A small vignette
We were having a quiet night in, readers. (Living in a cul-de-sac, it’s quite peaceful here in the evenings, unless we’re hosting a soirée.) We’d just made ourselves a late snack of a tasty baguette – preceded by a small apéritif, and a few canapés serving as hors d’oeuvre – as the au pair is on holiday in Paris this week with the chauffeur, taking in some haute couture.
As we relaxed on the chaise-longue, pondering an indulgent dessert of a chocolate eclair or some crème brûlée, we glanced at Twitter, in the hope of being amused by a few bon mots in the milieu of the internet. Sadly, the reality was a cliché.
We’ve never felt so divorced from the zeitgeist.
Suddenly the joie de vivre of the evening was kaput. Sighing, we opened a bottle of lager – although in truth that would have been de rigueur for the time of night anyway. A crushing sense of déjà vu overtook us as we wearily contemplated the latest effort of this tedious provocateur yet to move on from the style of his debut.
(The kindest thing we could say about the oafish amateur blogger, who we generally refer to by a sobriquet, is that it takes chutzpah to be such an imbecile in public.)
There was no point in hoping for détente, and certainly not a concordat. This doyen of the frothing Yoon community – this entrepreneur turned would-be enfant terrible that a clique of desperate pundits cling to in lieu of a proper expert – would never recognise the crassness of his faux pas, and wouldn’t be executing a volte-face.
His sour, lazy critique wasn’t a tour-de-force from a formidable raconteur. There wasn’t so much as a soupçon of wit or panache about it. Au contraire: its sole raison d’être was sabotage, a volley of flak barely worthy of a kindergarten or a crèche – little more, really, than dreck from a poseur sitting smugly in his pied-à-terre admiring the gauche décor and the tacky, garish objets d’art typical of the nouveau riche.
In truth we were too filled with ennui to think of a decent riposte. We contemplated a pastiche, perhaps written under the nom de plume of a coquettish brunette femme fatale, but on reflection we felt that the genre was tired and such a plan would carry no cachet. We were at an impasse. We had nada. Bupkis. We needed a montage.
None of our ideas had the necessary je ne sais quoi, and we felt a terrible sense of malaise. Here we were, a bunch of klutzes unable to develop a motif, let alone start a mêlée – a scene we’re normally more than au fait with (some might call it our forte, perhaps our defining marque). There was no prospect of delivering a coup de grâce.
So we were hors de combat. We’d wanted to launch a blitzkrieg but we couldn’t even come up with a decent spiel. There was nothing in our repertoire. We pictured our detractors as voyeurs enjoying the glow of schadenfreude en masse, and wished we had a protégé to delegate the task to (or at least have a good tête-à-tête about it with), but in their absence decided the best route was to adopt a laissez-faire attitude.
“C’est la vie”, we shrugged.
Touché!
Dearest – that is poetic xx
Sometimes big smelly jobbies just need to be flushed, rather than engaging with them. ;o)
Bravo!
Harsh but funny
Kev isn’t a cunning linguist.
Nunquam invado a mingit conflictus cum a skunk
As always, displaying your mastery of the English language
That’s enough, into your pyjamas and off to your futon.
Touché
Bravo
I just know Hague was rejected by his mother.
Bravo!
Smashing.
Bravo!
…and don’t forget that the French have no word for entrepreneur.
I have never failed to be surprised those who take joy in pissing all over our identity, culture and language.
To this day, I don’t know what they get out of it.
Wonder how Adam Smith spoke being a Fifer ken?
I’m sensing a fair bit of schadenfreude here.
Oui Stu, c’est tout merde.
Bravo!
Sorry mate, I don’t speak French.
Do you think K***n might sit down at the end of the year with a wee dram and contemplate another Annus Horriblus?
I’m pretty sure you could find Scots words for the terms he’s complaining about if you tried.
All languages copy words other languages, that’s how they evolve.
Take the Gaelic word telebhisean you can see immediately where the English word television came from. 😉
Heck, what’s the English for scunner? Pend close? Rone pipe? Outwith? Bourach? Do I have to go on?
Isn’t French for;
“This is the toilet”?
Se math sin.
Oui!
He walked into that kamikaze fashion…
Grouse Beater says:
13 April, 2016 at 11:02 pm
I just know Hague was rejected by his mother.
=========
Pity she never rejected the father .
…I suspect that wasn’t the first lager of the evening!
Where did “C’est la vie” get to?
Wunderbar!
Très drôle 🙂
kev should check this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_English_words_of_Scottish_origin …
oh, and… ‘education’ – latin, ‘policy’ – greek, ‘general’ – latin, ‘perception’ – latin, ‘that the’ – germanic … I mean what sort of self-respecting language doesn’t…?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in_English#/media/File:Origins_of_English_PieChart.svg
per ardua ad asterisks
As a proud neighbourly nation, the French for example, wouldn’t put up with this repetitive, puerile shit. Just as well they don’t have a word for déjà vu.
“Where did “C’est la vie” get to?”
Um, the last line?
Imagine if there was no English phrase for “La Reyne le veult”, no laws would get passed in the mother of all Parliaments!
“unwritten education policy” Wee dae its cawed “scoolin”
Brawo!
Well The Rev’s spelt Vinaigrette all wrong for a start.
No chance on Master Chef with that..
A pièce de résistance!
Superb riposte Stu – reading it as I sit here in my pyjamas, wrapped in a duvet, eating pizza, watching the tele. 🙂
What’s the English for ‘graph’ K***n? It’s all Greek to me.
Excellent! (Sgoinneil!)
Amazing riposte Rev. Bravo!
Just thought I drop KH a brief note thanking him for his good works in promoting the cause of Scottish Independence
Ah seen whit ye did rer, by the way. Very funny.
Fitt isn’t a good Scots writer though. He’s done a lot of very good work in schools. I think he writes like this to be more accessible to school children and in general.
But his writing does aid the slang / bad English as he uses present day (southern) English form rather than pre-1707 Scots. So it will just look Englishy rather than Scottishy.
It would be closer to “onwrittin educatioun policie”. Those aren’t my words or something someone has conjured up a few years ago.
That form is something you’ll find consistently in pre-union (unioun) Scots texts, especially the “-ioun” (pron. as ‘un’) for “-ion”. That’s the rule. It’s ours. There’s many different form like this ready to be used.
Without asking him, Paul the Wee Ginger Dug would have came up with the same thing as I have above. I’ve communicated with him before and our writing is virtually identical without ever discussing it with him. He’s studied it at length.
A tsunami of leitmotifs, maestro! Encore! Encore! Bravissimo!
H***e, unfortunately, does have just enough ‘language’ to embarass himself and his country on multiple media platforms. This Daily Record glove-puppet knows about as much of his country’s cultural legacy, resistance, and renaissance as he does about its economic condition. From Haguenomics to Kevinguistics. Is there no beginning to this polymath’s talents?
MacDiarmid wid be birlin in his grave.
Chef d’oeuvre!
@ David Mills
We should all send him a wee billet doux, tout suite.
Sorry, Stu, should have appeared between ‘Isn’t’ and ‘French’.
(Must, must, must proof-read before submitting!)
How is it possible to be so ashamed of your own country yet claim to support it? Unionist logic it seems.
Reminds me of the infamous incident on a radio panel show many decades ago when a female panelist in full snoot mode, a la Isabelle Barnett, asked of her Highland co-panelist:
“If Gaelic is so great, what is the Gaelic for Spaghetti Bolognese?”
To which the Highlander retorted:
“I haff no itea madam. Perhaps if you iff you proffitet the Inklish for it I could haff an attempt at translating it.”
Un bon mot!
I should like to congratulate you on your style, amigo,, but A jist cannae find le mot juste
I notice the blocked message top right Stu. Not cognoscenti with twitterati, who blocked who??
Dash beauatifool
Ach! Rev Stu, ye ken fine weel ye canna mak a silk purse frae a soo;s lug.
Ma Auld Granny yaised tae say:-
Am jist chillin in ma campervan wae ma boatle o bucky an ma plates o meet restin upoan ma poofey. Slainte mhath!
The unwritten policy of thrashing speakers of scots has led to a lack of pride in the language and a general perception that the eight hundred year old Scots language is “slang”.
Let’ give that a tweak:
The unwritten policy o paikin speakers of scots has led tae a lack o pride in the leid and a general perception that the eicht hunner year auld Scots language is “slang”.
Bob’s yer uncle, a hale different language.
Whit?
Truly unbelievable stuff from the Cringemeister General.
The irony is Hague’s post illustrates exactly what Matthew Fitt is writing about. It is about snobbery and class, not about what is a language or a dialect or whether it is Yoon or Nat.
He truly believes he is an expert in everything.
Growing up we spoke one way with our friends at school, another way at home and yet another way for school. Each was as authentic as the other. The funny thing was the ‘language’ for friends was probably the most obscure and impenetrable and contained true neologisms.
Oeuf!
Excelente!
I mean…just wow. What. Is. Wrong. Wi. These. Peepul?
I’m awa’ fur a coffee and a cigarette… **eyeroll**
Very clever.
“Kin yur mammy sew”
That’s modern Glaswegian
In old Glaswegian there were no words
there was just a noise (thunk!!) and yur Arse was on the pavement followed by these words
“Fkin talkin tae”
All the colour and flavour of language in one guttural response, and like all language, useful from time to time
Smashin post by our skipper showing where words galore are borrowed into the English brogue.
Twigged it, ta.
What I cannot understand is how a small secondary school in Bowmore on Islay has managed to produce so many Britnat Zoomers.
K***n H***e,
Glenn Campbell,
Alistair Carmichael and
George Robertson.
Truly amazing – what the **** did they teach them there?
I never did find out the Gaelic for Petrofac.
There’s no word in Scots for “to55er” and I think KH just nominated his initials, a sort of verbal shorthand.
“Och, wid yi just look at tha glaekit kh over there…”
Or however the hell it is written.
Madly, I have zero interest in Scots nor Gaelic and detest the roadsign campaign. But this KH’s anti-Scottish sentiment goes too far, attack the ponsiness and snobbery but not our right to have a culture.
@ GrouseBeater His Mother realised she kept the wrang thing, she should have kept the Placenta.
C’est la gemme…
@Hoss
I demand an immediate inquiry into the potential mind altering characteristics of peat flavoured single malts.
“I notice the blocked message top right Stu. Not cognoscenti with twitterati, who blocked who??”
It means I blocked him, though both are true.
Smashing.
Which, by the way Kev, is from the Gaelic ‘s-math-sin, (pronounced Sma-shin), meaning “that’s good.”
Aye, ah recall the oft repeated command o’ many a teacher growin’ up: ‘speak properly’, ‘speak proper English’. Drummed intae us and that yes we were indeed ‘using slang’ if not completing our ings, or callin’ our mum’s maw, our dad’s da.
Why it’s enough tae gie ye a complex aboot how ye speak.
What a dickhead that guy Hague is. If he came away wi that pish in Glesgae he’d be nursin a bust beak.
@ Hoss Mackintosh They were breathing in the fumes fae the Bowmore Distillery = addled brains.
Maybe Kev can do a graph to prove how shite the Scots language is… thats about his kind of level.
I went through Kevin’s latest piece wondering if I could find some examples of foreign language in common English usage but really there was nothing there at all. Just a bland tired piece moaning about Nicola Sturgeon.
Can you imagine this bitter graph guy bearing down in the boudoir, all hysterical and righteous. It hardly bears thinking of.
Parisian French words (as opposed to Norman French) were at one time far more prevalent in Scots and Northern English than in the English of the South, until Caxton assimilated many of them with the advent of printing. e.g. Barbour’s ‘The Bruce’ (see Archie Duncan).
Much to the chagrin of Southerners.
Isn’t chatte french for tory?
Yeah yeah I now juvenile at best. I’ll get my coat.
A linguistic tour de force, Rev – your piece de resistance.
There is nothing more futile than arguing the existence of Scots with monoglot ignorant Philistine Yoons, who seem to be blind to the enormous canon of Scots literature,poetry & song dating back centuries right up to the present (which wasn’t created in a vacuum). Nothing at all, life is too short
Och Tam, that wis a bit graphic. 😉
(coat’s oan)
Loads of our Scots words aren’t native to Scotland anyway, they come from the vikings/norwegian.
Like :
Huis = house, (pronounced hoose)
Barn = child/bairn
Kvinne = woman/quine
Kirk = church
Flit = to move, shift
Braw = good
Burn = river
Gråta = to cry/greet
Stein = stone /stane
Kjenne = to know/ken
There are loads more. I find it fascinating. Scots isn’t slang, these are real words that just happen to resemble the English but they are considered inferior to English because… just because OK.
Its all greek to me
@David Mooney
“Isn’t chatte french for tory?”
Reminds me of my wine making phase a couple of decades or more back.
I designed a nice sepia label with a picture of our house and called it:
“Chateau Aura Flare”.
Many recipients did not twig (just cannae rid masel o Gaelicisms) until the physical consequences manifested themselves. 🙂
True story.
Our country was shafted at her referendum by a load of sewer dwellers. We are fed a constant stream of excrement from the BUM and yet, as this thread shows, we maintain a wicked sense of fun.
And with that, and tears of joy in my eyes, i’m off to my pit.
Sare jaws tae!
This is one of those ridiculous examples of virtue signalling.
The reality is that both Scots and English are Saxon languages and in reality, much of Middle Scots is incorporated in modern English (perhaps more than from Middle English). One good example is the use of -ise over -ize. The former is the preferred form in Modern English while the latter is still used in American English. Almost certainly based in the use of “Z” to depict the letter zog in Middle Scots.
The problem, the biggest problem apart from the lunacy he represents to some Yoons, with Matthew Fitt is that he doesn’t actually use a form of Scots. It’s a mish mash of Middle Scots words and Standard English words and grammer. It’s a complete pig in a poke and embarrassing.
Braw
But there ARE two ‘G’s in ‘bugger off’
Chateau Aura Flare – Just fuckin’ brilliant! Love it! 🙂
Fantastique. 🙂
Declin de a empire grand britannia
La reve ne mourra Jamais
Funny thing really is apart from “unwritten” all the other words the Yoonite mentioned aren’t English either. Latin and modern French for the most part.
Mynd ye A widde nae hae yaesed “unwritten”. Ma sel A ‘hink “naeScreivit” idder weys “screivitnaecht”. Mebbes ma Platt Deutches heizin hets heid agin.
@ Hoss Mackintosh, 12:00am, 14/04/16
What I cannot understand is how a small secondary school in Bowmore on Islay has managed to produce so many Britnat Zoomers.
K***n H***e,
Glenn Campbell,
Alistair Carmichael and
George Robertson.
Truly amazing – what the **** did they teach them there?
Bowin’ and scrapin’ ? Touching the forelock? Who’s the Laird thereabouts and did he go to Eton, Oxford, Cambridge or the like?
“Chateau Aura Flare”
Chic, that cracked me up. I’m still chortling.
This idiot uses two different language terms for the one word. He uses “leid” and uses “language” in the same quote. It’s an utter embarrassment.
For all you who don’t quite understand what Rev. Stuart is saying, let me explain.
Basically Wings just declared class war. Oh well.
I don’t fit comfortably into any class so I’m not too concerned. By that I mean I hate them all equally. I used to think I was nice and considered feeding hungry people at one time but I realise now that I was just young and stupid. And hungry people rarely click the “Buy Now” button so I sort of lost interest in them. There’s no quid pro quo with the starving millions, it’s all one way.
So anyway, it’s all paradoxical or something. The poor are the real materialists, always going on about the things they don’t have. If people didn’t want so much they wouldn’t be so needy.
@Dair
Maybe if he was writing an academic article or translation then a pure form of Scots would be appropriate?
He has written a newspaper article and is perhaps demonstrating a hybrid form to illustrate how language develops or is spoken in real life? The same way that Rev. Stu has shown a mish mash of French and German in his piece.
Just a thought.
Coup de grâce, Rev!
Oh come on. The guys been foun oot. He’s talking mince and claiming its Scots. It’s not. He can’t use “language” and “leid” in the same headline and pretend he has a realistic understanding of Scots and is writing in Scots.
The reality is that both Saxon languages, English and Scots have converged to a reasonable degree yet they are, still, different languages. But Modern Scots is pretty much identical to Scots Standard English and nothing we will claim or believe is going to change that.
It is far better to take some pleasure that Modern English takes so much from Middle Scots that in a huge number of areas it is very different to Pre-Modern English as spoken and written in the United States.
Que sera.
@ Dair, 12:33am
Och, if you’re going to be picky, the word is “grammar”.
Yoony attacks on the Scots language are the worst kind of snuil.
(Oh, there isn’t a word for that in English, or for dreich, etc., etc., so obviously English can’t be a proper language either, then.)
Of all the idiotic comments they make, I find this kind of attack on the language the most revealing of yoons’ evident lack of self-esteem.
The attempted putdown though reminded me of one of George W. Bush’s best little gems:
@BettyBook oh so now you care about spelling?
At least my apparent failure was simply a spelling mistake and not Matthew Fitt’s embarrassing nonsense where he claims to be using a language he clearly is not.
@ Chic,12:28am
Very droll (and that’s not English either).
Re your wine-making days. Wish we had thought to make such a label when we indulged in the art years ago! Did you ever use the rubber bungs instead of cork? The resultant tainting of the wine would make your label really apt! 🙂
Stu-pendous piece of prose there Stuart.
Didn’t know you spoke Esperanto.
Can’t remember last time I went to a soirée never mind hosted one,though I am trying to get myself a life again,even just a totey wee one.
Still,on late tomorrow again so no lager for me : (
Enjoy !
Matthew Fitts’ Sci-fi novel “But N Ben A-Go-Go” is fkn ace.
Granted, it takes a bit of gettin yer head around linguistically because it’s mostly written in Dundonian but help ma christ what a storyline!
I’ve read it thrice and loved it every time.
As for mister H***e up there ^ he can’t even structure a 140 character tweet.
Wasn’t it Stephen Fry who said that his team had researched and found that 30 percent of Modern English was lifted directly from Modern Scots? So if you can’t remember the Scots for something, it’s probably because the English hijacked it.
“What I cannot understand is how a small secondary school in Bowmore on Islay has managed to produce so many Britnat Zoomers.
K***n H***e,
Glenn Campbell,
Alistair Carmichael and
George Robertson.”
It all makes sense now. Abandoned at birth and left to immature for 12 years in oaken sherry casks.
@ Dair
Looks like you’re not doing so well with the ole spelling tonight. Never mind. Nope, don’t care that much about spelling in comments unless someone is being picky and a tad superior. You have called Matthew Fitt an idiot, but, perhaps like someone else commented similarly earlier, he is simply making his article readable/accessible to readers, many of whom will have forgotten or never seen the language written.
That reminds me of that old joke Chic, two women sittin’ oan the deck of a big liner…one’s a wee wifie fae Govan, who’s man has won a prize of a cruise on one of the company’s ships. The other’s a very posh woman and they get chattin’:
‘So what does yor husband do? asks the posh one, ‘Oh, he’s the foremin in charge o’ the platers at the yaird’ says she. ‘An whit dis your man dae’ the wee wifie asks in kind: ‘Oh my husband works for Cunard’, says the posh one. The wee wifie quick as a flash retorts: ‘There’s need fur that kinda language! Ma husband works fuckin’ hard tae!
Oh fer feck’s sake!
Scots is a recognised language, otherwise it would not have it’s own Wikipedia edition: http://sco.wikipedia.org.
Might be a bit neglected, but that seems a familiar story.
Well, ClanDonald @ 00:21,
a lot come from Flemish (+Niederdeutsch) as well. For example, just off the top of my head:
bakster= female baker/baxter
elke = every, each/ilkie
gaan = to go/gaan (eg. “Ahm gaan hame”)
huis = house/hoose
kassei = shaped road stone/cassie
kennen = to be familiar with/ken
kerk = church/kirk
maken = to make/maak
roepen = to call out/roup (auction)
smederij = blacksmithy/smiddy
(from smeden= to hit,smite)
steen = stone/stane
stoofvlees = stew/stovies
zeker = sure/siccar
But that’s only because they all stem from a common root, sustained through the centuries by direct contact through trade. But that doesn’t make Scots inferior somehow, just another “cousin” in the family.
Bravo! Such eclat!
The problem with being all ‘mysterious’ by substituting characters is that folk could easily reach the wrong assumptions, since every substitution could be almost any of a very expanded character set.
So K**** H**** could be a name like,
say, Kevin Hague
& yet some folk could easily read it as a nom de plume like, say Keech Heid!
Ach Morag, if Inglis disnae hae words fur they Scots words, it’s no a leid.
Fantastic reposte Stuart. Definitely one of the finest responses I have ever read.
GIRFUY Kevin.
I love the reference to Stovies – It is a dish that is eaten in some guise or other on just about every country in Europe – but primarily in the coastal communties. From the Baltic countries (Lapskaus in Norway), all the way around the balkans, through to Spain and around the entire med area to the Adriatic it is eaten.
But as said previously, I certainly found a lot of commonality in between the Norwegian Bokmal and Scottish words during my stint there.
That is so good. 😀
He earned that.
Superb!
Pauvre Kevin – un pisseur de copie.
Stu, Formi-fuckin-dable.
These SAG’s (Scottish Anglified Gentlemen/women) should just sling their hooks, and coorie up wi’ their English heroes doon there.
I am fed up to the back teeth of this core of Scottish-baters.
O/T our Balloon is among the MEPs who voted against reigning in the excesses of tax havens. Cameron apparently claims that the Conservatives supported it but all of them who voted were opposed.
Plus ca change!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/these-are-the-british-meps-who-voted-against-plans-to-crack-down-on-corporate-tax-evasion-a6982271.html
I believe I’m experiencing schadenfreude.
He’s a complete ignoramus. Anything he doesn’t understand is somehow false. Typical yoon.
Good article but why does the Rev support Scots yet accuse some Gaelic speakers of being blood and soil nationalists?
And still no-one can answer why nonsense peddler Matthew Fitt uses “language” and “lied” in the same damn paragraph.
Belief in an independent Scotland and the importance of that goal does not require people to be taken in by shameless charlatans like this halfwit Fitt (even if we have to pay him a ridiculously generous salary for his ludicrous drivel from our taxes which would be far better used to target poverty and deprivation).
If a language is just a dialect with an army, then I hope English isn’t relying on its six-star field marshal H***e.
I thought the main point about the master of the English language Shakespeare was he found the vocabulary at the time limiting so made up hundreds of words that are still in use today.
Can we then say Shakespeare isn’t written in English?
As for that list of reprobates from the wee island, if there ever was evidence that too drink to much whiskey before sex is dangerous, then there it is. On each copulation over 100.000 sperm made the trip to fertilise the egg, and that’s the best of the bunch!
You could not formulate a more damaging statistical analysis for compulsory condom wearing when drinking than the unfortunate emissions from that cursed community.
Superb,witty polemicist delivers,tour de force.
If Carlsberg did banter……Grand Brittannia nul point.
🙂
Coat oan
I think that the Scottish government should do everything it can to promote scots and its recognition as a proper language, distinct from English as Spanish is from Portuguese, or Danish is from Swedish. The fact that the yoons go into blind fury at the mere suggestion that scots is a language indicates its importance in the fight for a distinct, independent Scotland.
Personally, I would like to use scots more in discussion. I was brought up with it and recognise many of the words, but having had the Queens English drummed into me over the past 40 years, I’m afraid that I have lost much of it and I am too embarrassed to try for fear of getting it wrong and sounding like a stupid Brigadoon yoon doing a white heather party piece! 🙁
Greek and Roman are not languages. Arabic numerals. The development of language is the history of the world. The Normans spoke French. Chaucer, Shakespeare are like a foreign language. The Egyptians and Chinese use symbols.
Doric
As Manuel would say, “Que”?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7mpClSPyhk
@Dair
I am guessing that he did so for the same reason he decided not to translate “education policy” or “general perception” neither of which would have been hard to do.
Of course I don’t know what this reason is, you would have to ask him.
At a guess he decided to deliberately mix Scots and English so more people would understand it.
Learning one language can encourage people to learn another. History, culture, and a better understanding between each other. Gaelic studies/music encourage knowledge. Not the ignorance of some people. 40million diaspora. Tourism and trade. Tourists come to claim their heritage and appreciate Gaelic signs.
Westminster economy policies depopulated Scotland and lost Scotland a £300Billion Oil Fund. That is ignorance.
Nil Illegitimae Carborundum.
Great piece to get up to this am.
Zut alors! Nearly had a petite accident in my lingerie!
OK ignorance showing here but what’s this about leid and language. I’ve tried gaelic to English and get bed of heather and nothing from French to English.
Hamish Henderson’s Cultural Centre brings students from all over the world. Scottish invention shaped the modern world. TV – telecommunications – Internet. Scotland the first country in the world to have tertiary (Church) education. The Arbroath Declaration influenced democracy and self determination. Yet Scotland is not Independence because of Westminster corruption and lies.
China – ‘Scotland the land of Invention’
‘Britain a small island with no Empire’.
Diese Schande muss weg!
“Scottish Anglified Gentlemen”? Lends then far too much gravitas that.
I’ll stick wi Wee Vichy Jocks! 😉
Billy Connelly has the same problem.His stage shows at one time were straight from the Glasgow Gorbals,until he became famous and developed a peculiar brand of English pronunciation for his wider audience.There have been many others who have done the same.
Beezer
Imbécile et branleur, Monsieur Fils de Pute
Kevin H….. Putz!
Brilliant Rev.
The yoons must be khaki-ing themselves!
The graphmister has proved as inept in the knowledge of language as he is in numeracy.
Illiterate and innumerate. We hear you Kev but nobody is listening.
Whit?
Ah, the sturm und drang of Scottish cultural life!
@ Telegraph
A new Underground Map celebrates Shakespeare – MacBeth, MacDuff.
BP the worst company in economic history. Dudley gets a £14Million remuneration. The Russians wanted to put him in jail for fraud.
Wee twist in the perspective?
Imagine going to Ireland and trying to teach them to speak Scots and lose their Irish brogue. I mean why the feck would you ever want to?
What is it in the Britnat psyche which compels it to assimilate everything like the Borg form Star Trek? “Your culture is crap compared to mine so yours has to go, and I will forever be at liberty to berate you as a second class immigrant into my culture”.
It is a relic of Imperialist morality and a breathtaking arrogance untempered by any remote self awareness or modesty. The “British” have a remarkable capacity to act atrociously yet excuse themselves for anything.
O wad some Power the gift tae gie them. Tae see themselves as ithers see them.
What makes it absurd is that the English people I know don’t actually think that at all. Mind, they didn’t go to Eton to be groomed and ordained as natural Masters of the Universe.
@Morag
Love the word outwith. It’s just so perfect and useful. I was astonished when I, fairly recently, discovered it is a Scottish word.
@LizRannoch
All I could find was that ‘leid’ is mother tongue. I am a bit puzzled why both cannot be used simultaneously.
Oh I forgot
Faux cul
Dae ye bide n’a bungalow Stu?
Liz, leid is Scots for language, so you were interrogating the wrong language for translation
Formidable !
Encore, Encore. mon amie.
as watching the rugby on Alba has taught me load a “guth”
Banana fur Kev.
@ NiallD 8.08 am – Khak? Kek? Cac? Just a wee geographical tit-bit, the two tops on Lochnagar are called
Cac Carn Mhor – Literally ‘The big pile of S**t’
Cac Carn Beag – Literally ‘The little pile of S**t’
Please note other translations are acceptable.
Funny ole world in it?
Imagine being cornered in the kitchen at a party as Hague bore down on you, armed with reams of graphs and intent on forcing you to share his self-loathing..
I too like the word ‘outwith’. A pompous counterpart from Steeple Bumpley or some such once took it upon himself to write a glossary of acronyms and ‘technical terminology’ which appeared in our official publications. He included the word ‘outwith’ as he had never come across it before. He settled on the helpful definition of it as ‘archaic, Scottish, origin and meaning unknown’.
Rev Stu. Re. School PFI Just heard the (red Tory) leader of Edinburgh C. C. Saying that the builder “Self Certified” and that it was “Perfectly Legal at the time” So the private company designed the buildings and carried out their own certification, so the council have to rely on the private company’s integrity and technical ability for the soundness of the construction which covers structural integrity and Lifespan of the materials used..
The council leader said, that self certification was legal at the time, implying that it no longer is. Would be interesting to find out, when did self certification become legal and when was it ended.
I was always under the impression that English isn’t a single language. Most if I appears French to me. Coupled with its Germanic origins and other Scandinavian influences as well as hangovers from Celtic languages, it would appear to be a mix of many.
Add to this the words we have borrowed from around the globe whilst we murdered, sorry, commonwealthed, folk, English is indeed, not very Anglo Saxon.
It would be very interesting to compare the amount of Scots words spoken by Scots in relation to the amount of Angle words spoken by those in England.
Also bear in mind that Scotland does have it’s own language, which of course we share with the Irish.
@theMadMurph
@Morag
“outwith”
Indeed. I’ve always just used it as the opposite of within. ‘Within the party’, ‘outwith the party’.
What else would be the opposite of within?
I too discovered recently it is Scots. Also, I notice spell checkers for UK English aren’t too happy with it!
Would that be “Queens English” from Germanic roots ?
Rev Stu, This piece is awesome.
This entire article should be preserved in the National library of Scotland, and made part of the schools syllabus in Scotland.
It is, quite simply, the best, well written, pithy response to those pig ignorant cringing Scots who ridicule their countries OWN languages, whilst blindly believing that ENGLISH does not borrow words, and is so much better than any other language.
Seriously, it truly is just pig ignorance that leads any Scots to make the kind of comment we saw last night. Were that same standard applied across the world, there would in facts be NO ‘real’ languages, anywhere. They all borrow words, such is the nature of the evolution of languages.
Sad, deluded unionists, cringe, cringe, cringety cringe.
@ Alan Mackintosh
Thanks for that, even at my age – learning something new every day.
@ Scottish Psyche 8.30
I agree, I think he’s done that to help people like me question and understand a bit more.
Thank you both.
No Frenchman ever said, “C’est la vie,” it’s a hangover from the ’20s when the Bright Young Things rendered common phrases into (bad)French. The closest the French have is, “C’est la guerre.”
Sorry Rev O/T but I thought this could equally apply to Tory/Lab parties.
President Jacob Zuma encouraged companies who do business with the state to donate money to the party.
“I always say to business people that if you invest in the ANC, you are wise. If you don’t invest in the ANC, your business is in danger,” Zuma said in October.
Don’t know how to do links but this is from an article in the NEWS 24 site in South Africa.
Cringe is an Old English derivative of the Germanic krank. Which is, I feel, highly appropriate for the purveyors of cringe.
Ah mon chere, formidable.
I don’t know nuffink about languages and where they come from but here’s a thot.
Hoomans like us came from Kenya or Persia or somewhere like that a few weeks ago.
A suppose they must have spoke somethin tae each other. A suppose that wis the only true original language. Efter that everything else wid be a variation on it, wid it no?
Meant to say it comes from this story in News 24
Exclusive: R378m prisons tender scandal
I may be wrong, but I have always thought that standard English stopped using words like hath, doth, etc etc, and began using has, does etc etc, adopted from Scots.
True? Or false?
Bugger (the Panda) wrote: “Faux cul”
HAW PANDA, wiv enuff o yon barbaric acts in oor cuntryside withoot yoo encouraging it an shame oan yoo, beein nearly extinct yersel.
Matthew Fitt can barely speak and write Scots so he is a bad example of the language. I grew up speaking only Scots until my teens (by then I started to speak English also as a seco language) and “the unwritten language policy” is absolutely not Scots, much like the rest of Matthew’s tweet, rather in my dislect of Scots that phrase is “i nó screivit leidlair pólise”
Are you seriously trying to tell me that Gaelic has a word for ‘aubergine’?
“ronnie anderson says:
14 April, 2016 at 12:02 am
@ GrouseBeater His Mother realised she kept the wrang thing, she should have kept the Placenta.”
Ronnie that is brilliant. Almost sprayed my coffee out my nose when I read that. Scottish wit at its finest. Just like the Rev
@ Luigi, 7:35am
Personally, I would like to use scots more in discussion. I was brought up with it and recognise many of the words, but having had the Queens English drummed into me over the past 40 years, I’m afraid that I have lost much of it and I am too embarrassed to try for fear of getting it wrong and sounding like a stupid Brigadoon yoon doing a white heather party piece! 🙁
Exactly. Knocked out of us by school, newspapers and the BBC.
I’ve been reading quite a few articles and poetry written in Scots recently and find I understand/remember almost all of it, depending on which “brand”,eg Borders, Doric, etc. When I read or hear folk speaking my language, despite having lost so much myself, it feels like being wrapped in a warm blanket.
Just start using the words you remember and maybe the memory will start to drag out more ! 🙂
Oh, and thank you whoever used “coorie up” further up the page. Haven’t heard that for years (memories of my mum) 🙂
@ Stoker says:
14 April, 2016 at 9:26 am
Bugger (the Panda) wrote: “Faux cul”
HAW PANDA, wiv enuff o yon barbaric acts in oor cuntryside withoot yoo encouraging it an shame oan yoo, beein nearly extinct yersel.
Used to be my Nom de Guerre on the old Herald Blogs but was written Faux Cu.
Got away with it for about 18 months then banned.
@Betty Boop
No, we used cork bungs and for bottle capping. We did try some of the new plastic corks when they came out to towards the end and with no obvious detriment but only for a short time since the quality of shop wine seemed to improve and we stopped making our own.
At one time, the UK seemed to get all the rubbish from the Continent.
Yes, the more rabid Unionists ( I reserve the word? Yoons and it’s extensions for them for them ) should be aware that thousands of English language words originate from French.
I found that out when I was trying to learn French, although they are in the main either slightly simplified, or bastardised to suit the English tongue.
Up to 45% actually.
This is a fact. Confirmed here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_French_origin
Brilliant EXPOSE (the e should have an acute over it. Can’t do that) of a semi-literate POSEUR
I noted words from six languages in your RIPOSTE – French, German, Hindi, Spanish, Hebrew and Latin.
Where else is there such a continually intelligent site?
By the way, one of the less polite Scots words used enthusiastically by the English is blackmail. As in ” if you vote Yes we will kick you out of the EU, NATO and the use of sterling”
Aubergine—–Ubhthoradh.
Absolutely brilliant article!
All modern European languages can be traced back to Sanskrit.
theMadMurph says:
14 April, 2016 at 8:26 am
@Morag
Love the word outwith. It’s just so perfect and useful. I was astonished when I, fairly recently, discovered it is a Scottish word.
________________________________
Many, many years ago there was an editorial in The Scotsman defending the use of ‘outwith’ and pointing out that it was in common use in Scotland and perfectly acceptable.
I think the editorial was prompted by some attack on the use of the word from some non-Scottish source.
Those were the days of course when that paper lived up to its name.
@Cuilean
Does that include Finnish and Magyar?
Just asking
SNP SNP EU
Ref my previous post,
reading further on it, I find that some 80,000 English words originate from French.
ALSO, the English language originated from Germanic!
The Yoons can put that in their pipe and smoke it!
artanarse says:
14 April, 2016 at 8:58 am
I was always under the impression that English isn’t a single language. Most if I appears French to me. Coupled with its Germanic origins and other Scandinavian influences as well as hangovers from Celtic languages, it would appear to be a mix of many.
Ruby replies
Quite a few words of Arabic origin used in English
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabic_origin
The same applies to French & especially Spanish.
Yer a scriver a’richt, Rev.
Further, one could argue that the English language originates from many other languages. A bit of a mongeral really.
This reminds me of the discussion that took place when someone claimed that the English invented marmalade.
Marmalade a good English word??????
Encore Maestro, encore.
O/T
But did anyone else find Harvie, on STV last night, appear as an untrustworthy ‘ally’ of independence?
I’m convinced the aim is just to piggy-back seats on the list by pretending to support it.
Both votes SNP the only way.
Greannach says:
Are you seriously trying to tell me that Gaelic has a word for ‘aubergine’?
late 18th century: from French, from Catalan alberginia, from Arabic al-b??inj?n (based on Persian b?ding?n, from Sanskrit v?ti?gan?a ).
Those words coming over here stealing our language…
Cojones!
I think this whole language debate annoys Yoons so much because they believe they get to set the rules all the time and no one has the right to question them.
The same mind-set that lets you assume you are always right because something has always been done a certain way.
Nothing is allowed to change or evolve.
It is a terrible affliction.
Outwith – I didn’t know that was Scots. My spell checker doesn’t like it though. Remember the hymn, “There is a green hill far away, without a city wall”? Obviously should have been “outwith a city wall”.
I wonder, does Kevin live in a bungalow or a tenement? Or maybe a chateau? Will soon be in a dungeon at this rate.
There’s a myth that applies to Scots and English which is similar to dogs and wolves. It isn’t correct to say dogs are descended from wolves. Both wolves and dogs do have a common ancestor, however a wolf has been evolving from that common ancestor for just as long as dogs have.
So it is for Scots. Both Scots and English language share a common anscestor, but one has been evolving from that common origin for as long as the other. What that means is that Scots is not a bastardisation or inferior quality of English, that isn’t accurate at all, whatever you were taught at school. To speak “properly” in Scotland would see you speaking Scots or Gaelic. Scots has an origin and evolution every bit as legitimate as Queens English, it is simply a different evolutionary path. Mary Queen of Scots, Queen consort of France, on her return to Scotland apparently spoke to her Scottish subjects in broad Scots. Hard to imagine Scots as the language of royalty, but it’s our language and its our royalty who should be so lucky to speak it.
Sassenach says:
Greens are not to be trusted with Indy in mind.
They are looking more like the way the Lib Dems behave. Who, I suspect will become their allies when it suits them.
Dair,
based on your flawed premise, if Shakespeare was writing today, you would, per force, despise and ridicule him also.
Shakespeare simply ‘made up’ his own ‘English’ as he went along, inventing over 1,700 new words, phrases and grammar.
What an ignorant bastard that Shakespeare, eh, no like you ava?
Colonised by wankers, effete arseholes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1tJJO_pVvQ
robert Kerr,
I believe it includes all western languages bar Basque which is a pre- Indo-Europeanan isolate.
Hashish doesn’t sound very English
What about harem?
What about the name Kevin where did that come from?
Hague is that not Dutch or perhaps it’s double Dutch!
….And forgot to add…
The very old Scottish name Fraser? Comes from the French word for Stawberry, fraisse, or fraisser for strawberry grower, and came over here with the Normans. If you see a strawberry depicted in a family’s heraldic crest, there is a Fraser in the family.
Don’t be upset Frasers wherever you are; your Scottish credentials are implacable. When William Wallace had his head displayed in London, (and Wallace itself is probably derived from a Welsh archer), to his left and right were the heads of two kindred spirits who also gave their lives for Scotland’s freedom; brothers Fraser from Neidpath Castle in Peebles.
Without furrin words the English language would be a series of wailings, grunts and hand gestures. Examples can be seen on a regular basis in the House of Commons.
Whoops, typo. European.
“What else would be the opposite of within?”
That would be without.
The opposite of outwith would be inwith.
http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/dost/inwith
Douce. Tres douce.
OT. This petition doesn’t seem to be doing too well.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/120442
Newspaper apologies or corrections must be same size and page of original story.
Seems like pretty good one to force the Westminster parliament to debate.
@Clydebuilt says:
8:56 am
“the builder “Self Certified” and that it was “Perfectly Legal at the time”
It might have been perfectly legal but it’s hardly an excuse that the Conservative leader should be proud of.
You can self assess your taxes but if you put in a false return you get hammered. If the guilty builder of these schools self certified the building work knowing it was sub standard or broke any building code he should be very publicly punished. Possibly charged for putting children’s life at risk.
Q.E.D.
The English are always adopting other folks’ culture and ideas then pretending it is their own.
Breakfast is the perfect example.
They take a wholesome and balanced Full Scottish Breakfast. Then they omit the essential Lorn Sausage and Tattie Scone, and call what’s left a Full English Breakfast as if it we their own. 😉
Dair says:
14 April, 2016 at 12:33 am
Matthew Fitt is that he doesn’t actually use a form of Scots. It’s a mish mash of Middle Scots words and Standard English words and grammer.
———-
I suppose he is trying to use Scots as a living language, in which case it would make sense to intertwine with modern slang and standard English words. The same as English has constantly evolved by taking words from other languages.
It would look pretty ridiculous for someone to talk only in old English or some sort of Shakespearean dialog.
I can see both sides here. If you want to use Scots as a modern everyday language, then it is no good regarding it as a museum piece.
Then there is the cringeworthy extreme Yoon type view based on class and snobbery which sees anything Scottish as inferior and a threat to Britishness.
The same attitude is seen in the “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” type newspaper letters, complaining about Americanisms and the like.
@ Chic
Aye, there was a sudden and incredible improvement in shop bought wine. I blame the Australians. Tables have turned again though and they’ve slipped back a bit and the readily available French wines are much improved.
Anyways, we started with cork, thought the rubber bungs would be more cost effective, but, they actually ruined the wine; smelled awful and was like drinking wine from a hot water bottle. I think every other home housed a vintner or brewer at the time! Reasonably priced imports became drinkable and the demi-john redundant. It’s probably still lurking in the loft somewhere or we might have left it back in the Outer Hebrides. Such fun we had in the 70s & 80s.
Still creased up over “Chateau Aura Flare” 🙂
@Jimmy Jackson
‘Inwith’
… an excellent word to bring back into use. Why did we stop? Today I begin the unofficial inwith usage campaign.
Inwith the year, I hope to see it used widely! 🙂
I’ve no idea who this Kevin guy is and he may be the tw*t that some are accusing him of being but I have read the columns of Matthew Fitt in the national and he comes overt as smug and arrogant. I’ve not written in myself but he has been rudely dismissive of ordinary readers writing in response to his columns and having the temerity to disagree with him. So I don’t think much of him either.
He’s also dishonest, throwing in lots of long out of use words and usages to add to the “Scots” in his column to try to impress with the notion that more Scots dialect is used than really is. He never quotes proper studies though.
Saying that will get me a barrage of abuse no doubt but as a pro-indy voter I would hate to see the old forcing of standard English (in all regions of the UK BTW) on folk being replaced by a forcing of pseudo-Scots onto the population which is the impression I get that guys like Fitt would like to do.
A few points on comments here: Scots is a dialect. So is Geordie, and West Country rural speech and so I RP as spoken on the BBC: they all come under the Heading of English language, an international language that just happens to be spoken by both Scots and Englishmen.
Ultra-nationalists might want to claim it as a language separate from English but it really isn’t different enough to qualify. A poster above listed words showing lots of Scots came from Norse but while there’s some truth in that some of his examples come from Old English (hus, stan for house and stone – all the pronunciations, hoos, moos,ect are OE)) and a lot of Norse came into Scots from Old Northumbrian (kist, Kirk) which is what Scots descended from. I quote that to show how many folk talk about Scots from a position of ignorance.
The fact is we can only talk about language as it is, not what we would like it to be. One should of course not denigrate any dialect and all are equally valid but there seems to me to be a heart of many who promote Scots as a separate language. It is what it is – preserve it and encourage it and encourage interest in Scots writers new and old but for heaven’s sake be honest about it. Next time you look at Fitt’s column, flick through the paper and ask yourself why the rest of the paper isn’t written like that.
C’est magnifique Rev, terrific comments.
I’ve been lost in France this morning. Now I can’t get the tune out of my head.
Late morning O/T links
http://indyref2.scot/the-shallowness-of-blis
Crumbling schools
http://archive.is/GV2QE
Solan oil field
http://archive.is/m4tl3
Panama-papers-corporations-shifted-half-trillion-dollars-offshore-tax-havens
http://archive.is/7jWOp
Onwards says:
14 April, 2016 at 10:36 am
The same attitude is seen in the “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” type newspaper letters, complaining about Americanisms and the like.
Ruby replies
I would agree with “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” re Americanisms,
I refuse to ask for regular fries!
I’m sticking with a wee poke of chips!
PS Anyone know what language Adam & Eve spoke?
Parliamo Hagueo!
Andrew 9.04
The French have never said “c’est la vie”
Oh well, c’est la vie.
‘Pitchforks and burning sticks (called a slogan)’
😉
Onwards says:
“Then there is the cringeworthy extreme Yoon type view based on class and snobbery which sees anything Scottish as inferior and a threat to Britishness”
It wouldn’t be quite so bad if there was such as thing a ‘Britishness’. In language, culture, politics, etc is mainly Home-County-ness as promoted for decades by the BBC.
What the Unionist Scots don’t seem to take on board is that in the Home Counties they more accurately refer to it not as Britishness, but to Englishness.
We must remember that for much of the last three hundred years the ‘cringeworthy Scot’ tried to pass themselves off as North Britons. While geographically correct, it had no culture meaning. Down south no one ever called themselves South Britons!
North Britons, Unionists, Proud Scots Buts, simply aspire to be English. That is the way I see it.
That is their choice. They must have their personal reasons.
I am Scottish, not pretendy English.
My previous reply had me carried away with what Fitt was about. However the point about KH’s question is this. It’s wrong to say Scots doesn’t have words for these words because it always has. Look up any Scots writing in the last few hundred years and you’ll find the words “education, policy, perception, written, etc”
They are in the language of old Scots writers because Scots is a form of English (just as RP is a form of English) and took in many of the same latinate (written being the exception and from old English) words, in fact were quite aware of and influenced by English English as well as French and other foreign writers. So the words have been used up here for centuries.
What I object to from guys like Fitt is their attempting to boost their case by claiming words like “leid” etc are normal Scots dialect words when you never see or hear them from any one except guys like him. Language is what it is and it’s useless – and indeed I think counterproductive – to try to make it out to be what it isn’t.
The question is: how much of that common vocabulary – both from OE as well as Latin and French – form the everyday speech of an average Scot. Or the other way round, how much genuine Scots dialect (and I mean that folk actually use regularly in everyday speech) is used compared to shared English vocabulary? What studies have been done to ascertain this?
@galamcennalath,
Dinna tell embdy bit ainlie discovert it masel efter Mr Fitt wis inwith oor schule edjicatin the bairns innat, ken 😀
They hate seeing the Scots regaining any sense of self worth in themsel’s ergo the constant undermining. Know yer place…same as it ever was. Scottish born Unionists of this mentality…are tortured by simply being Scottish.
Those strangulated vowels reveal the hidden depths of their despair, if only there wis a surgical procedure to cut oot their mither tongue, they’d happily submit tae it.
PS Anyone know what language Adam & Eve spoke?
Ruby, every Gael will confirm it was Gaelic.
Mmm, this carpaccio of marag dhubh is braw the day. Language is a riot, no?
Haig is a sumph, juist.
@cearc.
For fun and time wasting ?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/IndoEuropeanTreeDielli1.svg
No Basque, no Suoimi, no Magyar!
Still
SNP SNP EU
@ Sassenach Harvey would be the PiggyBack of Cameron if he thought it would gain him votes ( he pays lip service to Independence ) he,s wearing a Saltire badge on his lapel now, he refused one from us during the George Sq Demo.
SNP1&2
Reminds me of the old joke: ‘What’s the Gaelic for macaroni? I don’t know, what’s the English for it?
The cream of that joke is that there are actually THREE Gaelic words for macaroni; Sgeamhanach, Gasganach, and Lasgair.
Hey Stu, do you dig it? (Dig: from Scots Gaelic ‘Tuig’ : to understand.)
As for the bone head that detests bi-lingual road signs, there are no words in any language that describe that sort of ignoramus accurately enough.
I’m fluent in German including most of the dialects, Sächsisch, Friesich, Baierisch and I’ve noticed that when English TV shows a historical documentary where old Anglo-Saxon is spoken, then I can understand some/a lot of what is said without subtitles.
English is a bastard language made up from different tongues.
But then again there are a lot of bas***s in England..! 🙂
…unless it’s Snool.
ronnie, aye re Harvey…I’d vote for some of their policies in an independent Scotland, but not for their constitutional position within the current arrangement, he’s arrogant and really did think that the increased uptake In green party membership after the referendum wis tae dae wi him and his party.
It wasn’t, without the SNP and the subsequent referendum they would never have attracted that level of uptake. I know, I was there at one of the first increased membership meetings the week after the ref., snide remarks about his ‘dislike’ of Salmond.
Never went back.
SNP x 2 the only reliable vehicle on the ballot tae drive us toward Independence.
Chic McGregor says:
14 April, 2016 at 12:28 am
@David Mooney
“Isn’t chatte french for tory?”
Reminds me of my wine making phase a couple of decades or more back.
I designed a nice sepia label with a picture of our house and called it:
“Chateau Aura Flare”.
Aye Chic that made me fair chuckle. The French are much more creative with their language than the English. 😉
Auld Scots is more probably a nearly dead language.
France, at least at one time, had committee dedicated to keeping their language pure and bereft of such outrages as “le Picnic” or more damnably “Le Weekend”. Language purity isn’t that unique to the. UK or Scotland.
Thing is that unless your parents played along all the suppress your local dialect at school taught you was a flexibility and a bit of mental agility. In the vast majority of the population it failed to instill the required cringe.
The only hope of eliminating any unique form of English from Scotland is immersion and might, in part, be a factor in the loss of BBC English. But after over a 100 years of radio, cinema and TV without the elimination of regional accents or dilects here or abroad it’s not happening any time soon.
Realistically if it were to happen then we’d all talk like generic Americans. From an independence perspective there’s no need to prove any particular distinction between the languages spoken anywhere in the UK as we’re in both the EU and the Commonwealth.
Not sure that Scots was killed by a deliberate act of malice though. It’d be more fun to show that through commerce it merged with and influenced southern English to an extent that both languages became indistinct. A bit like how domestic and wild cats in Scotland are merging. Or how according to some Neanderthals merged with the rest of humanity.
Growing up & being educated in Canada, we were taught in Primary school that ‘English’ language was a collection of words originating in many parts of the world and when given our ‘English’ homework, we’d to learn the spelling of words – AND their origins. I found it totally fascinating just how eclectic our language was!
When I moved to Scotland and became more au fait with Scottish history (as opposed to the movie/tv versions that I had been more exposed to), I could see how with the natural migration of people and the opening of trade routes, that more and more ‘foreign’ words would creep into and invade another’s cultural language. Considering how frequently Scotland was invaded with Romans who came from many, MANY parts of the world, Norse and Danes, etc., it’s not surprising that many of our words are based in other languages. But that is the same for England’s language as much as the Scottish version. So it is just plain daft to assert that one form of language is any more valid than another. K***n H***e is just blethering!
But have to say re the word ‘outwith’ – I use it all the time. But I had no idea that it was of Scots origin! Thanks to the very knowledgeable commenters here for that bit of information. I learn so much here! 🙂
Your post was really smart. Unlike this comment.
If you google Scottish slang, all sorts comes up.
What I can’t get my head round is …
Are these sites imply the Scots language IS just slang?
Are they implying Scots is just a slang version of English?
Or, are they concentrating of slang words within the Scots language, because all languages contain slang?
Even visiting some, it doesn’t become clear!
Personally, I would find the suggestion that all Scots is slang, deeply offensive.
Dobro, hvala
If I recall correctly there was some sort of official challenge to the use of ‘outwith’ until someone decided to check legal texts from past centuries. Think the earliest use of it in those documents was circa 1400 ish. The challenge to its use swiftly fizzled out as the examples found proved that it had been in common usage for centuries.
Read that somewhere in an old book but can’t remember which one 🙂
It’s use also features in the Scotland Act of Union & the accompanying articles to the act.
‘S math sin (smashin’)
A juggernaut of an article Stu. I say Bravo to the National for breaking the taboo of the leid as a lingua franca.
@ cearc
The government sent me their response to that petition this morning. It can be summarized as: “in the interests of free speech we are not prepared to regulate the press; IPSO does that and now and again requires corrections to be on the front page. Be grateful for that”.
——-
@ everyone talking about Sanskrit as the precursor of all European languages:
Almost all languages currently spoken in Europe are classified as Indo-European and can be traced back to a form that resembles Sanskrit, but is partially reconstructed – proto-Indo-European.
The main exceptions are the Uralic languages which include Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian and various Sami languages as well as several minority languages in Russia. Maltese is a dialect of Arabic and Basque is a language isolate with no known relatives. There were also a number of judeo-European languages such as Yiddish and Ladino, which mixed Hebrew with the local language, but these have very few speakers now.
Then there’s Gagauz, a Turkic language spoken in an enclave of Moldova, which as Paul Kavanagh regularly points out, merits its own broadcasting service despite its tiny number of speakers. There are probably other minority non-IE languages which I have either forgotten or never known about.
lol brilliant Rev i see whit ye did there old chap 🙂
Its something i have been harping on about for years the English language has so many external influences it no longer represents itself as a nations language it has become the bastard language of the world.
And they really hate anybody messing with it because its the only thing they ever had that was actually theirs and not fucking stolen from someone else.
Chateau Aura Flare/Flair jist love it! Scots was deffo taboo at the school, got the belt myself for Aye & Naw but still use the lingo, safter folk ended up as “Lovely Speakers!”
Some folks here gettin fankled wi languages & dialects & lapsing into broad Keich, the kinda folk you dread meeting en vacance & badly need tae take a Keek at thursels!
Met a Danish lassie who studied English before coming here to work & was astonished that naebody here spoke what she learned. 🙂
Kev’s shenanigans are uber gauche.
tarisgal says:12:35
“Considering how frequently Scotland was invaded with Romans”
Attempted to invade would be closer, although The Romans attacked Scotland with a far larger force than the one used to hold all of England and Wales, the repeated campaigns to conquer Scotland were bloody, brutal and ultimately unsuccessful for the Roman Empire.
Unlike England that capitulated early, first to the Romans, then to the French Normans.
Maybe that’s why they keep saying England won the second world war, actually it was the Russians and Americans, historical embarrassment for being easy push over’s perhaps?
Luigi says:
14 April, 2016 at 7:35 am
I think that the Scottish government should do everything it can to promote scots and its recognition as a proper language, distinct from English as Spanish is from Portuguese, or Danish is from Swedish. The fact that the yoons go into blind fury at the mere suggestion that scots is a language indicates its importance in the fight for a distinct, independent Scotland.
I pointed out to Kevin Hague, after his buffoonish assertion that it was English with a few dialect spellings, that not only is it recognised by the Scottish Government as a language, it is enshrined in the list of protected languages in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, ratified by UK in 2001. He doesn’t appear to understand that English was introduced to Scotland, not the other way round. The usual mindset from the usual quarter.
Here’s living proof! Whip this out whenever yoons abase themselves and adopt the cringe:
http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/minlang/AboutCharter/LanguagesCovered.pdf (Page 4)
Sen him ben the skullery… bawbag
Thanks Suzanne, excellent! Bookmarked fur deployment… 🙂
Anent “outwith” (two for one there!), I think it was John Humphrys of Pravdavision4 (“I’m well hard, well hard, innit?”) who sneered at its use and said there was no such word. He was subjected to severe correction by various Scottish correspondents.
Some really good comments on here and an absolutely classic and clever post, Rev.
Chapeau bas, mon vieux.
Beautiful. Just a joy to read.
Glad I’m on your site Rev
math thu an gille
You really are the “Enfant terrible”of political comment Rev,your panache and savoir faire in dealing with assorted fools and unionist politicians fills me with joie de vivre.
Weel if Scots isna a leid it’s fair got a wheen
folk gey fashed an up in airms.
Matthew Fitt haes duin mair than maist tae
uphaud an forder Scots.
Whit we maunna dae is tak wir een aff the
task in haun, an that is tae set oot the case
for a staunart form o scrievit Scots.
If we dinna we’ll still be haein the same pynts
flung at us ower the staunin o Scots an whuther
It’s a leid or a by-leid.
The stelment o a staunart wad be a kwantum
lowp for Scots.
Here ye go http://www.scots-online.org/grammar/spelling.asp