EMMA Grae’s comment piece mentioned some of the problems about writing in Scots (We won’t save Scots and Gaelic if learners are slated for mistakes, Mar 18). There should be NO problems for people who were prevented from speaking Scots by well-meaning parents or teachers who, though they knew a good deal of Scots, used Scots words and phrases – but in “quotation marks” – and gave permission for reciting or quoting Burns.
My late husband was brought up not speaking Scots but studied Henryson, Dunbar and others in school as worthy subjects. As a young architect, on site he heard guid braid Scots all around him and felt he had been robbed of his own language. When he decided to see if a modern Scots novel was possible, there were two immediate problems.
The first was vocabulary, since after Scots lost its position as the “language of authority” through the movement to England of the court and the Parliament, it was much less used in writing, especially in formal prose.
Over time much of the wealth of 50,000 Scots words and phrases fell out of use and now languish in the many Scots dictionaries that record them. The job of the writer in Scots is to liberate as many of them as soon as possible. By definition this cannot be done by the native speaker of Scots, however enthusiastic.
Scots remained vigorous (despite continual assaults by a degree of linguistic imperialism) as the language of speech, poetry and song, and developed in every area into a local dialect of Scots, usually mutually understandable but with differing vocabulary, idiom and accent.
These include Lallans (Lowland); Doric (Aberdeenshire, where Scots remained in newspaper articles during the 19th century) ; Caithnessian; “Ulster” (Northern Ireland) etc and this leads to the second problem: these dialects sound different and have to be written phonetically.
The Concise Scots Dictionary lists the spelling of the seven most frequently used dialects in order of use: and if you want to write more than a few paragraphs you have to decide which spelling for which sound and be consistent until there is enough Scots written for a standardised spelling to be agreed.
My husband tried to reconstruct an authentic “guid braid” Scots and wrote more than 20 books: originals; translations of classics; “beginner’s” books like apicture dictionary, children’s stories in Scots/Gaelic/English etc. He never felt he was a Scots speaker, so others read the stories or poems for the audio CDs. I was on the first Holyrood Cross-Party Group on Scots and it is a matter of note that of all these people, passionate about the language, only Billy Kay (left) actually spoke in Scots.
The more people who try writing Scots, and showing people what it looks like (without the English “oo”s and apostrophes) the better. And anyone who thinks it matters how you say “scriever” can use the word makar – a maker. Rather like the Greek Poesis, which means making and gives us the word for poetry.
I’m sure Glaswegian counts as a dialect of Scots, perhaps with a bit more Gaelic in words or syntax, so if you want to write Scots – gaun yersel!
Susan FG Forde
Scotlandwell
READING Assa Samake-Roman’s column – intelligent and thought-provoking as always – brought to mind a television interview I watched as a teenager in the 1960s with a businessman, on the topic of ecology, then a fairly new buzzword in the popular consciousness. (Simply repeating independence as a mantra will not bring it any closer, Mar 18).
I have never forgotten what he said: “Of course we would all like to have ecology” (the strange wording is part of why I still remember it) “but first we have to make enough money to pay for it.”
This has me wondering what is “enough” money? Corporations are held to fail if they don’t post ever-increasing profits, and achieve ever-growing share prices.
It is hard to imagine what the billionaires of this world find to do with their money but part of it serves to “buy” national governments, to have them create the conditions to make more billions. It seems there is never an “enough”.
Meanwhile the great majority struggle along on stagnating wages. Economic theory would once have had it that if your potential consumers cannot afford what you provide, you are in for trouble. But in the post-Thatcher world, business is less about providing goods and services people need, and more about manipulating money to make more money.
And of course the true essentials of life – food, water, heat etc – are ripe for price-gouging, because the consumer has no choice but to pay whatever they cost. A few days ago I saw the economist Clara Mattei interviewed by Aaron Bastani of Novara Media. She pointed out that even the medieval serf fed himself by his own efforts on a plot of land available to him.
Only since the Industrial Revolution has the worker been unable to meet any of his needs without first selling his labour for money with which to buy them. In effect, we have only traded one unfreedom for another. Isn’t it obvious that whatever the wealthy think “enough” is, on a finite planet there is only so much to go round?
Robert Moffat
Penicuik
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