Measuring the distribution of Hume’s Scotticisms in the ECCO collection (2023)

Abstract: This short paper studies the distribution of Scotticisms from a list compiled by David Hume in a large collection of 18th century publications. We use regular expression search to find the items on the list in the ECCO collection, and then apply regression analysis to test whether the distribution of Scotticisms in works first published in Scotland is significantly different from the distribution of Scotticisms in works first published in England. We further refine our analysis to trace the influence of variables such as publication date, genre and author’s country of origin.

## introduction the 18th century was a period of standardization efforts for the english language, which is reflected in many contemporary texts, including those of philosopher david hume. one of the widely discussed topics was "scotticisms", i.e. non-standard words and expressions of scottish origin (dossena, 2005, 2012). hume, himself a scot, was concerned with the purity of language and paid a great deal of attention to the language of his writings. he was also involved in editorial work and assisted other writers in polishing their texts. the matter of scotticisms is mentioned several times in his letters to other writers while discussing their work. a list of "scotticisms" was published as an appendix to hume's political discources in 1752. the list was reprinted several times during the 18th century and mentioned in works by various authors. however, neither the 1752 edition nor any other work by hume explains how the list was compiled, to what extent it is representative of the language use in 18th century and what the impact of this work was on further standardization efforts. these characteristics make it an interesting cultural artifact to study quantitatively. it might capture regional, generational, genre-related and other variation and eventual standardization of english, but it is also most likely affected by the experiences and interests of its famous author. for example, previous research has found out that many of hume's scotticisms occurred in legal contexts (cruickshank, 2013), which might be explained by the fact that hume as a former student of law had been exposed to them. better understanding of how the use of hume's scotticisms varied in eighteenth-century texts can provide insights both to the standardization and variation of historical english, and to the origins, nature and limitations of the list itself. we perform a large-scale corpus study to determine: (i) how scottish were hume's "scotticisms"? (ii) who used them and where? (iii) was there change over time, did efforts like hume's make a difference? to that end, we search for the scotticisms on the list in a corpus of 18th century publications from england and scotland and study their distribution across location, genre and time. there was a previous attempt to search the items on hume's list in a limited correspondence corpus (cruickshank, 2013). however, as far as we are aware, this is the first attempt to analyse the actual usage of these items in a massive database of public discourse. ## data the main textual dataset for our analysis is eighteenth century collections online (ecco) (tolonen et al., 2021). the texts in ecco have been made into a machine-readable form using optical character recognition (ocr) technology. however, the ecco dataset has significant problems with the quality of the ocr texts. since the dataset itself consists of bitonal microfilm scans of varying quality, the ocr process has often not been able to reproduce the text very well or at all. thus, the textual data is often very messy, which can cause problems with analyses of the data (hill and hengchen, 2019). nevertheless, a lot of the ecco data is of fair quality, and as such the dataset can be used for various kinds of analyses. @xcite comprising about 200,000 volumes of 18thcentury printed works, the ecco dataset covers roughly half of the surviving printed works from the period. the dataset is not a balanced linguistic corpus, but more an incidental collection of various texts. for instance, ecco contains many more documents from the later periods of the century, with earlier periods underrepresented in relative terms. furthermore, different document lengths can dominate different periods. the dataset has not been balanced with respect to other variables, such as genre or register. moreover, ecco includes multiple editions of many works, which can confuse quantitative analyses due to the same or very similar content being included multiple times at different time periods. our metadata for the texts originates from the english short title catalogue (estc) foot_1 , harmonized and augmented by the helsinki computational history group (lahti et al., 2019). metadata were used to implement two data-filtering steps intended to control for the complexity of the analysis and data quality issues: and additional steps for the regression analysis: ## results we evaluated the reliability of our model by comparing how well it predicted the frequency of scotticisms in a test set compared to a null model that only considers the document length in characters to predict a number of scotticisms. @xcite the comparison of the predictions of the model to the real number of scotticisms in the test data is shown in figure 2 . there is a clear difference in favour of the full model, as it is able to more accurately detect those instances in which the number of scotticisms in a document is very high. our model is able to capture such variation in the number of scotticisms that generalizes beyond the training set. the results of the regression analysis are presented in several findings of the preceding univariate visualizations are supported by the posterior distribution of the fitted model: foot_4 good ocr quality, the author being a scot born in the 17th century and especially scottish legal publications are associated with an increased rate of scotticisms. additionally, several authors are associated with an increased rate of scotticisms. the most consistent factors associated with a lower rate of scotticisms are those depicting the difference between the first and 3rd/4th quarters of the 18th century for nonlegal scottish publications. hence, the regression model offers support for three major claims: the other major conclusion is that individuals differed in their use of scotticisms to a remarkable degree. even after accounting for other factors that were related to variation in the use of scotticisms (among them the overall difference between authors born in the seventeenth vs. the eighteenth century), some authors used them orders of magnitude more than others. while the analysis of the use of scotticisms by specific individuals is beyond the scope of this paper, this differentiation as a general phenomenon has historical implications. hume and fellow-minded advocates of standardization were focusing on removing characteristics of english that did divide authors. it is worth noting that most items from hume's list were more frequently used in their standard form, even in scottish writings. for example, the scotticism alwise was found 173 times in our corpus of works published in scotland, while the standard form always was used 44,972 times in this corpus. thus, alwise could serve as a strong predictor of scottish work, but even in scottish works the standard form was much more frequent. therefore, the standardization was not a complete transformation of scottish english but an attempt to eliminate what was seen as regionally specific language mistakes. taken as a whole, the changes in the use of scotticisms were remarkable. figure 3 shows that scotticisms are indeed prevalent in books published in scotland and that even there their number gradually decreases during the 18th century, with the 1760s being an outlier. we checked those documents from 1760s that have the biggest number of scotticisms and found out that all of them were legal documents. the peak in the number of scottish legal documents published during that time could have some historical explanation or could be a mere corpus artefact. we leave this for further investigation. ## conclusion and further work our analysis confirms that david hume was familiar with the peculiarities of language use in his time. the overall trend towards standardization was resisted by scottish legal texts and modified by significant variation between authors. the specific contribution of david hume to this process is a matter for further research. @xcite further work would include both refining the methods and taking into account a broader set of materials. the former line of research may include structural analysis of the data-including part of speech tagging and parsing-and efforts to find "scotticisms" in a data-driven way without any predefined list. the latter would involve studying scotticisms compiled by other 18th century writers, and studying other types of data outside ecco, such as newspapers and personal correspondence. we also plan to apply methods based on contextualized embeddings for semantic disambiguation and post-ocr correction of items from the list. and eighteenth-century publishing (grant numbers 333716 and 333717) and high performance computing for the detection and analysis of historical discourses (grant numbers 347706 and 347709). computational resources were provided by csc-it center for science.