Ulster
Scots: Realities and Myths
From: Ulster Folk Life Vol 44 1998. (Published by Ulster Folk & Transport
Museum, Cultra)
Another feature was the HAD + have + -ed participle construction, usually
in if-clauses: if I had've known, I would've gone. In lexis, there was considerable
borrowing into Scots not shared with English (as shown by Murison (1977),
from which the following examples are taken): disjune ('breakfast'), row
('street'), spairge ('splash'), vaig ('roam'), bonallie ('send-off'), and
Bon Accord (motto of Aberdeen) from the fourteenth century, dote ('endow'),
fash ('bother'), sussy ('care, trouble' < Fr. souci), visie ('aim' < Fr.
viser), bejan or bejant ('first year student at St. Andrews University'
< Fr. bec jaune, similar to English green-horn), barley (a truce in childrens'
games (< Fr. parler), turner ('a old twopenny piece'), howtodie ('a fat
chicken for the pot' < Fr. hetoudeau), caddie ('a messenger', later 'a golfer's
attendant, and, last but not least, hogmanay - all words which entered Scots
because the Auld Alliance with France and which bypassed English.
Other borrowings exclusive to Scots were from Dutch (cuit 'ankle', coft
'bought', geck 'foolish or mocking gesture', redd 'to tidy up', and, of
course, golf), from Latin (of which there were subgroups of legal terms,
aureate terms used informal poetry, and educational terms: pandie (a stroke
from a scholmasrter's teather belt or tawse), fugie ('coward', the person
who ran away'), and dux, ('the child who is academically overall best in
the school'), and also from Scots Gaelic (including the many words characteristic
of the Scottish topography (loch, glen strath, bog, cairn, crag, and, less
specifically, airt), the natural habitat (capercailzie 'the wood grouse',
partan 'an edible crab', and ptarmigan 'the mountain grouse'), and also
instruments of Scottish culture (clarsach 'type of harp' and caber ('the
beam which is traditionally tossed'), filibeg, pibroch, sporran, usquebae
and ceilidh, which hardly need glossing here. In phonology, vowels progressed
differently in quality by merging (cf. high back vowels with high front
vowels, as in good deed), by developing independently (cf. contrasts such
as hame from home), or by not following developments in England (cf. contrasts
such as hoose from house), and these were bound up with the emergence of
a different system of vowel length from that in the South of England (characterised
by linguists as 'the Scottish Vowel Length Rule' or 'Aitken's Law', whereby
agreed has a lengthened realisation of the vowel in greed, brewed of brood,
tied of tide, etc.).
There is abundant evidence that, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
Scots differed from English by developing its own, unshared, forms and realisations
across every structural level. Many of the above features have survived
in Ulster Scots, in which there have been subsequent developments, especially
in vowel lengthening, which have spread to Ulster English in general (cf.
map 6).
In the centuries leading up 1603, but especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, Scots asserted its autonomy1 as a fully-fledged, all-purpose,
national language, reinforced by national confidence and prestige as the
sole official voice of that powerful, late medieval, nation state. Its claim
to linguistic status is justified on three grounds:
(a) because of difference of system, i.e. those internal dynamic developments
which caused its own autonomous momentum and consequent different evolution
from any variety of late fifteenth and early sixteenth century English in
England;
(b) because these developments were motivated by, and reinforced by, accompanying
national and social politics;
(c) because it performed the full range of spoken and written functions
expected of a standardised language, including legal, legislative and institutional
uses as well as literary uses (the only exception was religion, with the
absence of a Scots Bible).
A contemporary dramatic representation of this situation is to be found
in Sir David Lyndsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis, and from a twentieth-century
perspective, in Robert McLellan's comedy Jamie the Saxt. |
