Scots and its Literature

224 Pages·1996·23.936 MB·English

by  J. Derrick McClure

SCOTS AND ITS LITERATURE
Varieties of English Around the World
General Editor:
Manfred Görlach
Englisches Seminar
Universität zu Köln
Albertus-Magnus-Platz 1
D-50923 KÖLN
Germany
GENERAL SERIES
Volume 14
J. Derrick McClure
Scots and its Literature
SCOTS AND
ITS LITERATURE
J. DERRICK McCLURE
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McClure, J. Derrick.
Scots and its literature . J. Derrick McClure.
p. cm. - (Varieties of English around the world. General series, ISSN 0172-7362 ;
v. 14)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
1. Scots language. 2. Scottish literature—History and criticism. 3. Scotland-In literature. 4.
Scotland-Civilization. I. Title. II. Series.
PE2102.M33 1995
427'.9411-dc20 95-43671
ISBN 90 272 4872 9 (Eur.) / 1-55619-445-5 (US) (alk. paper) CIP
© Copyright 1995 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O.Box 75577 · 1070 AN Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O.Box 27519 · Philadelphia, PA 19118-0519 · USA
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Lowland Scots: an ambivalent national tongue (1984) 5
The concept of Standard Scots (1979) 20
The debate on Scots orthography (1985) 37
Scottis, Inglis, Suddroun: language labels and language attitudes (1981) 44
The Pinkerton syndrome (1985) 57
What Scots owes to Gaelic (1986) 68
Scots in dialogue: some uses and implications (1983) 86
Linguistic characterisation in Rob Roy (1983) 107
Language varieties in The Three Perils of Man (1988) 118
Scots and English in Annals of the Parish and The Provost (1979) 129
The language of The Entail (1981) 142
Language and genre in Allan Ramsay's 1721 Poems (1987) 161
Scots and its use in recent poetry (1979) 171
The synthesisers of Scots (1981) 190
Bibliography 200
Index of names 211
General index 215
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due first to Professor Manfred Görlach, who initiated the
project and helped throughout with comments and suggestions, and whose
gentle persistence played a part in its being brought to completion. I am most
grateful also to Sibylle Wosnitza for her exemplary care in editing and proof­
reading, and her help in compiling and arranging the bibliography; and to
Christoph Stephan for his practical suggestions in improving the appearance
of the text and his attention to several details during the last stages of prepara­
tion.
The articles in the collection were written over several years, and the
people who gave me the benefit of their knowledge and inspiration for each
one could not be mentioned individually. However, the presence of A. J. (Jack)
Aitken, as mentor, colleague and friend, has been both bedrock and lodestar
for my entire career as a Scots scholar. His work sets the standard for every­
thing I write.
And thanks, too, to my wife Ann, the hidden hand in this project, for her
support and her unfailing patience.
INTRODUCTION
The articles in this selection, published in various books and journals
between 1979 and 1988, are concerned with the Lowland Scots tongue; and
principally with its sociolinguistic status and its use in literature. All have been
re-scrutinised and where necessary revised for the present volume, alterations
ranging in scope from minor changes in phrasing to the addition of substantial
notes.
The first paper, "Lowland Scots: an Ambivalent National Tongue", is an
attempt to summarise in short compass the condition of Scots at the present
time, and to dispel the endemic confusion surrounding the nature and identity of
the tongue. Reference is made both to the external history of Scots and to the
characteristically diverse and contradictory attitudes towards it held at various
times and by different sections of the population; and the remarkable complex­
ity of its perceptual status is shown to be a function not only of its marked
internal diversity but of its ambiguous relationship to Standard English and of
the anomalous historical position of Scotland as a national entity.
The next two papers, "The Concept of Standard Scots" and "The Debate on
Scots Orthography", both discuss one of the central factors seen as lessening
the claim of Scots to be classed as a language': the absence of a standardised
form, and particularly of a standard spelling system. The first uses a general
consideration of the historical stages in the rise of a standard language to illu­
minate the case of Scots, which began, but did not complete, the process of
development leading to this status. A case is argued, on political as well as
social and cultural grounds, for a language planning programme for Scots, and
reference is made to an attempt at establishing a language planning committee.
(The author is of the opinion that the eventual failure of this committee to
achieve any important results does not call in question the value of the argu­
ments presented in the article.) A phoneme-based spelling system for Scots is
presented and discussed. The second article summarises the issues relating to
Scots spelling, and offers brief answers to arguments regularly advanced both
for and against the idea of a reformed orthography for the language.
A historical article follows, "Scottis, Inglis, Suddroun: Language Labels
and Language Attitudes". Here the confusion regarding the status of Scots still
current today is shown to have been equally a feature of the Renaissance and
Reformation periods. Historical references are used to demonstrate that con­
flicting opinions and assumptions on the relationship between the Germanic
speech of Scotland and that of England were endemic in the fifteenth and six­
teenth centuries, and that the ambivalent status of Scots allowed the language
to be used as a counter in religious and political controversy.
2 Scots and its Literature
"The Pinkerton Syndrome" is an attempt to identify a particular manifesta­
tion of the national confusion regarding Scots speech. In this as in other articles
in the collection, the question of the status of Scots is placed firmly in a politi­
cal context: the indissoluble relationship between the health of the language and
that of the Scottish national identity is argued, and the view expressed that
moves to encourage the language, or any other aspect of Scottish culture, in­
escapably raise the issue of Scottish political autonomy .
The next article, "What Scots Owes to Gaelic", is purely linguistic; and is
concerned with the influence on the Scots vocabulary of the other national lan­
guage of the kingdom. A large amount of material from the Scottish National
Dictionary is examined to show that the Gaelic presence in Scots is far more
extensive and more pervasive than has been generally thought.
The remaining papers all deal with Scots as used in literature. A general
article on one of the longest-established and best-developed literary functions
for Scots, fictional dialogue, demonstrates by a detailed consideration of six
novels and brief reference to several others that the purpose of writing dialogue
in Scots is by no means bound to be the straightforward one of literary verisi­
militude: the ambivalent status of Scots in relation to English gives rise to a
number of ways in which the language can be used symbolically rather than
realistically.
The unchallenged nonpareil of Scottish novelists and two of his great suc­
cessors provide material for the next four papers. Walter Scott's Rob Roy,
James Hogg's The Three Perils of Man and John Gait's Annals of the Parish,
The Provost and The Entail are examined for the particular literary effects
gained by the use of Scots. Scott in Rob Roy is shown to have achieved his
masterly characterisations by a variety of devices of which the mere fact of
using Scots is one of the least important; by contrast, Hogg's astonishing skill in
evoking a number of widely diverse forms of Scots, and of English too, is an
essential factor in the effect of riotous exuberance conveyed by the entire
novel. John Gait's use of Scots is shown to contrast strongly in his two memoir
novels, where the supposed narrators' modulations between Scots and English
are clearly revelatory of their moods and personalities, and in The Entail, a
novel of more conventional format, where different registers of Scots are used
in the author's characterisation of his protagonists and the contrasting use of
Scots and English is used symbolically to reflect the social changes which (in
historical fact) occurred during the period of the novel.
The most important general conclusion to emerge from those four articles is
that no critical point of any importance is made by remarking that a writer of
fiction uses 'Scots'. Scots as a literary language contains such a wide range of
registers, of social and geographical variants, and of degrees of 'density' (a
concept discussed in a later article though not in any of those four) that a
statement that the dialogue in a particular story is 'in Scots' does not even begin
Introduction 3
to suggest which of a potentially enormous number of literary effects the writer
could be seeking to gain.
Finally, a group of three articles focuses on Scots as a language of poetry.
The first, "Language and genre in Allan Ramsay's 1721 Poems", addresses the
familiar charge that Allan Ramsay, one of the most influential figures in Scot­
tish literature, restricted the range of Scots to less dignified literary forms. The
same point regarding the inadequacy of a blanket term 'Scots' to describe a
medium of such diversity and flexibility is used to demonstrate the inadequacy
of such a view; and though the fact is conceded that Ramsay evidently
preferred to use Scots for humorous and satirical work, doubt is cast on the
popular notion that he actually considered the language to be inadequate or
inappropriate for other purposes.
The modern poetic scene provides material for the last two papers in the
selection. A schema for distinguishing the forms of Scots used in recent poetry
is proposed in the penultimate article, with illustrations drawn from a variety of
poetic texts. Finally in "The Synthesisers of Scots" (the title is suggested by the
term 'Synthetic Scots', commonly used to describe the literary register marked
by extensive use of archaic, literary and geographically diverse words, charac­
teristic of much twentieth-century poetry), the sources for the forms which have
enriched poetic Scots are examined. The material discussed in the article is
principally drawn from the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid, Douglas Young and
Sydney Goodsir Smith; but the techniques discussed have been widely used in
Scots poetry of recent times.
Though the collection post-dates the most recent of the articles by seven
years, the issues examined are still not only relevant but under active discus­
sion. Scots as a literary language is an established field of academic research.
Readers familiar with the history and present state of other European minority
languages will notice several points of comparison: the linguistic and cultural
relationships of (to mention only a few of several possible cases) Frisian to
Dutch, Plattdeutsch to Hochdeutsch, Occitan to French and Neapolitan to
Italian furnish interesting parallels and contrasts with that of Scots to English.
In the same way, the social and educational attitudes towards Scots discussed
in these papers are reflected in those affecting English-based speech-forms of
much more recent development, such as the creoles of West Africa and the
Caribbean.
The articles are of still more immediate relevance to another issue, and one
which reflects an ongoing and dramatic change in social attitudes; namely, the
increasing attention being paid at both scholarly and popular level to the Scots
tongue and its actual, potential and desired position in the national life. The
question of whether Scots 'is' a language or a dialect is debated with wearisome
regularity in broadcasting and journalism: a fact which, though encouraging in
that it demonstrates an unfailing interest in the issue, is also depressing in that it
4 Scots and its Literature
provides a chronic distraction from the necessity of practical work to improve
its status. (Another depressing factor is the attitude invariably manifest by
certain contributors to the debate that since Scots 'is' a dialect, or if it should be
proved to 'be' one, it therefore is or would be undeserving of political or
educational support.) It would be encouraging if the new and improved level of
public awareness of and concern for Scots were part of a whole new
educational initiative which would enable the debate to be conducted at a less
naive level; but there is little evidence of this as yet. The gulf between scholarly
and popular perceptions of the case of Scots, and of language issues in general,
alluded to in several of the papers, still shows no clear signs of being bridged;
and the optimism which the unmistakable growth of interest in Scots may
rightly encourage must be tempered by the fact that the intellectual context in
which the issue should be debated is simply not present.
Finally, no apology is made for the overtly political stance taken in several
of the papers. That the language of a community is an aspect of its communal
identity and as such has an inherent political importance, that a historically- and
culturally-defined group of people should have not only a natural desire but a
natural right to preserve their distinctive culture, that a minority language in
danger of submergence by a politically and demographically more powerful one
has a moral as well as an academic case for active support: these are accepted
as elementary principles when other languages of comparable status and in
comparable circumstances to those of Scots are being discussed; and Scots can
fairly expect the same consideration. Furthermore, the language question in
Scotland is being discussed against a background of urgent debate on the future
development of the nation's constitutional status: it is not of purely academic
and cultural interest.
Several, though not all, of the articles in this book originally appeared in
publications circulating principally in Scotland. It is hoped that their re­
appearance in a Varieties of English Around the World publication will make a
modest contribution to the necessary task of bringing the Scots language, and
the social, literary and political issues surrounding it, to the attention of the
wider academic world.