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.

I’m sair hauden doon by the bubbly-jock.

It’s ma ain threid oniewey.

Blether tae CrackGPT

Peety me!

The words came clattering out of his mouth like chuckie stanes on a tin.

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

Peety me!

Has Boaby Gillespie posted itt yet?

Was hoping you would attend to that.

Have been asked to read the Ode to a Haggis at a Scottish poetry night next week, partly, I think, because my accent is thought to be authentic enough. Excitedly working on my Burns voice, of course nothing like my actual one, as we speak.

Also didn't realise Aonghas MacNeacail had died - quite an important figure in modern Gaelic poetry and keeping the language alive culturally. Lovely obituary here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/17/aonghas-macneacail-obituary

Great stuff all around, thanks for posting!

https://learngaelic.scot/sol/episodes/ep.jsp?prog=1&clip=2

Halò.
Ciamar a tha sibh?
Tha gu math.

Are you still doing this, verhexen?

I am! Managing about 20 minutes a day. It's quite exciting starting to hack away at a language I've always thought would be impenetrable despite the geographic proximity. I speak French and German but have only dared pick up little bits of other similar European languages so this is thrilling new territory.

First takeaways: so far the early vocab isn't as far from English/Scots as I thought, I can often find a rationale or a mnemonic for the nouns at least. Bit exhausted by all the pointing out Irn Bru and salted gannet and thanking Anndra and Ealasaid but I'm assuming that this is helping teach me something with repetition.

I haven't properly used Duolingo before and while I'm trusting the algorithm, I definitely would benefit from some instructions/explanations along the way. I tend to actually enjoy the grammar element of language learning and find the rules a fun hook that helps when confused. It feels odd to be able to form sentences now but still have to kind of guess why words add an "h" after the first letter sometimes, when you say "tapadh leat" and "tapadh leibh", etc. unless I look it up.

Might need to take up one of the resources you suggested above alongside the owl...

just realised ive been so focused on moving house i forgot abt burns night, maybe i shd celebrate tomorrow night, the o/g date (before the burns soc checked the actual parish records)

Took a little staycation from these and did a little bit of Irish since one of the apps just added it. It’s close enough to be confusing, will probably have to refocus soon.

Coffee Break Gaelic has dropped. Think I will try the podcast but don’t want to pay for the full course.

I always enjoyed this, which finds an appropriate form/dialect/register of Scots to match the demographic background of each author (that could be much more elegantly put, but you know what I mean):
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/4174Zwgyn2L.jpg

That’s amazing, thanks! And the ebook is very cheap as well.

You might also be interested in my grandfather's Lallans version of the Book of Ruth from the early 70s.

https://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/document/?documentid=691

Tintin albums in Scots:

https://tintinscots.com

Asterix albums in Scots:

http://www.mfitt.co.uk/asterix.html

The Asterix ones don't look very Scots tbh.

A friend of mine from Aberdeen (so it's Doric) just posted this after Scotland beat Norway with two goals in the closing minutes.

Hud at Halland you gypit looking monstrosity

Thinking about "an aw" . . . "country" people here in the southern U.S. often use "an' all" to finish a sentence. Surely this is a carryover from Scots, as that ethnic heritage is pretty heavy in this region.

https://www.tobarandualchais.co.uk/track/54304?l=en

Chan eil deur air an t-sùil ged a tha an cù a' rànaich.

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

I didn’t even find out how to listen to other stuff yet

So there is word “ist” in Gaelic that means “hush” or “quiet” and of course there seem to be several in Scots, “hish” and “wheesht” being two, along with their myriad variant spellings.

Haud yer wheesht.

Wiest Tom, I didna mean to vex ye.

Tam, surely?

Taffy

Sorry

Tammie

Tammie a’thing

Tammie-nid-nod

Don’t know if this has been linked yet:

https://www.scots-online.org/mobile/dictionary/read_dictionary.php?letter=N&CurPage=13

Tam o’ tae end

Nickie-tam

ding doun Tantallon

https://groups.google.com/g/soc.culture.scottish/c/89WnR8uLFQ8

https://www3.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/corpus/seanfhaclan/Gaelic_Proverbs_TD_Macdonald.doc

http://bydanfree.blogspot.com/2009/07/some-gaelic-proverbs-is-buaine-bladh-na.html?m=1

The New Testament in Scots James M mentioned is incredible.

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