Dear Andy,

Again, one thousand years have passed since you posted this which I have
passed in purposive idleness AKA the Tynemouth Lodge, but I know my duty
calleth. Answers interspersed below.
----- Original Message -----
From: Andrew Jackson <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2000 5:59 PM
Subject: Re: Language, ah language is barry


> Hi Roddy,
>
>
>
> I think I need more advice from Bill about the issue of Scots --
> is there a concensus as to whether Scots is a language or
> a dialect?  Forgive my ignorance on the matter . . . I've heard
> both definitions argued for over the years, but have never clarified
> it for myself.

You need _Why Scots Matters_ by J.Derrick McClure, a Saltire Pamphlet: it
cleans and polishes all such difficulties. I'm not much given to 'plucky wee
Scots language'-type arguments, but it's made here with the necessary info.
Scots contains dialects -- this in itself is a kind of definition of a
language. Then again, it's so closely related to English what's the fuss? To
my mind the only important issue here is: what can you write in it?
>
> With regard to 'Englishes' -- I think the reason I don't read Stevens
> with an American accent is because the language is recognisable,
> if not as something I would ordinarily say, then as something very
> close to it -- 'the palm at the end of the mind' becomes 'the shop
> at the end of the road'.  At increasing levels of abstractedness,
> it is still a language I would conceivably write, if not say.  Scots
> on the other hand I would neither say nor write -- I would find it
> far easier to write or speak in French, I think, for the reason
> that it appears (loaded word . . .) neutral somehow.  Scots has
> the appearance of being partisan, by comparison, or a language
> which doesn't 'travel' well.  A native tongue.
>
There are more statues of Burns worldwide than there are of Shakespeare.
Scots themselves travel well, and with them comes the cultural trappings --
if most of the people who sing 'Auld Lang Syne' do not understand the words,
nonetheless they do sing it: the Scots is present in their world as an
other, a shadowing speech. A bit like Shakespearean English, which Callista
Flockhart speaks as though singing 'Auld Lang Syne'.

> I'm wondering whether any non-Scottish writers (or Scots like
> myself who weren't raised in the country) have written poetry in
> Scots?  If it works as a language as opposed to a dialect, then
> this should be possible, in theory -- someone could learn it well
> enough to experiment with it in their own verse.

Here we're perhaps referring to that old verse/prose divide mentioned
elsewhere. A non-Scots novelist wouldn't mind if a character had to use
Scots, just as long as they got it right and it was comprehensible to their
audience. (Their publisher might have more difficulties, depending on the
current sexiness/unsexiness ratings of Scots within the Capitol.) The issue
of their own 'right' to use the words doesn't arise in the same way as it
does for the poet lumbered with the notion of lyric authenticity.

I was struck whilst watching _Chicken Run_ by a large rotten turnip...hang
on. I was struck watching _Chicken Run_ by the fact that, although all the
chickens spoke 'Northern', the only one Mel Gibson Chicken deemed
incomprehensible was the Scottish chicken (who nonetheless got to call the
others 'Hen' -- good one!). It was OK for the US press to publish glosses of
'difficult' Northern words because they'd decided to like the film. But I
can't help thinking that it helped that there was a scapechicken in the form
of Mac; and to extrapolate from that that perhaps Scots people slightly buy
into this stereotype of their language as incomprehensible to others.

>
> I would also be fascinated to know how poetry in Scots is
> received when you've read poems abroad -- what's the reaction?
> For example, I'm wondering whether it's given a noticably different
> reception by French audiences than Scandanavian, the latter
> perhaps having a closer sensibility to a northern tongue . . . ?

Read it to Spaniards, Greeks and Russians in a variety of circumstances
(simultaneous headset translations, preamble by native speaker, no help
whatsoever -- my preference). My feeling was that with a foreign language a
poetry listener is more attuned or disposed to tune into sound and rhythm --
a level on which poems ought to stand or fall in any case -- so that the
fact they were in Scots per se wasn't much of an issue in the experience,
although it obviously gave people something to ask questions about
afterwards (quite helpful, given the usual void in which the speech balloon
'Where do your poems come from?' swells and wobbles like a condom on an
exhaust pipe).
>
> Last question (I think) -- how far is it true to say that Scots is
> essentially a 'masculine' language?  I would be curious to know
> the rough percentage of women writing in Scots compared to men.
> I've always imagined it to be very gender-specific, somehow,
> if only because it's practitioners (up until very recently) have all
> been men . . . . again though, I'm coming to this subject largely in
> ignorance.

Ellie MacDonald and Sheena Blackhall come to mind as two East Coast women
who do fine work (in Dundonian and the Doric respectively). There has been a
history of women poets writing in Scots, from Lady Nairne, Jean Elliot, that
Cumbrian poet who wrote in Scots, Cumbrian and English (sorry, name's
evading me); early twentieth century figures like Violet Jacob and Marion
Angus -- and Liz Lochhead among the contemporary figures has done a lot of
work in Scots. There's an increasing number of Scots poems in Kathleen
Jamie's writing (some very fine poems in fact). So although I take your
point that Scots can _sound_ 'masculine', all rough and hairy, I'm not sure
that its percussiveness, its consonantial energy, is actually a masculine
characteristic; nor am I sure that its softnesses, the fricative
tendernesses and flow of vowels, ought to be identified as 'feminine'. I'd
confine myself to saying it can do a lot of things that stretch an ear
accustomed to standard English, and that many of these stretches are
pleasurable rather than exhausting: yoga for RP; acupuncture for Mockney.

Best,

Bill



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