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Thursday 21 August 2008

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Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 6th February 2008

Dot Wordsworth on why Scots is no more than a dialect

To write well in one of the varieties of Scots is a splendid thing. An edition of Gavin Douglas’s early 16th-century translation of The Aeneid sits on the shelf behind me, and I suppose the best-known sample of Scots dialect poetry is the ‘Lament for the Makaris’ by Douglas’s contemporary William Dunbar, which Sir Arthur Quiller Couch put into the Oxford Book of English Verse: ‘Unto the Death gois all Estatis,/ Princis, Prelatis, and Potestatis,/ Baith rich and poor of all degree: — Timor Mortis conturbat me.’

Dunbar admired Chaucer, and both relied on vocabulary derived through French from Latin. Robert Burns nearly three centuries later wrote a different Scots principally because there was a fashion for the rustic. In the meantime, the Bible in Scotland was read and heard in the standard English dialect, and kings and big men took up standard English. Such ironing out of local dialects was going on in all parts of Britain where English was spoken. Thus Lallans or Scots came to seem as eccentric as William Barnes’s Dorset poetry, which is still requested on the BBC’s Poetry Please: 'There she zot, wi’ breast a-heaven,/ While vrom zide to zide, wi’ grieven,/ Vell her head, wi’ tears a-creepen/ Down her cheaks, in bitter weepen.’ It is no easier to comprehend than examples of modern Scot.

The triumph of the Scottish Parliament is to render publicity into Scots which retains the dull phraseology of officialese: ‘Wir premises is awready designit tae be as accessible as possible. Hooanever, gin ye are disablit and hae ony specific requirements, ye’re gey walcome tae contact us afore yer visit.’

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