.18622@gssec.bt.co.uk>
|> cwilson@gssec.bt.co.uk (Colin Wilson) writes:
|> 
|> >At the foot of this posting is a list of forty Scots words, not cognate with
|> >English.
|> 
|> 	I'm not *quite* sure what your implication is.  Several of your words
|> [eg, "bonny", "burn", "bairn"] would be understood (in the Scots sense) by
|> any native speaker of English;  others ["sark", "lum", "haver", "blether",
|> "brae", "fash"] would be understood by anyone who remembered their literary
|> or other associations [as in "Cutty Sark", "lang may your lum reek", etc.];
|> "sneck", "lug", "neb", "snib" are all used in your sense by my Lincolnshire
|> relatives;  "breiks" is surely cognate with "breeches", "chunner" with
|> "chunter", "close" with "close".
|> 
|> 	Nevertheless, I freely admit that you could easily produce whole
|> sentences of Scots dialect/language that would be totally incomprehensible
|> to the average Midlander, Londoner, Bristolian, or whatever;  but I'd guess
|> that *every* region of the UK could easily retaliate in kind.  Even the
|> boring Midlands -- I have a yellowing clipping on my office wall with
|> "translations" of local stuff such as "Oo worra weeya", "Gizzarfonitt",
|> "Gerrup yo elsal bat yatab", "Atod im ee cud pleez issen", "Gerroff't
|> causie", etc.
|> 
|> 	No-one pretends that Nottinghamese is a separate language, despite
|> its many differences in grammar, inflexion, phonetics and vocabulary from
|> BBC English!  Where the differences become so large as to turn a dialect
|> into a language is surely a purely political matter, not easily subject
|> to quantification.
|> 

I can see that I've chosen some bad examples of Scots words not cognate
with English. I don't include in that, though, the ones that you say
would be recognised (but not used) by speakers of English: that simply
shows that they are Scots words known to English-speakers, just as
French words widely known to English-speakers ("homme", "maison",
"fromage", etc.) remain words of French, not English. It is interesting
that you say that some of the words that I mentioned are used in
Lincolnshire, but the fact remains that in English these words are not
part of the literary language, whereas in Scots they are.  "Close", as
it happens, comes from a similar but unrelated word in Gaelic. I accept
that in the case of "breiks" and "chunner" I was mistaken.

The purpose of the posting was not, in this instance, to defend the
proposition that Scots should be seen as a language in its own right
but instead was meant to convince a sceptical reader that Scots
(however it might be categorised) is used by a sizeable proportion of
the population of Scotland. The case for Scots as a language in its own
right has been made elsewhere.

Finally, although I would not stand in the way of anyone who wanted to
assert the status of Nottinghamese as a language in its own right, I
can hardly see how running words of standard English together ("Gerrup"
-> "get up, "elsal" -> "else I will", etc.), or simply varying
spellings ("pleez" -> "please") which are the principal characteristics
of the examples you give, can be seen in the same light as the
characteristics that distinguish Scots from English.

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