> > (It's revived under Robert Crawford and Bill Herbert, but
> > that was much
> > later.)
>
> I think Crawford would be a little surprised to be fingered in this
context,
Didn't Rob Crawford do work in Braid Scots, Peter? I'm beginning to
wonder -- don't really know his work that well. (Though my father confirmed
him.)
> but writers of his generation and younger are less bothered by the
> pin-dancing issues and are correspondingly comfortable with whichever
> variant attracts them as a craft resource.
Well, it wasn't pin-dancing in the sixties (he said, smoke coming out his
ears) when urban language poetry was under fire from *both* RSP and the
Lallans crew, and the dictionary compilers at Edinburgh were scouring the
coutryside for the last living speaker of some variant of the term "sparrow"
in Wamfry, while studiously denying that urban Scots existed.
Yesterday's wars, I suppose.
> The big shift happened in the mid 1990s when Scots was given an 'official'
> standing by being brought into the schools curriculum. A lot of people
who'd
> had their shoulders to the boulder for years found the boulder suddenly
> gone. For people constitutionally built for oppositionalism, this was
quite
> a shock.
<g>
But which Scots?
The yahoo ScotsLanguage group (current membership 4) has just restarted
after a two year hiatus, and *that* crew are even now antagonistic to urban
speech. (I should know -- I was in the original group from about the
start.)
> Pin-dancing anecdote: George Philp holding forth on the orthography of the
> oo/ou sound in Scots. Sheena Wellington intercedes: George, if I giey'a
> cloot, I expectye to mop the flair. If I giey'a clout, I expectye to be
OAN
> the flair!
Yeah, but pin-dancing again -- that would never have been transcribed that
way at the height of the Language Wars. No one *ever* used an apostrophe,
as it implied that Scots was a deformed version of English.
Well, the Lallans crowd did, but them ...
All right, all right, did a tell ye whit a did in the bore war, son?
The Stone Dormouse
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