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Mark says: > Lallans or Glasgow orthography is another matter--a challange to the > primacy of the south as much as a representation of dialect. Indeed, and the big battle of the Lallans transcription debate was whether and how far to use the apostrophe. Using it (it was argued) implied that the language of the poems was a deformed version of "standard English", and was notated as a transformation of that rather than a mode of speech in its own right. Tom Leonard writing later eschewed the apostrophe entirely, but MacDiarmid, equally consistently, does use it in _Sangshaw_, Penny Wheep_, and _The Drunk Man ..._ But then this language thing was as much an internal Scottish battle as externally against received standard English -- Lallans revolting against kailyard, and Glasgow writing in the sixties putting itself forward as the urban alternative to the rural of Lallans (at about the same time that the School of Scottish Studies were refusing to document urban as opposed to rural Scots in their dictionaries). Mark says in another post: "I also think Tom Leonard's transliterations of Glaswegian are brilliant, though I'm never sure whether I admire them as poetry or just as a technical tour de force." I'd share both the reservations and the admiration -- I have a sense, as Tom Leonard's work evolves, of a narrowing of the +content+ of the Glasgow language poems to either transcription of life around (a crude way to put it) or an almost obsessive concern with the linguistic nature of the poems themselves [the obvious exception would be "The Good Thief"]. It's a phenomenon there already in "Six Glasgow Poems", which move from "The Good Thief" at the beginning to "Good Style" at the end, with teenage girls, football supporters, and pub gurus in the middle. When it comes to tours de force, the best, most extended, and funniest has to be the prose piece "Honest". Much of this is pertinent to the present question (showing among other things that linguistic discussion can be howlingly funny). To quote a short bit: Yi write doon a wurd, nyi sayti yirsell, that's no thi way a say it. Nif yi tryti write it doon thi way yi say it, yi end up wi thi page covered in letters stuck thigithir, nwee dots above hof the letters, in fact, yi end up wi wanna they thingz yid needti huv took a course in phonetics ti be able ti read. But that's no the way a _think_, as if ad took a course in phonetics ... Robin