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.

In addition to Duolingo, there is also Glossika. I have thus far only dabbled in it. It’s just a big dumb sentence bank, very repetitive and tedious, but it’s apparently very effective if you keep at it. I have noticed some positive results as well if I use it in conjunction with other stuff. Free for endangered languages, which this one is.

They even have a Manx course! Although I don’t know what else you would use to study.

Manx is supposedly way more phonetic because I guess there was some kind of reform or rationalization relatively recently. This ends up looking more out there, like seeing French-looking words on subway announcements in some English-looking spelling and realizing it’s Haitian Creole.

So the Manx for I’m tired is:

Ta mee skee.

As opposed to the (now) more familiar SG:

Tha mi sgìth.

Sunset Song the film was amazing, if mostly in English. Looking forward to the book.

The Duolingo forum, which is now locked and frozen forever, contains a mixed bag of complaints along with stale, warmed-over, very low level excelsior bait joeks, but also does have some extremely useful usage explanations, usually by the same few people.

For instance, this guy posts a lot of great stuff, such as here:
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/39310770/I-am-in-Stirling-again

Ann an is the preposition meaning in. Historically it used to be just an (an Sruighlea = in Stirling, am bàta = in a boat), but that was confusing in certain contexts so people started doubling the preposition (ann an Sruighlea there, in Stirling; in in Stirling; ann am bàta there, in a boat; in in a boat) and that became the standard way of saying in (so ann an Sruighlea, ann an Glaschu in Glasgow, ann am bàta in a boat, ann am pàirc in a park).

Feel like I should just call it Gaelic as that is its preferred name in English although some people here use that word to refer to Irish.

Some visual differences between Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the accent marks go the other way (although maybe at one point they went the same way). Also there was a spelling reform in Irish to trim off some of the unpronounced consonant clusters.

Link to the Scottish Gaelic Dictionary Am Faclair Beag: https://www.faclair.com/index.aspx

Link to Ollie Benson's extensive Duolingo notes: https://olliebenson.fandom.com/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic

Useful but less helpful link to (some of the) vocabulary for the prior version of the Duolingo tree: https://duolingo.fandom.com/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic

Link to the saved tips and notes for (prior version of) the Duolingo tree: https://duome.eu/tips/en/gd

Which contains everything you ever wanted to know about guga, haggis and yes, Runrig.

Tatoeba sentences in Scottish Gaelic with all translations turned on: https://tatoeba.org/en/sentences/show_all_in/gla/und

Some people like this course:
https://speakgaelic.scot/

Which has an accompanying YouTube series
http://www.youtube.com/@SpeakGaelic
as well as a podcast.

SpeakGaelic seems really good.

The vocative case with masculine names: https://duome.eu/tips/en/gd#Names-2

I'm talking to you, Fhearghais.

Further explanation: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/36574749/Madainn-mhath-Fhearghais

This is a great list of resources!

Have just started my Duolingo journey with Scottish Gaelic inspired by this thread, having avoided both for stubbornly long. Lot of salted gannet and Irn Bru so far.

:)

Just occurred to me that IRN BRU and Runrig are near anagrams.

But what I really came to post is:

Some visual differences between Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the accent marks go the other way (although maybe at one point they went the same way). Also there was a spelling reform in Irish to trim off some of the unpronounced consonant clusters.

That being The Gaelic-English Dictionary, by Colin Mark, who also wrote Gaelic Verbs: Systemized and Simplified.

Apparently Colin B. D. Mark didn’t start learning Gaelic until he was turning forty. Sometime afterwards he wrote the verb book and then spent twenty-five odd years on the dictionary.

Guy who wrote another, century-old dictionary people still use also learned the language as an adult, Edward Dwelly.

Should have responded to your post by saying
Is math sin.

Also I did the first four sections of the first topic of SpeakGaelic and can attest that it really well-done.

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

Wow, thanks

Feel like maybe the word “Scots” should be added to the thread title as well.

Even this Mango course I can get free through the library seems to have some good intro stuff.

(xp) "An aw" as used in the famous phrase, "Aw naw, no Annoni oan an aw noo".

...and indeed, "Twa pehs an an ingin ane an aw".

So would it be correct to add “Scots an aw” to the thread title? I don’t quite get the subtleties.

Yes.

I don't really know what they're talking about in the Guardian article re the use of 'an aw'.

Even if the new thread title is incorrect:
a) we can fix it again if needed, assuming mods don’t take offense
b) we may end up learning more from the error
c) it’s all good, after all it’s not like it’s Wikipedia an awor something

One of the useful things about Scots which English no longer has is that the word 'no' exists in two different forms.

"Is there an equivalent in English?"
"Naw, there's nae equivalent in English"

Or better still..

"Naw, there's nae equivalent in English, at least I'm no sure there is".

Now I am, um, mulling over whether to add “noo” at the end as well.

Nae noos is guid noos.

I think the Guardian article is trying to say "an aw" technically can't be used the same way as "also" because it can't appear *before* the extra thing. Instead of saying it's the same as "and all", they could've used "too".

Never thought of that about "nae" as well as "naw" before. Bit like the French "aucun" or German "kein". Fun!

Kein' Angst, Baby!

Really came to say that people love love love this guy: https://gaelicwithjason.thinkific.com/

I don't think he is taking any one-on-one students anymore but you can still look at some of his materials, get a regular email and sign up for group classes.

Video courses. One of them is free.

Just found mention of this this!
https://www.taic.me.uk/feuch/index.html
Have no idea what it is, just about to click through now.

(xp) Surefire way to get a Scotsman interested.

That's sort of a test/demo version, here is the main site: https://www.taic.me.uk/

Depends on how you feel about The Witcher. (xp)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ5U15iFPM8

Or just look at some of his other videos.
http://www.youtube.com/@GaelicwithJason

This guy totally reminds me of being a high school student and sitting in an enrichment class taught by one of the former mathletes who has come back from college break, except I don't get lost so quickly.

for all the accents in Skellige there's not many (or any?) Scots ones tbf

he's right tho it's immediately piqued me interest in the video

Lol

Don't think I've linked https://learngaelic.scot/ yet. There's a ton of stuff there but it can be hard to navigate. I can never remember which sections I've visited before.

Think you have to go here to get the written materials for that free Witcher course: https://gaelicwithjason.thinkific.com/courses/take/the-witcher-1

Reminder to the thrifty Scotsmen on the borad: SpeakGaelic is also free: https://speakgaelic.scot/

Don't think I encountered it yet, but apparently Duolingo has a discussion on the Falkirk Wheel in some lessons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxxz45z4H2c

He’s nae eel-drooner

Dè an aois a tha e?

Tha mi coma.

I did watch the BBC Alba (Gaelic) Hogmanay Show - and usually do most years - because it's the only place you're guaranteed good music to see the New Year in.

did some of the Gaelic Duolingo course last year, just to get the basics. found pronouncing surprisingly easy and spelling really difficult.
(incidentally did the word grotty come the Gaidhlig word "grod" meaning rotten?)
anyway the best thing to come from this was finding the Alba kids show Geamaichen Gorach ("Silly Games"), wonderfully daft stop motion stuff.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000rdz1/geamaichean-gorach-series-2-episode-17

Tell you one thing: because the two languages in the thread title are in different families, there’s nae danger o confusing them.

Trying to focus on the Gaelic Spelling Rule to gave myself half a chance. (xp)

Give.

Tae gie masel

Hing in, zappi!

Stoap greetin, bubblie!

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

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.

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

Wiki:

Annoni is the subject of an anecdote whereby, in a match in the late 1990s where Celtic were performing poorly and Annoni had just been brought on as a substitute, a fan is reported to have exclaimed in his native Scots; "Aw naw, no Annoni oan an aw noo!" (Oh no, not Annoni on as well now!).[19]

HI DERE

https://www.highlifehighland.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Angus-Og-Gaelic-1-scaled.jpg