Harry Josephine · @HarryGiles
18th Apr 2014 from TwitLonger
.@hannahnicklin Long answer: It's complicated! But then, with Scots, every choice and argument is intensely politicised, because as a literary language it's always been bound up with political positions and movements.
On the first: I think that all the options are potentially valid, and it depends a lot on the context. It's totally valid just to use the "English" word. English and Scots have the same roots in a different mix -- Scots has a bit less French and a lot more Norse, for example -- and they've always had a shared vocabulary, and we continue to take loan words from the same overseas languages. Scots theorists often use a five column model: (1) words which are Scots only (e.g. bairn), (2)/(4) words which have cognates in Scots and English (hame / home), (3) words which are shared (name), (5) words which are English only (child). There's a political things happening here: if Scots is a language like English is a language, then a new verb or noun enters Scots and English equally, it's not that Scots uses the English word. You could make a stronger political argument that words like "logarithm" are Scots words loaned to English.
It's also valid to invent a new word. Sometimes this can be reasonably done just be using constituent parts: in my essay, I used "sel-rebiggin" for "self-reconstruction"; I'm fairly sure I created a neologism there, but one that felt intuitive. A more controversial example is "unthirldom", which the SNP famously used to mean "independence". "Thirl" means "enslave", and has particular literary-historical connotations of English colonisation of Scotland, hence "unthirldom". I'm leary of using "unthirldom" to mean "independence", but I would use it to mean "decolonisation" in a Scottish context. But that's about context -- it's relevant to that particular situation, with the right resonances. If I were writing in Scots about decolonisation in a context of American indigenous politics I'd just use "decolonisation", because that has the right resonances there.
Inventing new words has been a big part of the Scots poetry tradition (as it is for many poetry traditions). For Scots, though, it's about a continuing creation of Scots as a language, because for many linguists something that makes a tongue a language is how different from nearby languages, so having a different-seeming vocabulary is politically important. It's something I'd do more freely in poetry where linguistic invention is part of the game; in most prose I'd be more conservative, if I'm aiming for intelligibility first. (But then are we ever, in Scots?) That said, sometimes it's a positive advantage to use a Scots neologism -- if I were writing about Brecht, "fremmitin" is way way better than "estrangement" for "verfremdung".
A last option is to extend or stretch the meaning of a nearby word, or use a nearby word instead and go with the different associations. I used "monolithic" twice in my essay; in Scots, I let it stand once and used "bou-stane" or "deep planted foundation stone" for the other time, because I decided I liked those associations in that sentence!
Onto grammar. In a way this is easier. There are a number of published grammar guides and numerous articles on the differing grammar of Scots. Here are some: http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spellin_an_grammar#Grammar Obvious example features include negation operator ordering ("Is he no?" for "Isn't he?") and extended use of the definite article ("The nou" for "Now").
But I think the picture's more complicated than it's made out to be. Folk publish Scots grammar guides as part of the mission of having Scots recognised as a language, and so they often look for ways to mark its difference. As a result, a lot (though not all) of the listed differences in Scots grammar are shared with other vernacular languages or dialects throughout Britain. The grammar of formal Standard English is very different to most people's spoken English. The reconstructed language that is contemporary Scots draws on a messy mix of literary, folk and spoken sources, meaning that its grammar draws heavily from spoken Scots grammar. If Scots were formalised in the way English has been formalised, would all its grammar differences remain? Or should one of the features of formal literary Scots be that it's closer to the spoken language?
All this means that choosing how to write means negotiating a massive pile of tensions and compromises! In the end, I go with what "feels right", which is usually an aesthetic sense. I'm helped by lacking an ideology of authenticity -- I'm not aiming for a coherent Scots. One of the things I was getting at in this essay is that I like Scots' uneasy status because it enables me to use a language that's constantly redefining its reality, and that's exciting to me.