Scottish Gaelic, Scots an aw

Been trying to learn this recently. Not sure if anyone else is also doing so or will post on this thread, but here we go. More later.

Not to be confused with Scots, although maybe I should have mentioned that in the thread title as well.

The Duolingo course is really special, maybe the best of all of theirs, maybe the last best, at least the last one done by all volunteers as far as I know. Lots of amazing audio of native speakers.

I'm assuming there's no such thing as a Duolingo course in Scots?

Don’t think so. Why, are you wanting to learn?

If I wanted to sound like a 19th century Ayrshire farmer maybe. I don't though. Anyway there's plenty of Scots words in common usage without turning into Private Fraser from Dad's Army.

I started watching Terence Davies’s Sunset Song the other day because it is leaving from MUBI tomorrow and found out the novel it is based on is written in Scots iirc.

Still very readable, Sunset Song, the first part of the trilogy was on our school's curriculum. I still recall words like 'kye'

Think I may get the book and the ebook as well.

Feel a bit self-conscious that I started this thread too early and gave away the game.

Maybe I should have waited until I was fluent.

HAHAAHAHAHA!

Ciamar a tha thu, a charaid?

Tha gu math, tapadh leat.

Sunset Song is a brilliant novel and a great feat of prose but maybe not v useful as a linguistic artefact of Scots - it's sort of a hybrid of English, Scots and Doric (NE Scot dialect) words aimed at capturing the essence of local speech while still working for an English reader. The rhythm of the language is more interesting than the vocab, though things like "kye" have still stuck with me.

When the book was being taught in my high school in Glasgow, few of the kids, despite all speaking a kind of Scots themselves, could really get into it. My teacher despaired of getting us to develop a feel for the rhythms and pulled in my mum, who was from Galloway in the opposite corner of Scotland and still had a mega lilting accent, to read out a few bits in class. This worked but added to the weird synthesised feel.

I guess that's part of my problem with establishing a Scots lexicon today. What's Scots when there are so many odd old corners of it, and different regional ways to pronounce "what"? For any given word, the Scots dictionary / Wikipedia entry always seems to opt for the one vowel sound I've never heard used.

Great post, thanks! Not intending for that book and movie to be language learning material per se, more like a general vibe and motivational thing. Scots and Scottish Gaelic are obv two very different things anyway.

Feel like I am aware of several different standard sources of learning materials for SG that seem to be talking about the exact same language, so there must have been some standardization of the language to IRN-OUT some of the regionalisms of the tens of thousands of native speakers.

Wikipedia sez:

Native speakers
57,000 fluent L1 and L2 speakers in Scotland (2011)
87,000 people in Scotland reported having some Gaelic language ability in 2011; 1,300 fluent in Nova Scotia

Right now I am having this kind of honeymoon high (first or second honeymoon hard to say), of being able to have some ability to recognize more sounds and words than not and therefore feeling like fluency is just around the corner, a matter of hours or minutes. This is an old mental habit that is very hard to turn off, similar to trying to regain one’s sense of smell after COVID.

Definitely worth getting into Sunset Song for motivation / context and I'll see if I can think of anything else. Nan Shepherd, a novelist from the same time ploughing a similar furrow (if I may), uses a fair bit of Scots/Doric. I discovered her novels through the Canongate Classics series of Scottish fiction which dug up a lot of good stuff from the first half of the 20thC and were often published with a short glossary in the back.

Fiction in rural settings usually offers up more interesting use of Scots because of the really specific language used to describe natural phenomena that has died out now. One such expression I remember: "the brears o' an e'e", meaning "eyelashes", "brears" being small first shoots of grass.

If you want to go a bit further back, James Hogg (a shepherd who wrote some hugely influential fiction in the early 19thC iirc) uses Scots here and there in an interesting way. His work is all about the tension between rural superstition and religious and Enlightenment values in Scotland and I suspect he plays with use of dialect and who has narrative authority. Should be a glossary in the back again.

Would be interesting to know more about what's happened with the standardisation of Gaelic - I'd suspect the forms used in parts of Scotland where it's still active today have been adopted everywhere, but that might be too simplistic...

Also these posts got way longer than I intended, forgive the extra reading material!

No worries at all, that post was very useful and informative!

Think a lot of the standardization comes from the Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on the Isle of Skye, which is a Scottish Gaelic college associated with some other institutions and organizations as well. Don’t know much about the SMO except that the previous director wrote the Teach Yourself course and the associated dictionary.

The SMO is involved in a big SG dictionary project
http://www.faclair.ac.uk/
which links to a similar, functioning Scots dictionary
https://dsl.ac.uk/
Although I mak nae bairn’s bargains here.

Here is a good writeup of the available dictionaries:
https://gaelic.co/gaelic-dictionary/

I am trying quite hard to bring more Scots into my general speech - as a Highlander with family from Caithness and Wester Ross, and growing up around Doric speakers, it was the way I spoke as a kid and I hate that moving to the central belt has knocked a lot of it out of my speech and I'm trying to get it back. I have two separate friends who are native Gaelic speakers and in both cases are bringing their children up bilingual

Feel free to practice your Scots here if that helps!

We did Sunset Song in English at high school (15 miles outside of Glasgow). We watched the TV adaptation which was terrible and not just in the way everything is when you're 15. I remember enjoying the book to a degree but the mini-series was so bad, I just couldn't take it seriously afterwards.

I love watching De-A-Nis because Postman Pat becomes Padraig Post and the theme is infinitely more catchy in Gaelic.

The TV series was shown again recently (on BBC 4 I think). Looked OK to me.

I remember our English teacher prefaced the class starting in with Sunset Song by quoting some lines from 'October' by U2.

XXP - Dè a-nis could be a fun watch.

Danger Mouse was changed to 'Donnie Murdo' and as a kid I remember thinking, 'the singer from Runrig is Danger Mouse??'

Ha. The Duolingo SG course is chock-a-block with references to Runrig, maybe almost as many as there are to Irn-Bru.

This sight is pretty useful: https://learngaelic.scot/

Looks of videos here which seem to be from a series called Speaking Our Language.

https://learngaelic.scot/sol/

Well, early on, Runrig had their own TV show, at the start of which they would assemble like the Avengers prompted by a spooky female voice, kinda amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ5I1Hq6Ex4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lfxKoq1tK0

Ha! Do they actually sing in Gàidhlig?

Just clicked. I guess so.

But not every song.

Yeah, they did quite a lot of the time iirc, they were kinda inescapable for a few years.

Anyways, sorry for derail, James

No worries at all. That barely constituted a derail and was fun to hear about, even if I doubt that listening to Runrig will ultimately be that helpful in my studies.

Kind of amazing to me how close Irish and Scottish Gaelic are tbh. Was looking at the former last night and forgot and thought I was looking at the latter. Wonder if they are as close as, say, Danish and Norwegian, the written languages anyway.

It was brought to Scotland from Ireland, well that's the accepted opinion. I've heard that Donegal Irish is especially close to Scottish Gaelic, not that surprising.

Thanks. They seem to be different enough at this point as not to be mutually intelligible but still the resemblance is striking.

Today I learned that the English word “pibroch” is an anglicized version of “pìobaireachd.”

At a company where I used to work we had to hire a Gaelic translator and the only guy we could find was an Irish-born poet who lives on Skye and works with both Irish and Scottish Gaelic, I think he added the latter easily when he moved to Scotland. It was so hard to find someone that before we turned him up I was encouraged as the token Scot to try and tap into my personal network (cue panicked FB posts).

We had a Gaelic unit at our high school where kids from Gaelic primary school would study Gaelic literature, geography and history and join everyone else for other subjects. A fair few of those kids ended up on TV and radio and doing the odd bit of translation or weird side gig due to demand. Interestingly the school only briefly offered Gaelic for beginners so you were witnessing the thrill of bilingualism with no real way to access it, slightly controversial as the unit was seen as an enclave of brighter and better-behaved pupils from more well-to-do backgrounds.

Can you get access to BBC Alba programming where you are James? On iPlayer or TV? It repeats classic shows from the '90s such as the aforementioned Speaking Our Language and a strikingly low-budget soap opera called Machair, among newer material.

Can’t access BBC Alba directly here, no, but thanks for reminding me.

Some of these things seem to be on Dailymotion though.

Spent so much time working on this today I think I broke my brain. We’ll see how much I retain when I wake up tomorrow and get on the subway.

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.

Really enjoyed But n Ben A-Go-Go.

http://textualities.net/tag/matthew-fitt

^That’s a little amuse-bouche from the world of the novel. Here is something longer, the second chapter of the book itself, at least from a prepublication version of it, although I don’t notice any differences:
https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/aboutus/resources/stella/projects/starn/prose/sair-heid-city/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0rgETg2Hoo

Uses one of my recent new favorite words, lumber, I think.

Since you've moved on to Glaswegian I hope you're familiar with the Boaby Gillespie skits in this very forum.

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

Reminds me that I just read that Edwin Morgan came out when he was 70, I think.

Since you've moved on to Glaswegian I hope you're familiar with the Boaby Gillespie skits in this very forum.

I even have a book called Scotspeak which has detailed phonetic info about the different accents, co-authored by Christine Robinson, Director of Scottish Language Dictionaries.

And have I told you about the Doric Express yet?

Okay, this one is too deep for me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cio3RFU8nlQ

Here's the Scotspeak audio: http://www.scotspeak.co.uk

(xp) I'm glad they didn't go to Brixton... or Birmingham. Maybe those were edited out though!

Not sure how I am ever getting out of this rabbit hole.

I just got a copy of the ScotsThesaurus published by the Scottish National Dictionary Association which later was folded into Dictionary of Scots Language.

Learned a funny expression called Banff bailies.

https://occasionalscotland.blogspot.com/2012/02/skywatch-friday-banff-baillies.html

I hadn't even know there was a Banff in Scotland!

known

https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/banff_bailies

https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/elfshot

Detour into Manx up ahead!

Not sure how I am ever getting out of this rabbit hole.

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/scotland-now/distinctive-scottish-regional-accent-named-32398891

Currently watching the Wales v Finland European Championship playoff... only available in Welsh.

Sorry, Cymru v. Y Ffyndir

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.

Here’s the link for the film: https://www.filmlinc.org/films/memoirs-of-a-sinner/

Film was very trippy, as expected

Was up in Scotland last week and on the way back, the guard on the train made an announcement about carriage J - with the J pronounced the Scottish way, to rhyme with "high". I always forget that's how J is (still) pronounced in (the west of) Scotland (at least).

I was doing a quiz yesterday and the answer I had to give was the letter J and I pronounced it the Scottish way and was about get it marked wrong until I saw a brief look of panic on the (English) quiz master's face and had to explain that's how we say it up here. I am also the kind of dick who'll refer to Mr Beyonce as Jye Zed though.

Good name for Scottish rapper.

He’s the Dundee Jye, A’m the Rapper

Yeah I'd never heard of it - does 'itch' for H overlap?

Never heard of that tbh

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-51403324

Wikipedia sez:

Originally Thurso was known by the Celtic name of tarvodubron meaning "bull water" or "bull river"; similarly was tarvedunum standing for "bull fort" and the name of the town name may have its roots there. Norse influence translated its name to Thjorsá, then altered it to Thorsá, based on the deity of and translating as (the place on) Thor's River.

The local name, Thursa, derives from the Norse, as does the modern Inbhir Theòrsa. means a river mouth, and is generally found as Inver in many anglicised names