THE piece by the Wee Ginger Dug (June 13) touching on Ross Thomson’s attack on the Scots language was insightful but did not address one important fact: loaded perspective. The Dug wrote: “Gaelic as a language can hardly be denied” but that there was a debate as to whether “the dialects known as Scots” are a language or “a distinct set of dialects of English”.
If we compare Scottish Gaelic with Scots and English then we always throw a loaded die because Scots and English come from a common origin. However, if we reverse this and compare Scots with Scottish Gaelic and Irish – from a common origin – then Scots is the distinct language while the status of Scottish Gaelic as a dialect of Irish becomes an argument. Indeed, there are those in Ireland who claim that.
The UK regime of which Ross Thomson is a part recognised the Scots language as such when it ratified the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages on behalf of Scots in 2001. Officially Scots is a language.
Academically speaking, only by comparing English and Scots on the one hand with Irish and Scottish Gaelic on the other can we can arrive at a neutral assessment of the distinctiveness and status of both pairs free from loaded perspective.
Linda Horsburgh
Dundee
THE Wee Ginger Dug has made his usual firm defence of the Scots language in The National, and draws attention to Conservative MSP Ross Thomson's most amazing ignorance of Scotland. Firstly it shows that Mr Thomson is unaware that the Scottish Government has part-financed a new edition of the Concise Scots Dictionary, which, had he read it, would have made him understand the folly of his crass remarks. That dictionary of the Scots language has more than 40,000 head words in 850 pages, and that is the concise version.
Perhaps more worrying is that his lack of knowledge about Scots indicates a equal lack of awareness of Scottish history. He is probably a believer in the Suddron idea of Scotland's past, which is Anglo-centric. Scots developed initially from the Anglian tongue which was spoken between Forth and Humber. As the names Sussex, Wessex, Essex attest, the Saxon kingdoms were in the south of Britain, and when Northumbria became separated from them by the Danelaw which stretched between Tweed and Thames, the Kingdom of England was centred on Wessex, the first English monarch being Athelstain 929-939. This did not last long – until the French invasion in 1066.
Meanwhile, the Scots kingdom which was consolidating in the north was Gaelic-speaking, an old literary tongue. The Saxon royal court fled there after 1066, including St Margaret; a mixed blessing some say. By the time of the Wars of Independence, Scots, had become the language of government, the earliest statute being from 1397 which speaks of violent behaviour thus: "The grete and horrible destruccion hereschypis and slauchteris that ar sa commomly done throch al the kynrike."
That is a fair description of the linguistic activities of Ross Thomson and his ilk to this very day.
Iain WD Forde
Scotlandwell
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