Ulster
Scots: Realities and Myths
From: Ulster Folk Life Vol 44 1998. (Published by Ulster Folk & Transport
Museum, Cultra)
by John M. Kirk
Development of Scots in Scotland
The Scots language has its origins in the speech of the West Germanic invaders
of Britain (primarily the Angles and Saxons). The geographical dispersal
of these initial invasions as well as subsequent relocations resulted in
what are today recognised as the dialects of Old English. Already distinctive,
the northern (Northumbrian) dialect, which for a period stretched evidently
from the Humber to the Forth, came to later co-exist with the Scandinavian
tongue of subsequent invaders, the Vikings, which linguists today refer
to as Old Norse. The transfer of features from Old Norse into Northumbrian
Old English created a hybrid language of Anglo-Danish or Anglo-Scandinavian,
from which, according to Macafee (1997), Scots was to develop.
At the time of the Scottish Wars of Independence, which culminated in 1314
in the Battle of Bannockburn and the coronation of King Robert I (the Bruce),
Scots (not recognised as such by name until the late fifteenth century -
it was then called Inglis 'English') shared numerous features of accent,
vocabulary, morphology and syntax with the then variety of northern English,
itself already significantly different from the southern variety. Had politics
not intervened, however, Scots and northern English would have continued
to develop as a single continuous entity; the creation of the Scottish nation
state, with its adoption, as the national tongue, of the variety of English,
which only by the late fifteenth century was to be called Scots, forged
for Scottish speakers a new allegiance to Scotland and an impetus to assert
their own identity on the forms and ways of their speech. It is a case of
evolutionary speciation whereby dialects arise through physical separation
(Scots from northern English, earlier the Germanic tongue in Britain from
that on the continent, etc.).
As the distinguished German Professor of English Language, who has studied
varieties and dialects of the language throughout the entire English-speaking
world, Manfred Görlach (1985: 21) states: 'the older Scots language is a
standardised form of Northern M[iddle] E[nglish], i.e. regional dialect
that covered an area much larger than Scotland. Spoken dialects of the fifteenth
century were more similar N[orth] and S[outh] of the political border than
they were N[orth] and S[outh] of the Humber, and this is largely true, as
far as traditional dialects are concerned, even today.' As another German
anglicist, Dietrich Strauss (1978) observes, 'there is an amazing paradox
whereby the earliest Scottish poem, the surviving manuscript for which is
dated to 1375, John Barbour's epic poem known as The Brus, for all its manifestation
of a separate nation state and strong national sentiment, is written in
what was then called Inglis, or the language of the arch-enemy!
In due course, however, it came about that, under the political motivation
of asserting national self-identity, in a country with a king, court, parliament
and a complex, hierarchical social structure of lairdships and fiefdoms,
and where learning, scholarship and its own independent institutions particularly
of the Church and the Law were highly valued, Scots went on to develop independently
from its southern siblings. Scots forged new forms within and thereby restructured
its grammatical system; its phonological system developed autonomously and
restructured itself; new idioms ('Scotticisms') arose; and it began to borrow
words not at the time borrowed into any varieties of the then English English
(and vice versa).
Characteristic features of this autonomous Scots occurred at all levels
of structure. In orthography, <quh-> was used to represent a /hw/ sound
expressed by <wh-> in English words (e.g. quhat, quho, quhy, etc.), <-i>
was used as a digraph marker of length on vowels (ai, ei, oi, ui, etc.),
<ch> was retained as the spelling of the voiceless velar fricative (as in
loch, technical, etc.) and <sch-> for English <sh->. In morphology, <-s>
inflection on verbs could be used for all persons and number (as in the
proverb manners makes man), gerunds ending in -ing were distinguished from
verbal participles in -and, and relative pronouns could be pluralised (e.g.
quhilkis for plural 'whose'). In syntax, propositional negation was expressed
through the simple adverb nocht, shortened to no or a contracted -na form
(e.g. he cam nocht; I doubtna) without the use of periphrastic do, it had
special auxiliary verbs, including gar used as a causative semi-auxiliary:
it gars me greet.; there were special genitive relative constructions (surviving
from Old English): here's the man that his sun was killed in the war, and
there was the so-called Scottish or northern 'subject-verb concord rule'
whereby -s inflection occur with plural lexical subjects and with plural
pronominal subjects if the latter are separated from the verb. |
