Puzzle of division between the Scottish and English language
It is a debate that has divided scholars since ... well, possibly the 7th century, when two languages with a common Germanic root — Old English — took their separate courses. One became standard English, the other developed its own vocabulary, and became Scots. Language? Dialect? Unintelligible slang? The answer is as much political as linguistic. But no one can deny the difference.
When the great Scots poets Robert Henryson and William Dunbar were writing in the 15th century, they were using words unintelligible to outsiders (“with fraward langage for to muse and steir/Our craibit goddis . . . ”)* Three centuries later, Robert Burns was drawing on this legacy, with a language only half-understood by sassenachs, otherwise known as the English (“we’ll tak a richt guid-wullie waucht” comes halfway through Auld Lang Syne — itself a challenge. )** The move to downgrade Scots and to claim that it was an inferior, even bastardised version, of English, probably began when James VI of Scotland moved south, became James I of England and forgot the Scots tongue in which he had once written poetry. He commissioned his translation of the Bible — into English. Walter Scott did his best to revive it as a robust and eloquent language, but it was not until the 1930s that the debate became political when the poet Hugh MacDiarmid proclaimed that no author could call himself Scottish unless he wrote in the “mither tongue”.
Today a politically correct Scots government dutifully translates official documents into a curious hybrid of a language. But the best of Scots survives in great words such as “bourach,” meaning a confusion, “stramash,” an uproar, “swither”, to be uncertain, “dreich”, which is what the weather has been this week, and “thrawn”, which is almost untranslatable but aptly describes the character and personality of Gordon Brown.
(* “With fractious language that provokes and stirs our ill-tempered goddess).
(** We’ll take a draught of good fellowship . . . Auld Lang Syne means literally old long since or long, long ago).
Source: The Times, January 15th 2010
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6988652.ece
