This is Brilliant! Scots Wikipædia, the first encyclopædia in the Scots leid!

[Trout]

There are words in Scots which are entirely different from those in English and the movement for recognising Scots as a language has its roots in protecting vanishing elements of a culture.

I'd say it's up to the people of Scotland to protect and promote their culture however they like, and it's perhaps a bit insulting for people from other places to take the piss.

- Trout

[I, Cosh]

At risk of being shot down in knowledge-flames again, is it not maybe more of a dialect?

You could say that, but you'd be stepping onto a linguistic and semantic landmine if you did. What differentiates a "language" from a "dialect" is a subject of debate akin to asking whether John Wagner or Pat Mills has been more important to 2000AD. I would certainly agree that what you hear the average person in the street speaking is simply "just English with a heavy accent." However, Lallans Scots is something more than that, yet should still be intelligible to the average reader in the same way that Chaucer is intelligible if you put a bit of effort into it.

What does that prove? Don't know really: anyone who did French at school should be able to make sense of a restaurant menu in Italy or Spain but they're different languages.

I'd say it's up to the people of Scotland to protect and promote their culture however they like, and it's perhaps a bit insulting for people from other places to take the piss.

You could say that too, but I feel you'd be overreacting a bit. The problem I have with things like this Scots Leid wiki is that it's so obviously artificial. This is not how the vast majority of Scots use language on an everyday basis and trying to force a modern viewpoint into that kind of idiom simply grates for me.

Language changes and languages die and words alter their meanings. Is this a bad thing? In my view: no, it's natural. Certainly, a richness and diversity of vocabulary might be lost. I can think of a dozen words, off the top of my head, that my Granny would use in everday speech that many people wouldn't know. However, language is about communicating, so what use are those words if the people I want to speak to don't know what they mean?

If people want to get together and write collections of bawdy songs or manuals for gas boilers or anything else then I'm happy for them to do it in whatever language, dialect, idiom, slang, creloe, argot, cant or symbolic representation system they like. On the other hand, the quixotic quest to have Scots recognised as a language seems to me to be a waste of time on a par with middle-class couples from the West End of Glasgow sending their kids to a "Gaelic" school. (NB I know that's a completely different rant, but it really winds me up.)

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect" target="_blank">Quite an interesting field, linguistics

[Slippery PD]

If anyone is interested there is a remarkable discussion on this in Jeremy Paxman's English.  Even within England, before a financial north and south divide.  There was a linguistic divide between the two.  Thus providing the linkage between Scots and northern English Dialects.

Of course even these two diverged over a period of time.

For me having a weird accent is funny down here in Middle England.

Yer Slips

[Peter Wolf]

 
 I worked for a short while recently with some Brummies.While they were not talking in a dialect of their own , their very broad accents proved to be indecipherable at times.

 Same goes for some of those from the Merseyside area.Totally unintelligable apart from the F words.Wether there was a Dialect being used here as well i dont know as i couldnt understand a bloody word they were saying so i may not have noticed.

[Trout]

feel you'd be overreacting a bit

Aye, fair enough. On reflection, everybody's opinion is valid.

- Trout

[SamuelAWilkinson]

On reflection, everybody's opinion is valid.

I'm forced to disagree. I'd say that most people's opinions are bunkum of the highest order.

[Peter Wolf]

 That should have said that they are entitled to have that opinion although it may be wrong.


 Then if they get corrected they might learn something.