Scottish Gaelic, Scots an aw

As is Stew’s granddad’s Book of Ruth.

There’s a lot of Dòtaman content in the Duolingo course.

Feeling the mission creep pull of sibling Irish.

Dòtaman content off the charts today.

Einnsean, tractar agus bhan… tha greis bho nach cuala sinn sin #DIYleDonnie!
Music to our ears - Dòtaman has still got it! pic.twitter.com/BHHpRFGreN

— BBC ALBA (@bbcalba) June 15, 2017

Là Naomh Anndra sona dhut!

Cuid ye repeat that, please? Cuid ye spik a bittie slawer, please? I dinnae unnerstaun.

Say it slower ye fookin bawbag.

Fookin? Never!

how much of the perceived “impenetrability” of languages could be defeated simply, by better transliteration? Like how much of shit of “mysteriousness” is extended by spelling it “cuid”? and obv it is in BOTH directions— “cuid” is better than “could” to my ear, but… here we are.

coming out of a lot of fam scotsness, i’m like, gmafb. same thing even if jumpin barriers into, say welsh— a lot is made more ridiculous just by spellin rules. am i wrong or just infinitely redundant of known complaints ? with me it’s equal chance either way. but brits musta been complainin of this forever?

If it wasn’t spelled like that how would we know it was Scots and not just English?

Isn't it a bit trickier too because Scottish is not a transliteration so much as a parallel/sister language using the same characters.

Yeah, it’s a closely related language so…

Somewhat vaguely analogous to the different languages that use Chinese characters. People who speak one can sort of understand part of what is written in the other, but not totally.

late seeing this thread so apologies if somebody's already mentioned this brilliant story

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia🕸

Check it out: https://www.chrisgilmour.co.uk/scots/

https://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/corpus-details/

https://www.abdn.ac.uk/elphinstone/kist/

https://mapofstories.scot/the-story-of-the-laird-of-the-black-arts🕸/
Ye ken?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhC267fHNZ0

You'll still never convince me that's a distinct language and not just a dialect. I understand all of it for a start!

Some people seem to like this site: https://stooryduster.co.uk/

what counts as a dialect and what counts as a language is an extremely contentious question, for example Norwegian and Danish or Serbian and Croatian are mutually intelligible.

i read a book once (about the precise date of the foundering of atlantis) which used as evidence that fact that basque and japanese are mutually intelligible

this is has never seemed to me very likely but i have never seen it disproven

That’s kind of batshit crazy- which means there must be plenty of people who want to believe!

One of the reasons Scots is extra-mutually intelligible with English is that the latter has influenced it so much over the centuries, but historically it came from some specific tribes of Angles that settled in Lothian iirc.

See also the way many Celtic languages, although less so for Scottish Gaelic, lost and continue to lose certain elements of phonology, such as nasalization.

Lothian? Maybe it was Berwickshire.

Hugh MacDiarmid made a heroic attempt to reinvent or reinvigorate Scots, raiding the dictionary, inventing new words, let me see if I can find a good summary.

The man who created the climate for modern literature in Scots was a radical Communist and nationalist called Christopher Murray Grieve, alias Hugh MacDiarmid. Grieve was a native Scots speaker from Langholm near the English border; single-handedly, he dragged Scots out of the couthy Kailyard to re-create it as a medium of poetry of international calibre. His method of doing this was novel: augmenting his native Scots with words from dictionaries, seeking words from different dialects and past ages of the language, and inventing words of his own when all else failed. What he in fact did was little different from Dante’s achievement in creating a national tongue out of the welter of Italian dialects at the beginning of the fourteenth century; MacDiarmid’s achievement may be recognised in the same terms some day, but for the moment an anglicised Scotland is still getting over the shock of the despised patois being taken seriously internationally once again.

One of the reasons Scots is extra-mutually intelligible with English is that the latter has influenced it so much over the centuries

That website is a literal treasure trove - I could spend hours listening to this stuff...

Happy Burns Nicht!

Slàinthe Mhath!

Whit like?

Would any of you be interested in a dystopian sf novel written only in Scots?

Maybe I should post on the sf thread.

Yes please. Sea also 'Deep Wheel Orcadia', a verse novel written in the Scots/Norse Orkney dialect.

An interesting article I came upon today: Why Scotland lost its tongue

Okay, that was pretty good, although maybe some oversimplification.

Yes please. Sea also 'Deep Wheel Orcadia', a verse novel written in the Scots/Norse Orkney dialect.

Some Scots speakers I know are very into both of those books.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/31/gpt4_gaelic_safety/

Deep Wheel Orcadia is very good!

Thanks. I believe you are also a fan of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, although I don’t know how much Scots one can find in that one.

That is a fucking brilliant book!

I heard it was kind of lost until André Gide rediscovered it.

Is the Editor’s Note a framing story, I wonder.

This story has been making the rounds: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd75qn08z1o

One of the greatest words in Scots and maybe in any language is “weirdless,” which means “unlucky” or “inept,” because one’s “weird” (Fate) has deserted him.