Anglic Languages

Convince me that ‘Scots’ is a ‘language’ independent of English any more than Canadian or Jamaican or South African English?

The only thing that seems to set it apart is insisting on spelling it phonetically. If you did that with any other dialect it’d seem just as non-standard.

Also it should be said that the Low German language is also North Sea Germanic, just doesn't have the Anglic connection, is also going to be dead soon leaving English and Scots (quickly merging with English) the only North Sea Germanic Languages

notice that the white spots in Low German correlate fine with the Frisian locations

youtube.com/watch?v=trx1iP9n7ik

That same Psalm, in the King James Bible, is full of words nobody uses that are essentially deprecated in modern English.

What about the rest of the Netherlands? I thought Dutch was a derivation of low german?

Well it's like that now because it's pretty much extinct. The point is that it was developing independently of english for centuries, and was recognised as a distinct language similar to english by foreign diplomats, before it converged back into english.

Dutch is typically in the low franconian/istvaeonic branch. It essentially took some of the changes north germanic languages made, but not all consistently.

>Convince me that ‘Scots’ is a ‘language’ independent of English any more than Canadian or Jamaican or South African English?
I'm not sure I would even call modern Scots a language, it's been anglicised very dramatically, but the vocabulary is definitely different enough to have a much greater differentiation from standard English than other dialects, but this gets complicated because when most people think of "Scots", they're just thinking of English read in a Scottish diction. McClure (1996) suggested Scots as part of a dialect continuum, with Dense Scots on one end, and Scottish English on the other. Most people (even most Scottish people) only have exposure to Scottish English and believe that all Scots is like that.

Here's a recording of myself reading a colloquial poem written in Scots in 1975, I'd be curious as to how much of it you can understand. It isn't slang or anything, just standard Scots vocabulary, you can see how similar it is to English but I don't think you'd say it's on the same level of difference as Canadian English.

vocaroo.com/i/s1xUfgR4lp69

For comparison's sake, here's me reading a passage from a Scots book written in 1650:

vocaroo.com/i/s1xUfgR4lp69

Now, it was written by someone with sympathies to English, so there isn't much native Scots vocabulary, and I wanted to illustrate that it sounds very similar to middle English, even though it was contemporary with modern English.

This user is quite right.

>For comparison's sake, here's me reading a passage from a Scots book written in 1650:
>vocaroo.com/i/s1xUfgR4lp69
Ah, sorry, linked the poem again

Here's the passage from the book:

vocaroo.com/i/s1LZhQ2jYszW

Sure, but weren’t all English varieties diverging until recently, with the rise of mass communications?

If you want to call Scots a language (and not a vernacular dialect) then there are plenty of other English ‘languages’. As a native (Canadian) English speaker I largely can’t understand all sorts of people speaking ‘English’ in their vernacular at speed, including even people in my own country. But they wouldn’t consider themselves as speaking another language; that some do in Scotland strikes me as purely political.

p.s. I appreciate that some of the features of scots/Scottish English are very old, but Scots spread those features around the world as well, such that you’ll find these Scottish-derived features in places like the Caribbean, US South, Ottawa valley, Cape Breton, etc. You’d have to start saying those are ‘dialects of scots’.

>is also going to be dead soon
Thanks Prussia

Are the people in rural German/Dutch Friesland + Gronningen speaking actual Friesian?

So here is the same sentence written in English, Canadian English, and Scots. Obviously this is hopefully something nobody will ever say, I just want to illustrate the differences in vocab.

Standard English
>I've bought a molded pictureframe with many children in the picture. I promise you, I won't carve it and it won't become covered with my syphilitic sperm.

>Canadian English
>I've bought a molded pictureframe with many children in the picture. I promise you, I won't carve it and it won't become covered with my syphilitic sperm.

Scots
>I've coft a fossit beeldfram wae meikle bairnis in the beeld. I behecht ye, I'm no for tae fliss it an it willnae becamand drouktit wae me grangorie skeed.

Ah that explains, thanks.
Frisians in Dutch Frisia speak actual Frisian, I believe Groningers speak a low saxon dialect, but that's dying out.

It was obviously part of a continuum with standard english so it's always going to be fuzzy where it becomes seperate. But like the other user says Scots had a much greater divergence from standard english than other dialects, particularity in maintaining it's own vocabulary.

You could maybe make a case for something like broad Yorkish being it's own language, but Scots is also unlike other forms of anglic in Britain(new world dialects outside of actual creoles are basically identical compared to the varity in Britain) in that it was a literary language in an independent state and did have writing done in it and things translated to it.

I think a lot of it comes down to accent/pronunciation. There are all sorts of vowel shifts that have gone on in various English varieties that at first make things incomprehensible, until you ‘catch on’ to the regularity and suddenly become clear.

I used to live in Windsor, Ontario (across from Detroit), and they’ve got this thing going on in the US Midwest where women shift all their vowels, so ‘bus’ is ‘boss’, job is ‘jab’. At first you have no idea what they’re saying, but once you’re used to it it’s clear.

Does any living person actually talk like that? E.g. ‘meikle’ for many? Other stuff like ‘behecha’ just sounds like slang in other dialects (I assume it’s just ‘betcha’ which any English speaker anywhere understands and might say, but not in ‘formal’ speaking/writing.

On it being recognised as distinct from English by foreigners.

>His ownScots languageis as different from English as Aragonese from Castilian. The King speaks, besides, the language of the savages who live insome parts of Scotland and on the islands. It is as different from Scots asBiscayanis fromCastilian
>t, Spanish diplomat on King James IV

Obviously they notice that it's closely related and probably easy for a speaker of one to pick up the other relatively quickly. But distinct none the less

Actually at may be ‘beseach you’ (however that’s spelled).

Are you retarded? The topic of scots opened by explaining that it's not really spoken in the modern day having converged into english.

>Does any living person actually talk like that? E.g. ‘meikle’ for many
Yes, mostly by older people but it is spoken that way, particular around Fife and the Mariches.

>Other stuff like ‘behecha’ just sounds like slang in other dialects (I assume it’s just ‘betcha’ which any English speaker anywhere understands and might say, but not in ‘formal’ speaking/writing.
Behecht? It comes from the Anglo-Saxon word behatan, which is the verb "to vow", it's not etymologically related to betcha, which is just a form of "bet you".

‘Will’na’ makes infinitely more sense than ‘won’t’ ; I wonder how the latter caught on.

youtu.be/9UoJ1-ZGb1w

It’s weird/interesting how if you hear a word in isolation you don’t understand, but in context you ‘get’ the vowel shift.

Fucking rad.

Old English from beofre the Vowel Shift is remarkable similar to Old Dutch.

book -> boek
hook-> hoek
knight-> knecht

>but I don't think you'd say it's on the same level of difference as Canadian English.
Well one of the things with language is that in cities you get a lot more 'standard' pronunciation and vocabulary. Canada's a big ass place and some corners of it (especially the rural parts of the maritimes) can have some pretty indecipherable dialects like newfoundland english, which isn't just hard to understand because of the accent but also uses very different vocabulary with its own set of colloquialisms and even some grammar is different from standard english.

Dude responds partially in Dutch, partially in Frisian though.

The things about Scots as well is that it doesn't even descend from Early Modern English like every other living dialect, it has it's own lineage going back to the Northern Dialect of Old English (that never changed the /k/ to a /t͡ʃ/). The only other languages that could claim that were Yola/Forge and Barthy with Middle English but they died out.

So, if the people who migrated to Britain and formed the basis of the modern English language were from all over, from Friesland to Jutland, why did the early Frisian language's influence dominate in the language that they formed?
Did that whole area formerly speak Frisian?

Not all of it, but a large part of the coast was Frisian-speaking

So why do we call ourselves Anglo-Saxon instead of Briton-Frisian?

Yeah I'm from Mid Michigan and all the women in my family talk like that. Guys have an accent too but it's typically not as strong.

Probably because Angles and Saxons also colonised and became the dominant force?
I don't know tbqh

But Scots isn't colloquialisms, it separated from English 500 years before anyone in Canada even spoke English

As a New Englander, people on the West coast have trouble understanding if I just use a word vs a whole sentence. So this makes sense. Sorry I butcher (perfect) english

Colloquialisms are an important part of speech and one of the foundations of how the language is used in day to day situations - they both reflect and influence the vernacular. The fact that the colloquialisms are different is more just to show that the dialect was isolated from standard english for quite some time, newfoundland was a very remote settlement for hundreds of years until the 20th century.
I'm not even saying Newfoundland english is as different from standard english as Scots, just that 'Canadian english' is just as dumb a thing to say as thinking Scots is Scottish english when some Canadians speak like this: youtube.com/watch?v=12lCfrsYIfc

Do people not from the South in the US naturally understand yall'd've?

And it's typically pronounced as yallda in many areas too

That's fair

No.

Fair enough, it means you guys/all would have

Some of the regions on that map were lands of Anglos and Saxons during the era that they migrated to Europe. Not sure what time that Friesland map is from. Probably just its maximum extent in history.

Did the Angles and Saxons speak Frisian languages?

I'd understand that. I say you guys would've, but y'all'd've is better.

They spoke older versions of Anglo-Saxon (probably split at this time I'd guess), which would have fallen into the anglo-frisian family.

Frisian and Old Saxon belonged to the Ingvaeonic variety of Germanic, hence the similarities between English and Frisian. Old English is not directly descended from Frisian, they're rather cousin. "Anglo-Frisian" as a construct is not taken seriously anymore outside wikipedia

>you all would have
Reminder that Southern American English is the closest to original British English of all American dialects

>tfw the language continuum is never ever coming back

Ive heard totally incomprehensible (to me) ‘English’ on cape bretton, worse than any Newfie.

You all would have?

Nah Low-German literally comes from Saxon while Dutch comes from Frankish essentially

Despite the ‘genetic’ classification of English as a Germanic language, I would think that to a native English speaker who knew no other language, French (or another Latin language) would be much more comprehensible, since the vocabulary is so much more similar.

Groningen = Grunnegs. a low saxon dialect which was dying out but we've had a small comeback the last few years.

>Denmark
I heard somewhere that there is or was a West Germanic language in Denmark called Angledansk hat was most likely a hold over from the Angles. Might have gone extinct in the Middle Ages or something though idk

What examples are you thinking of? German is pretty easy to learn for an English speaker. Many words are similar, and the grammar isn't terribly different.

That's not the topic of discussion. People DID talk like this but now not so many, it's going the way of Gaelic

As a native english speaker who knew no other language I will have to disagree.

And Scots is far harder to promote than Gaelic is because Gaelic is standardised and has a body that governs its use, whereas Scots is a free for all. I could claim that this post I'm writing is Scots and nobody would be able to disagree with me.

It's the structure that is Germanic, many of the more frivolous words are romance, especially from the langues d'oïl. And a lot of technical terminology, like species names and medical terms, are classical, from Latin or Koine Greek.

I see anons saying that Scots has anglicised a lot since its heyday and it used to look much more like a unique language but why did this happen?

not at all. Many words in German and English are nearly identical and the sentence structure is mostly the same.

A lot of the people in Cape Breton are anglicized Acadians and mi'kmaq and what they're speaking is more like 'chiac', a mishmash pidgin of english, french and mikmaq with plenty of code switching.

Two main factors

1. From the late 16th century on, any household with over 300 Scots merks in annual income was legally expected to own at least one copy of the Bible. In the absence of any Scots translation of the Bible, most of these households relied on a version of the Geneva Bible called the Bassendyne Bible, which had a Scots preface but English text.

There was a Scots version of the New Testament published by one Murdock Nisbet around the same time but it was never widely distributed.

The lack of a Scots Bible seems to have had something of a demoralising effect on the Scottish population, whereby they came to associate their own language with vulgarity and Godlessness, and gradually abandoned it in favour of English. (not that they stopped speaking Scots at first, they avoided Scots vocabulary but still used Scots morphology and grammar, until even these were eventually phased out over the course of the 17th century)

2. James VI gaining the throne of England. Until that point, he had been a very avowed linguistic patriot, writing about how Scots was a superior language to English for both prose and poetry, was generally more pleasant to the ear and had a richer vocabulary to draw from. He financially supported Scots literature, required foreign diplomats to learn it, personally distributed a Scots newsletter on the streets of Edinburgh, required all works and laws published in Latin to also be published in Scots, and a whole host of other things.

That is, he did all that until he moved his court to England. After that, he never spoke or wrote another word of Scots in his life, had all his earlier works translated into English, and forbade any of his Scottish courtiers from writing in Scots.

>That is, he did all that until he moved his court to England. After that, he never spoke or wrote another word of Scots in his life, had all his earlier works translated into English, and forbade any of his Scottish courtiers from writing in Scots
Wait what. Why the fuck would he do that.

Why wouldn't he favour the stronger of his two kingdoms?

>Many words are similar, and the grammar isn't terribly different.

You clearly never took anything past elementary german.

The words that matter (aka Nouns, Adjectives and Verbs) are actually 50/50 between French and Germanic

So practically, it's not as Germanic as the official stats make it out to be (mainly because of the tons of irrelevant words like pronouns, prepositions...etc that are Germanic), but it's not "more French than Germanic" either

But in real life

...

This

Are you an absolute brainlet?
No one has denied the large romance vocabulary in English but there are also many cognates with Dutch and german too

Is there any place i could find and read your BA and MA ? I'd like them as source material to cite

t. Currently working on BA

Prussia spoke a Low Germanic language, you moron.

Pretty please

t.

>is also going to be dead soon
>Thanks Prussia

Unironically why did he mean by this? Is he referring to the fact that Prussia enforced literacy and standard German in the 18th century?

No they didn't.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Prussian_dialect

Berlin spoke high german

bump

Try reading Chaucer first. Baby steps.

I'm still tweaking my MA a bit but I just uploaded my BA here:

academia.edu/36040513/An_Examination_of_the_Process_by_which_Scotland_became_an_English-Speaking_Country

You have no idea how much this helps, thanks a lot user!

Scots is English but pronounced drunk
Same as Romance languages are Latin but pronounced drunk, eg slurred endings with extra vowels tacked on (Spanish & Italian), or so drunk you omit the last syllable (French)

French is absolutely retarded for me when I was in college. Between the pronunciation and sentence structure, German was MUCH easier to learn.

No problem dude, nice to see people interested in the subject matter

Actual West Frisian here. You're wrong. It's not economically feasable at all. But since we have a large amount of unique cultural aspects and of course our own language, an autonomous status would be justified if you ask me.

>Grammar not different
O boy

See pic related

French had tons of words literally spelled the same or with just one letter changing, but pronounciation is lawys completly different so it's prettty tricky

Sometimes, even the meaning is different, as retarded anglos made the meaning evolve while frogs didn't (for exemple "actual", "deceive", "intelligence"...etc)

Which is Slovak? I would assume it'd be right next to Czech.

Assuming SVK