Spelling Scots: The Orthography of Literary Scots, 1700-2000 [Illustrated] 0748643052, 9780748643059

Table of contents :
Title page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
The IPA Chart
1 Introduction
2 The Consonants of Older Scots
3 Older Scots Vowels
4 The Development of Modern Scots Orthography
5 From Orthoepy to Activism: Orthographic Interventions
6 Cluster Analysis and Scots Orthography
7 Applying Cluster Analysis to Scots Poetry
8 Applying Cluster Analysis to Scots Prose
9 Promoting Literacy in Scots
Appendix: Wordlists Used in Cluster Analyses
References
Index

Citation preview

Spelling ScotS the orthography of literary Scots, 1700–2000

Jennifer Bann and John corBett

Spelling Scots e The Orthography of Literary Scots, 1700–2000

e

Jennifer Bann and John Corbett

© Jennifer Bann and John Corbett, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun - Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Times by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4305 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9645 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0839 4 (epub) The right of Jennifer Bann and John Corbett to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

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Acknowledgementsiv The IPA Chartv 1. Introduction 2. The Consonants of Older Scots 3. Older Scots Vowels 4. The Development of Modern Scots Orthography 5. From Orthoepy to Activism: Orthographic Interventions 6. Cluster Analysis and Scots Orthography 7. Applying Cluster Analysis to Scots Poetry 8. Applying Cluster Analysis to Scots Prose 9. Promoting Literacy in Scots

1 16 39 59 76 97 111 127 139

Appendix: Wordlists Used in Cluster Analyses147 References152 Index159

Acknowledgements

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This volume began as part of the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing ­(1700–1945) project, which was developed by the Department of English Language at the University of Glasgow between 2007 and 2010, and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. We are grateful to our colleagues in the project team for their advice and patience, particularly Dr Wendy Anderson, Mrs Jean Anderson, Mr David Beavan, Professor Christian Kay and Professor Jeremy Smith. We are immensely grateful too for advice and detailed criticism given by long-­suffering friends and by anonymous reviewers; they have saved us from a number of errors. Those that remain are, of course, entirely our responsibility. The team at EUP has also been unfailingly supportive through the long gestation of this project. Since leaving Glasgow, John Corbett has benefited from time given by the University of Macau to make progress with this research. He was also supported by a Start-­Up Grant (SRG020-­FSH11-­JBC) that enabled him to make research trips to Glasgow. We are also, of course, indebted to our family for their continuing support and good humour, particularly Augusta Rodrigues Alves, and Gordon and Sarah Barr. The IPA Chart, , is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-­Sharealike 3.0 Unported License. Copyright © 2005 International Phonetic Association.

The IPA Chart

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e Introduction

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This book is an account of the evolution of the spelling system, or orthography, of Scots, the language of lowland Scotland. Substantial written records in Scots survive from the fourteenth century and they are evidence of a distinctive language that was used in speech and as a language of written record in the Scottish kingdom until the end of the sixteenth century; thereafter broader written use of Scots declined. Written Scots was, however, revived, largely as a medium for literature, in the eighteenth century, and it has been used by a very large number of poets, novelists and dramatists ever since this ‘vernacular revival’ occurred. It thrives as a literary medium today. The way in which Scots has been fashioned in writing, however, has always been characterised by a wide range of variation and diversity in spelling. The present volume surveys the main reasons for this variation and diversity historically, and suggests ways of understanding and exploring it with a view to encouraging literacy practices in Scots. The topic of this book is complex, and debates on Scots spelling can quickly become heated. Our hope is to synthesise and extend the considerable scholarship on Scots orthography, to set the debates about Scots spelling in a historical context, as well as to suggest a means of tracking the distribution of particular Scots spellings through a small corpus of modern literary texts, with a view to considering approaches to the teaching of literacy in Scots. Previous detailed discussions of Scots orthography (e.g. Agutter 1987, Aitken 1971, Aitken and Macafee 2002, Kniezsa 1997, Macafee and Aitken 2002, Smith 2012) have focused on the Older Scots period, up until 1700, though Jones (1995, 1997, 2010) discusses the modern period, from 1700 on, and Eagle (2014) gives a lucid summary of Modern Scots spellings and contrasts in detail different proposed spelling reforms. In many respects, the orthography of Scots and English are similar, and the present study has drawn on some detailed ­discussions of English spelling, particularly Venezky (1967, 1970, 1999). Detailed d ­ iscussions of English orthography have also been given by Scragg (1974), Salmon (1999), Upward and Davidson (2011) and, in a more popular vein, Crystal (2012).

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Spelling Scots

Sources of Information The major resource for those studying Scots orthography remains the two great dictionary projects, the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, which covers the Older Scots period, and the Scottish National Dictionary and its supplements, which cover the period from 1700 to 2005. Although the two dictionaries were informed by differing editorial principles, they were combined in the online Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL, ), completed in 2004 and upgraded in 2014. This electronic edition is the major source of information for this volume, though Chapters 6 to 8 also draw upon the online Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW, ).

Studying Orthography At the outset, it is necessary to establish what orthography is, what it does, and to introduce some key technical terms that appear throughout this volume. A naïve view of a spelling system is that it serves solely to map sounds onto written characters, or letters; this view is forcefully challenged with respect to English by Venezky (1967: 77): For centuries philologists have approached the study of English orthography with the purblind attitude that writing serves only to mirror speech, and that deviations from a perfect letter-­sound relationship are irregularities. The study of orthography, Venezky (1967, 1970, 1999: 5–10) argues, involves understanding a number of issues. The two main goals of orthography are to identify and classify the written characters used in a spelling system and to account for their combination. As Abercrombie (1949) observes, ancient accounts of Greek and Latin spelling considered litera (the letter) to have three characteristics: the figura, or written form of the letter; the potestas (‘power’ or ‘force’) that refers to possible pronunciations of the letter; and the nomen or ‘name’, by which certain letters can be identified. Thus has a written form, or figura; its potestas can be accounted for by the various ways in which is pronounced in context; and in discussions we identify the letter by its nomen, which can be represented by the phonemic symbol /i/. The distinction is still a useful way of thinking about the relationships between spellings and sounds: the relationship between figurae and their potestas remains the main issue in orthographic study. The written characters, or figurae, used in a spelling system are now usually referred to as ‘graphemes’; they are indicated by angled brackets, for example . Sometimes a combination of two or more characters maps onto a single sound, in which case we refer to them as ‘digraphs’, for example or , or ‘trigraphs’ such as . There can also be variation in the form given to a particular grapheme: different variants of the same grapheme are referred to as ‘allographs’, for example and . Although a grapheme might have a variant form, or allograph, it is the visual or graphic form of the character that ultimately determines whether or not it is a grapheme. In the history of English and Scots spelling, two allographs can become separate graphemes; this is true

Introduction

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of and which originally were allographs but are now used as separate graphemes. Chapters 2 and 3 tabulate the consonant and vowel graphemes used in Older Scots, while Chapter 4 discusses the use made of the Older Scots system by the vernacular revivalists and their successors. Venezky (1967: 77, 1999: 6–7) uses ‘graphotactics’ to refer to the study of the allowable combination of graphemes in an orthographic system, and he observes that the combination of letters is limited in standard Present-­Day English. The graphemes and seldom double in Present-­Day English spelling, for example. The graphotactic constraints on Scots differ from those of standard English; for instance , which is avoided in English, is found in the dictionary evidence in forms like makkit, ‘made’, and makkin, ‘making’, and so on. In Chapter 2 in particular, common ‘clusters’ of consonants are given that indicate common patternings of consonant graphemes in Scots.

The Challenges of a Variable Orthographic System The identification of graphemes and an account of the constraints on their combination is further complicated when dealing with an orthographic system that allows considerable variation. There are different reasons for variation in spelling. These include the relationship of the written characters to sounds that themselves vary over time, space and social community; the fact that certain characters do not themselves map onto sounds but, rather, they indicate the sounds represented by other characters; and the fact that spellings can encode not just phonemic but also grammatical and (sometimes imagined) etymological information. Venezky (1967, 1970, 1999) describes as ‘relational units’ those graphemes that map onto units of sound, or ‘phonemes’. Phonemes are indicated by slashes, e.g. represents /tʃ/ in chaft, ‘jaw’, or /x/ in licht, ‘light’. The concept of the grapheme was inspired by that of the phoneme, which is a basic unit of sound used to contrast meanings, e.g. the difference between /p/ and /b/ in pit and bit. However, as Venezky (1999: 77) observes, there are fundamental differences between phoneme and grapheme: [. . .] phonemes are language-­dependent, functionally defined units, while graphemes are not necessarily language-­dependent or functionally defined. Almost all speech communities that use the Roman alphabet have the same graphemic system, according to current definitions of graphemics; yet their phonemic systems are vastly different. Furthermore, a new grapheme can be added at will to the graphemic system, regardless of whether it contrasts functionally with existing graphemes. The Anglo-­Norman scribes reintroduced into English orthography. Yet this grapheme performed the same function as which remained in the English writing system. The parallel system does not exist on the phonemic level; in fact the opposite is true. A new phoneme comes into existence only when a new contrast appears. Venezky’s caution serves to remind us that grapheme-­phoneme mappings are arbitrary and dynamic: it is usual for more than one grapheme to map onto the same phoneme, or for one grapheme to represent several phonemes. The fact that the phonemic system changes over time also means that earlier spelling-­sound

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Spelling Scots

mappings do not correspond to later ones. This is particularly true of the vowel system, discussed in Chapter 3. Smith (2012: 35) characterises variation in Older Scots spelling as being personal, diachronic or diatopic. Some writers simply preferred particular, idiosyncratic spellings, a fact that Macafee and Aitken (2002: lxxi; cited in Smith 2012) illustrate with reference to a legal case where a set of treasonable letters were ascribed to a particular author through his alleged use of particular orthographic variants, such as a single, initial in words where others might use . An example of diachronic and diatopic change is the development of the vowel in the word stane, ‘stone’, over time (diachronic variation) and place (diatopic variation). In Early Scots, the vowel would have been close to the Old English /a:/ which was then raised to /æ:/, then /ɛ:/ and /e:/, before being shortened to /e/ (Aitken and Macafee 2002: 77–8, 152). However, in northern Scotland and on the Orkney and Shetland Islands, the vowel merged with /i/ when it preceded /n/ (Millar 2007: 35). Some of the spellings of the lexical item recorded in DSL suggest these changing pronunciations: stane, staan, steyn, stein, stean, stin. Since no single authority was available to determine a ‘correct’ variant, individual writers would have balanced their own sense of sound-­spelling relations with their awareness of orthographic convention. Venezky (1999: 7) terms ‘markers’ those graphemes that do not map onto sounds in themselves, but rather indicate the pronunciation of other sounds, e.g. at the end of a word does not usually map onto a phoneme; rather it indicates the quality of the preceding vowel; compare man and mane in standard English. Other graphemes may also be ‘silent’, often as a result of sound changes such as /v/ or /l/ deletion. The variant spellings have/hae or fault/faut suggest that for some spellings the and come to represent phonemes that were elided in later Scots speech, in much the same way as in night represents an elided sound in standard English. This kind of sound change also results in ‘reverse spellings’ whereby a silent grapheme is inserted into the written form of a word for no historical reason, but with analogy to those lexical items in which a phoneme was deleted in speech; Macafee and Aitken (2002), amongst other examples, give the spelling send for sen, ‘since’. Spellings do more than offer a written representation of sounds. Some spelling choices preserve etymological information, e.g. the grapheme was reintroduced to Scots spelling between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries to identify Latin, Greek, Hebrew or Arabic borrowings (via mediaeval Latin and/or French) although it is used for native words too. The grapheme, then, can appear in such words as paranymph, ‘bridesmaid’ (1593 < L. paranymphus, Fr. paranymphe), and phanatik, ‘frenzied’ (c. 1525 < L. fanaticus; Fr. fanatique), but also in such everyday words as the onomatopoeic clomph, clamph, clumph, ‘to walk in a dull, heavy manner’, recorded since the nineteenth century. Other spellings retain traces of the languages of origin: lenvoy, ‘envoy’, incorporates the French article into the item itself. Variant spellings of the French borrowing bureau, ‘executioner’ (< Fr. bourreau), retain the French word-­ending, while other variants domesticate the spelling as burreo, burrio. Some spelling choices encode morphological information; that is, they represent recurring grammatical forms rather than ways of pronouncing sequences of

Introduction

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letters. The morpheme -­is, which marked either the plural or the possessive form of the noun, and the past-­tense inflection -­it are two examples of morphemes that might be pronounced in different ways. The different spellings of the plural and possessive forms of queen in the DSL citations indicate that the unstressed /ɪ/ phoneme in -­is might often have been elided: To xiij ȝemen of the kingis and the queynis (1474) the king and quenes airmes (1594) at the quein’s instance (c. 1633) Similarly, the unstressed /ɪ/ might also have been deleted by some people in some contexts, e.g. tellit and tellt are recorded in DSL as variant weak forms of the simple past tense form of the verb tell. Where the full -­is/-­it forms are used in written Scots, they therefore may well be signalling the grammatical form of the word rather than representing how the writer might pronounce these words. Other factors impinge on orthography. As writing moved from manuscript to print culture, and as modes of punctuation changed, spelling conventions shifted accordingly. In Older Scots manuscripts, the grapheme known as ‘thorn’, , which survived from the runic alphabet, was represented by an open allograph that was identical in form with and a double was used where a capitalised might be used in modern manuscripts. Abbreviated forms include the use of a macron above a vowel to indicate an omitted and for with. Some examples of these usages can be seen in the opening of Smith’s (2012: 80) diplomatic edition of a legal document written in 1389 by Robert, Earl of Fife, granting the Abbey of Melrose exemption from taxation on wool. The in ffyf, ‘Fife’, probably indicates a proper noun, although ffor, ‘for’, also appears later in the text; ye, ‘the’, illustrates the open allograph of , and the italicised in hadyntoun, ‘Haddington’, indicates where a deleted has been reinstated by the editor: Robert erle of ffyf & of menteth wardane & Chambirlayn of Scotland to ye Custumers of ye grete Custome of ye burows of Edynburgh | hadyntoun and Dunbarr [. . .] As Scots became an official language of record, certain features of manuscript spelling were suppressed, and the rise of printing in the sixteenth century also gave rise to a new set of orthographic conventions, though Scots never developed a fully standardised set of forms of the type that characterise the written variety of English that developed as an official language of record. For example, as printing developed in Scotland, was replaced, sometimes by its manuscript allograph or , and eventually by the digraph . Other allographs survived in print until the end of the eighteenth century, such as the long s that appears in many eighteenth-­century volumes, particularly at the beginning or in the middle of a word, as in the following lines from the ‘Kilmarnock Edition’ of Robert Burns’s poetry: Ae Hairſt afore the Sherra-­moor, I mind’t as weel’s yeſtreen’. As Smith (2012: passim) observes, the introduction of printing to Scotland resulted in the gradual evolution of new conventions of font selection, ­punctuation and

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Spelling Scots

spelling. While this process was ongoing, different variant forms – allographs and graphemes – entered the orthographic system. Some, like the adoption of for ‘yogh’, died out quite swiftly, except in names like Culzean and Menzies, while others survived. The full development and dissemination into Scotland of a standard written variety of English eventually gave Scots writers the option of drawing on both orthographic resources to indicate the distinctive ‘Scottishness’ of their literary medium. Krapp (1926: 523) coined the term ‘eye dialect’ to refer to one means of indicating literary otherness: It consists merely in respelling familiar words to accord with the pronunciation, the pronunciation being the same, however, in the speech of the cultivated, as in the speech of the uncultivated. Thus to spell ‘is’ as ‘iz’, or ‘dear’ as ‘dere’, or ‘once’ as ‘wunce’, means nothing to the ear, though it may mean something to the eye. It is worth restating that the use of ‘eye dialect’, as Krapp describes it, did not become an issue in Scots spelling until the conventions of written standard English had been disseminated in Scotland, that is, until the eighteenth century. The recognition of eye dialect assumes a familiarity with a standard English spelling that can be implicitly contrasted with the non-­standard spelling. In a discussion of the role of eye dialect in the transcription of speech for sociolinguistic analysis, Macaulay (1991: 281) alludes to the twentieth-­century writer Tom Leonard’s use of forms like sumdy, ‘somebody’, and emdy, ‘anybody’, in an essay on his use of spelling to convey an impression of Glasgow speech: What Leonard does in a passage like this and in his poetry in general is to exploit the phonetic power of normal orthography [i.e. the orthography of written standard English] to guide the reader to an interpretation of ­nonstandard speech. Macaulay goes on to indicate that eye dialect spellings generally are unsystematic and inconsistent for the good reason that full systematicity and consistency would create too much ‘code noise’, or aberrations from understandable discourse, for the reader to process easily. For the moment, it is enough to observe that the gradual rise of literacy in standard English in Scotland changed the status of writing in Scots: writers could increasingly draw upon readers’ familiarity with two inter-­related orthographic systems in order to fashion a written medium that signalled its ‘Scottishness’.

Scots and English We conclude this chapter by presenting a few illustrative examples of Scots at different historical periods, and commenting on ways in which it was – and was not – distinct from English. As noted above, in fourteenth-­ century Scotland there was a shift away from writing only in the language of powerful elites – the French that had been the written medium of the Normanised court and the Latin of the clergy and the ­lawmakers – and poetry, treatises, laws and official records began to

Introduction

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be ­composed in the language spoken by all social classes in the lowlands of Scotland. This language, normally referred to by its users as ‘Inglis’ (McClure 1981), was distinct from the Gaelic spoken widely in the Highlands and in some western areas of Scotland, and it also differed in a number of respects from the more closely related ‘English’ that was spoken and written in the neighbouring kingdom to the south. Examples of written Scots of this early period can be seen in the Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, now transcribed, digitised and put online by the University of St Andrews. An extract from a legal document dating from 1437, in the reign of James II of Scotland, is reproduced below to illustrate what early Older Scots looks like. The document is part of the legal procedure for determining the ways in which heirs can take possession of goods and land belonging to a deceased property-­holder. A paraphrase in Present-­Day English is given after the excerpt: Item the generale consale, that is to say the clergy, barounis ande commissaris of burowis beande in this generale consale, be ane assent, nane discrepant, and weill avysit, has deliveryt and revokyt all alienatiounis, alsueill of landis and possessiounis as of movabill gudis, that war in his fadiris possessiounis, quham Gode assoilye, the tyme of his decese, gewyn and maide without the awyse and consent of the thre estatis, and has ordanyt that ane inventare be maide of all gudis in to depoise belangand to the king be thame that best knawys the sammyn gudis.1 Item the General Council, that is to say the clergy, barons and commissioners of burghs being in this General Council, by one assent, none in disagreement, and well advised, has delivered and revoked all alienations [i.e. the legal transfer of property], as well of lands and possessions as of movable goods that were in his father’s possessions, whom God absolve, [at] the time of his decease, given and made without the advice and consent of the three estates [i.e. the parliament,] and have ordained that an inventory be made of all goods in to deposit belonging to the king by those who best know the same goods. The excerpt indicates the character of Early Scots texts. The variability of the system of Scots orthography in this period is demonstrated in the alternation between in avysit/awyse, ‘advised/advice’, and in the fact that the verbal inflection that denotes the present participle has an extra final, ‘silent’ in beande, ‘being’, but not in belangand, ‘belonging’. In this period, the presence or absence of a final is relatively arbitrary, sometimes added or omitted to lengthen or shorten a manuscript line; the grapheme did not yet function as a ‘marker’, to adopt Venezky’s term (see above). The appropriation of a final to denote vowel length in English owes its later popularity to the orthographic guidance offered by Richard Mulcaster, in his volume The First Part of the Elementarie (1582) (Scragg 1974: 80). Scots, then, began to be written down for a number of purposes in the late fourteenth century, as there was a shift away from producing legal and other documents in Latin. The ways in which the graphemes Venezky describes as ‘relational units’ mapped onto the sounds of the spoken language were c­ omplicated in the early fifteenth century by an event known as the ‘Great Vowel Shift’ (GVS).

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This widespread change in the way vowels were pronounced affected the sounds of Scots and English in different ways, as we shall chart in detail in Chapter 3. Macafee and Aitken (2002) illustrate the process with the vivid ­metaphor of insect colonies moving over a mapped-­out field: Describing the phonemes of a language can be compared to describing insect colonies in a field. First we divide the field into a grid of equal squares, each with a name, such as /a, o, p, t/. If each square has one and only one insect colony, it is easy to name the colonies after the abstract grid squares. Otherwise, we need to qualify our symbols, e.g. /a/ and /a:/ (short and long vowels respectively). Often colonies are spread over two or more squares: we choose the symbols that best represent their positions. Over time, the colonies may drift, until there comes a point when we decide that a colony is largely in a different square and should be renamed. (In the historical record of a language, sound change often becomes evident precisely because writers begin to change the spellings they use.) The general outcome was that by the beginning of the sixteenth century, those relational units that represented vowels no longer necessarily represented the sounds they had mapped onto around a century before, since the vowels had ‘drifted’ into another position in the vocal space. And yet, although pronunciations had changed, the earlier spellings of Scots remained as a resource for later writers to draw upon. Modern Scots orthography – that is, spellings used by writers since 1700 – in some, but not all, respects inherits a set of historically layered writing practices from the Older Scots period (1375–1700). To illustrate the middle period of Older Scots by way of a canonical poetic text, we might look at the first three stanzas of the 1571 edition by the printer Thomas Bassandyne of Robert Henryson’s The Preiching of the Swallow (Smith 2012: 153): The hie prudence, and wirking meruelous, The profound wit off God omnipotent, Is sa perfyte, and sa Ingenious Excellent ffar all mannis Jugement. For quhy to him all thing is ay present, Richt as it is, or ony tyme sall be, Befoir the sicht of his Diuinitie. Thairfoir our Saull with Sensualitie, So fetterit is in presoun Corporall, We may not cleirlie vnderstand, nor se God, as he is, nor thingis Celestiall, Our mirk and deidlie corps Naturall, Blindis the Spirituall operatioun, Lyke as ane man wer bundin in presoun. In Metaphisik Aristotell sayis, That mannis Saull is lyke ane Bakkis Ee, Quhilk lurkis still, als lang as licht off day is,

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Introduction And in the gloming cummis furth to fle. Hir Ene are waik, the Sone scho may not se. Sa is our Saull with fantasie opprest, To knaw the thingis in nature manifest.

20

There are no surviving manuscript versions of any of Henryson’s work in his own hand – he died around the end of the previous century – but some extant editions of his poems were printed in the early sixteenth century, and other editions of his work survive from the middle of the sixteenth century and first half of the seventeenth century. Bassandyne’s edition is in Scots, and the excerpt reprinted above serves to illustrate some of the characteristics of Older Scots spelling. The orthography is a combination of different inherited systems of Old English (OE) and French, which in turn mediated the earlier orthographic systems of Latin and Greek. For example, the native OE has developed into or in words like sa, ane, lang, thairfoir; the OE consonant cluster is regularly in words like quhy, quhilk; and the OE medial is usually represented as in words like rycht, licht. Here the final in French/Latin loanwords Corporall, Celestiall and Naturall is doubled, and, as often the case in Older Scots, an extra is added to French/Latin loanwords ending in , as is evident in words such as operatioun. The in Metaphisik is borrowed from French métaphysique, which is derived from Latin metaphysica, which in turn comes from Greek μεταφυσική. Bassandyne’s later sixteenth-­ century edition of a late fifteenth-­to early sixteenth-­century poet can be compared to English texts of the sixteenth century, that is, from the Early Modern English period (late fifteenth century to late seventeenth century) that serves as a transition between Middle and Present-­Day English. The Middle English period is characterised by considerable variation in English spelling, and this tendency to variation lasted into the Early Modern period in England. There was no widespread inclination to standardise English spelling, either in manuscript or in print, before the Early Modern period; however, in the sixteenth century there appeared a number of spelling reformers in England whose work serves, at the very least, as an indicator that social pressure to standardise spelling was intensifying. Salmon (1999) offers a concise summary of the innovations suggested by reformers such as John Cheke, John Hart and Richard Mulcaster, and argues that, although the suggestions may have had limited impact, ‘it appears that, in general, printers of the later sixteenth century were making some attempts at both regularity and consistency’ (Salmon 1999: 27). The printers began in particular to adopt ways of indicating long and short vowels, the former by doubling certain vowel graphemes, like and , and the latter by doubling the succeeding consonant, e.g. heel, hell. There was also a tendency in the sixteenth century to revise the spelling of mediaeval French borrowings to indicate their Latin etymology. Scragg (1974: 54–5) notes that the Middle English forms assoil, amonest, caitif, cors and descryve were respelled in the sixteenth century as absolve, admonish, captive, corpse and describe. The state of Early Modern English spelling by the late sixteenth century can be illustrated with reference to the earliest known printing of Shakespeare’s comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1598.2 In Act IV, Scene ii, in a speech attributed to Nathaniel in the First Quarto, we find the lines:

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Spelling Scots

This is a gyft that I have simple: simple, a foolish extrauagant spirit, full of formes, figures, shapes, obiectes, Ideas, aprehentions, motions, reuolutions. These are begot in the ventricle of Memorie, nourisht in the wombe of primater, and deliuered vpon the mellowing of occasion: But the gyft is good in those whom it is acute, and I am thankfull for it. From this short extract, it can be seen that Early Modern English and Middle Scots orthography shared some of the same characteristics: the variants as in gyft, the variants as in obiectes, alternation as in extrauagant, reuolutions, deliuered, vpon, and final variants as in Memorie. The past-­tense morpheme after an unvoiced consonant can be represented by as in nourisht, and there are instances of that do not survive into Present-­Day English: formes, obiectes, wombe. There is doubling of the final consonant in thankfull. In such respects, Scots shared a set of possible orthographic realisations with writing south of the border. However, Bassandyne’s edition of Henryson also demonstrates that, in the middle to late 1500s, Scots spelling practices were still, in several respects, distinct from southern English ones. Some of the differences can be illustrated with reference to forms of the same words in Bassandyne’s edition and in Shakespeare’s First Quarto edition. With the exception of celestiall, ‘celestial’, which doubles the final as in thankfull (see above), the 1598 edition of Shakespeare e­ ffectively has Present-­Day English spellings for the following words. Henryson Shakespeare sa so ane one lang long thairfoire therefore quhy why quhilk which rycht right licht light celestiall celestiall Social and political events such as the Reformation in 1560 and the Union of the Crowns in 1603 meant that the norms governing spelling practices in Scotland shifted closer to those that were then being used south of the border, and which were well into the process of standardisation. This process was further accelerated by the events leading to the merging of the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707. The narrative of the development of spelling practices in Scotland to this point, then, looks like a narrative of progressive anglicisation. The final stages of this narrative can be illustrated by an extract from the records of the pre-­1707 Scottish parliament. The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland include the following procedure, dated 14 March 1689, for the convening of the three estates: Acts and orders of the meeting of the estats of the kingdom of Scotland holden and begun att Edinburgh, the fourteinth day of March, jM vjC eighty nyne called by circular letters from his highnes the prince of Orange under his hand

Introduction

11

and seall to the lords of the clergie and nobility, and to the sheriffe clerks for the severall shyres and to the toune clerks for the royall burghes.3 While this text is orthographically different from standard Present-­Day English, it is not particularly distinct from the variants found in the Early Modern English illustration from Shakespeare described above. For instance, the final is still doubled in seall, severall and royall in the same way that the is doubled in Shakespeare’s thankfull and celestiall; is preferred to in nyne and shyres as it was in Shakespeare’s gyft; and the final is preferred in clergie, as it was in Shakespeare’s Memorie. It is also worth considering the digraphs and that appear in fourteinth, ‘fourteenth’, and toune, ‘town’. Both digraphs enter English and Scots from the Old French orthographic system (Scragg 1974: 47, 49n): entered English in the fourteenth century for /u:/ and first represented /ɛ:/ and then /i:/. While by the seventeenth century the digraph in toune may represent a distinctively Scottish pronunciation, and the use of can be compared to that of in standard Present-­Day English, the spellings in this Scottish text are drawn largely from Early Modern English and so can be said to represent the culmination, by the end of the seventeenth century, of an extended period of anglicisation. While the anglicisation of orthographic practice in Scotland was widespread, it was not absolute. MacQueen (1957) found examples of residual Scottish forms such as spellings, particularly in certain classes of manuscript, even at the end of the seventeenth century. Aitken (1991: 33–4) observes of her findings: [An] examination of some 22 late seventeenth century printed texts establishes that by that date most, though not quite all, of these were virtually totally anglicized. However, even by the late seventeenth century anglicization in most manuscript writings was far from total. Different categories of Scotticism appear to anglicize at different rates according to the class of document. In the record literature spelling and grammar become de-­Scotticized more rapidly than word-­form, vocabulary and idiom, whereas in the private letters and memoirs it is Scottish spellings, word-­form and grammar which are most durable and vocabulary which anglicizes most. Even if residual Scots forms survived in certain genres of writing, it is still clear that the overall story of Scots spelling in the seventeenth century was to shift towards English orthographic conventions. However, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, imaginative literature in lowland Scotland underwent what has become known as a ‘vernacular revival’, that is, a renewal of interest in reading and writing in Scots. What in large part seems to have sparked the renewal of interest in composing literature in what had been, for over a century, a declining written medium was the Treaty of Union of 1707, an event that might otherwise have been expected to mark the death of written Scots.

Towards Modern Scots There were various reasons why small but powerful elites in Scotland and England desired greater political and economic union between nations that already shared

12

Spelling Scots

a single monarch. Among them was the urgent necessity to encourage the people in Scotland to accept that the Stuart dynasty, which was Scottish by descent and, at least latterly, Catholic by inclination, should be replaced. Political and economic union between Scotland and England also promised access to markets, trade, and increasingly the bureaucratic offices of Empire to entrepreneurial and ambitious Scots. Despite popular opposition, the Treaty was an attractive deal for the political and economic elites and, ratified by separate English and Scottish Acts, it duly became law in 1707. The Treaty of Union either safeguarded or did not directly affect several distinctive Scottish cultural institutions. Though law-­making powers moved from Edinburgh to Westminster, and the legislature was shared, Scots law remained separate from that of England. The Church of Scotland also remained governed by its General Assembly, which met annually and for much of the eighteenth century became one of the strongest national voices within the Scottish polity. The Presbyterian church had also overseen the growth of parish schools, mainly in the lowlands. Run by burgh councils, these local schools delivered a rudimentary education, mainly for boys, but in time the network would develop into the modern Scottish educational system. Even so, for much of the rest of the century, there was in Scotland an anxiety that part of the nation’s sovereignty had been bargained away. Almost eighty years after the Treaty, Robert Burns could still lament to a correspondent: Alas! have I often said to myself, what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from the Union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her independence, and even her very name?4 Burns’s sentiments here, as in most of his letters, are in finely wrought English, both in diction and in spelling. But many of his poems and songs, of course, shift in and out of Broad Scots, whose revival as a literary medium can be dated back to the period of the Treaty. In an important respect, Burns and his contemporaries differed from those writers who employed the Scots language between 1375 and the end of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, that relatively small proportion of the Scottish population who were literate had learned to write in an increasingly standardised variety of English, which had largely arrived at its current fixed state, after several centuries of development. Those who chose to write in Scots in the modern period – after 1700 – were therefore in a position of mediating and reconstructing different historical layers of Scots and English orthographic practices. Older printed texts and manuscripts gave some writers and editors access to Older Scots conventions; some Older Scots texts were reprinted in the eighteenth century, in more or less modernised versions. As we have seen, some seventeenth-­century Scottish texts are characterised by conventions shared with Early Modern English orthography; as standard Present-­Day English spelling was established, these earlier English spellings also became available to indicate difference that could be interpreted as ‘Scottishness’. Finally, the vernacular revivalists and their successors could adapt the conventions of standard English spellings to represent distinctive features of their own Scots pronunciation. This combination of conservative Scots, archaic English and adapted standard English characterises much modern

13

Introduction

literary ­production in Scots. The combination, however, can be quite idiosyncratic, depending on which conservative, archaic and adapted features the writer chooses to employ. We can briefly consider an example from a poetry anthology, Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-­Loom Weaver, by William Thom, published in 1844: Awa ye weary licht, Nae moon nor starnie bricht; Oh! for thy midwatch nicht An’ rayless hour; Whan I may gang alane, Unmarked by mortal een, An’ meet my bosom queen In her murky bower. I ken she’s waitin’ there — She’s faithfu’ as she’s fair — I’ll twine her raven hair Roun’ her snawie brow An’ vow by earth an’ sea Hoo dear she’s been to me, An’ thou lone Benachie Maun hear that vow.5

5

10

15

Even in this short example, we can see some of the orthographic features that are also evident in the excerpt from Henryson’s The Preiching of the Swallow, discussed above. The reflexes of Old English and can be seen in words like starnie, gang and alane and richt, bricht and nicht. However, OE has an alternative reflex in lone, which suggests some anglicisation. The Older Scots corresponds to in whan. Moreover, OE here is reflected not by or but by the standard English digraph in moon. To complicate matters, the very same ‘English’ digraph has also been used to give a ‘phonetic’ representation of the Scots pronunciation of hoo. The descriptions of the examples given so far in this chapter are far from comprehensive; the few excerpts are intended simply to give readers who may be new to this topic a brief and preliminary sense of what Older and Modern Scots literary writing looks like, and some of the issues that arise when dealing with the spellings of the older and modern period. This book sets out to investigate in some detail the ways in which canonical and non-­canonical writers of Older and Modern Scots have negotiated the orthographic resources available to them, and in particular we trace the development of Modern Scots literary orthography. The next chapter, Chapter 2, takes a much closer look at the origins of Scots orthography than has been given in this introduction and offers a description of the Older Scots consonant graphemes. It draws on other studies of English and Scots orthography (e.g. Kniezsa 1997, Scragg 1974, Upward and Davidson 2011, Venezky 1970, 1999) and also on the available dictionary evidence to outline the development of Older Scots consonant patterns. Chapter 3 then addresses one of the more complex issues in the book, namely the mapping of spellings onto the changing Older Scots vowels, drawing largely on the authoritative account given

14

Spelling Scots

by Aitken and Macafee (2002). Chapters 2 and 3 are illustrated by examples that are taken from the dictionary record and from diplomatic editions of Older Scots texts, e.g. Smith (2012). Together they provide a guide to the Older Scots ­orthographic system that is still one of the pillars of Modern Scots spelling. The remainder of the book explains the methodology to be adopted for the investigation of Modern Scots spelling and describes the outcome of some case studies. Chapter 4 provides more detail than has been given in this introduction about the historical and cultural background to the development of Scots literary orthography after the Treaty of Union of 1707. The chapter also discusses the challenges attendant on the analysis of literary texts, texts from different dialect areas and periods, and texts written in Scots for readerships whose members were schooled and literate in English. A feature of writing in Scots in the modern period is an increasing self-­consciousness about the political and linguistic issues that attend the use of Scots in a context in which written English was the ‘standard’ medium prescribed in schools. The following chapter, Chapter 5, surveys commentators on the Scots language from the eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing partly on literature by Jones (1995, 1997, 2010) and partly on primary source material, the chapter focuses on attempts at spelling harmonisation as a basis for language planning – and discusses why these attempts have been unsuccessful. The primary source material is largely based on a series of orthoepist texts digitised for the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing. Chapter 6 is the first of three chapters that use statistical methods to trace the degree of similarity and difference between a small selection of writers in Scots in the modern period. This chapter outlines the principles of the approach, and the following chapter – Chapter 7 – applies cluster analysis to a subcorpus of poetry in Scots to identify likeness and difference in orthographic practices in the work in Scots of poets such as Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns, James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson and Hugh MacDiarmid. Most of these writers have texts represented in the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, though for copyright reasons one of the writers (MacDiarmid) is not represented in this online corpus. Chapter 8 complements the previous chapter by applying cluster analysis to a subcorpus of fictional works, including samples from writers as diverse as William Alexander, John Wilson, James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson and J. J. Bell. The cluster analyses are proposed as a means of comparing the orthographic and lexical characteristics of different texts in Modern Scots, and they also offer a potential method for identifying a ‘literacy corpus’ of texts that could be used to promote the writing of Scots in schools today. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the teaching of Scots in schools. Chapter 9, then, offers a brief discussion of the relevance of this volume to the teaching of literacy in Scots in the twenty-­first century.

Notes 1. The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, ed. K. M. Brown et al. (St Andrews, 2007–14), , JamII/1 (last accessed 22 February 2014).

Introduction

15

2. A digital facsimile of this edition is available at (last accessed 10 February 2015). 3. The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, ed. K. M. Brown et al. (St Andrews, 2007–14), , 1689/3/1 (last accessed 22 February 2014). 4. Letter to Mrs Dunlop, 10 April 1790. See J. Currie (ed.) (1824), The Works of Robert Burns, London: Thomas Tegg, pp. 309–10. 5. Available at (last accessed 10 February 2015).

2

e The Consonants of Older Scots

e

This chapter begins a more detailed description of the developments outlined in brief in the introduction. In particular, it details the development of the consonant graphemes that were used in the Older Scots period (1375–1700). The discussion in this chapter considers Older Scots phonology insofar as it impacts on spelling; a much more detailed discussion of the phonological system of Older Scots can be found in Johnston (1997a).

Older Scots Literacy: Historical Background Older Scots shares its earliest history with that of Old and Middle English. In mediaeval Europe, the main written language of the Christian clergy and educated laity was Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. Indeed, the long reign and intellectual prestige of Latin extended well beyond the Middle Ages, dating at least from the composition of the Vulgate Bible in Latin by St Jerome in the fourth century, to the first half of the eighteenth century, when the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Francis Hutcheson broke with tradition and began delivering his lectures at Glasgow University in English. The development of writing systems for the vernacular, or ‘non-­Latin’, languages of Europe was, therefore, based on the written language of the Romans. In particular, the twenty-­three-­character Roman alphabet (ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTUXYZ) replaced other writing systems that were locally in use, like runes, a twenty-­four-­ character Germanic script, whose traces are found in a number of manuscripts and carved inscriptions, such as the Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire. Early scribes were faced with the challenge of adapting the limited Roman alphabet of twenty-­three symbols to the various sounds they encountered in varieties of Old English, and so they introduced different characters to serve their immediate purposes. The characters , ‘thorn’, and , ‘eth’, were used to represent the sounds later represented by the digraph , while , ‘wynn’, was used to represent the sound later represented by , and , ‘yogh’, was used for the consonant sound later represented by . Some of these Old English characters survived into Older Scots, as we shall shortly see when we discuss the list of characters that forms the ‘graphemic inventory’ of Older Scots.



The Consonants of Older Scots

17

Scribes came to England and lowland Scotland from France after the Norman Conquest in 1066, to act as clerks in the administrative apparatus of church and feudal government. While the Norman Conquest did not directly affect Scotland, which was an independent kingdom, it had a profound impact on the social organisation and language of the Scottish lowlands. The Scottish monarchy adopted many of the structures of Norman feudal societies – for example, setting up royal burghs with trading privileges – and established religious foundations affiliated to French monasteries and abbeys. Norman-­French barons were granted lands in Scotland and they brought with them into Scotland a large number of labourers who spoke Northumbrian Old English, which became the basis of Older Scots. The great majority of the population, of course, was not literate. For many centuries after the establishment of Christianity in Scotland, literate Scots remained an elite cadre, reading and writing Latin. Grammar schools were established to teach Latin, mainly to young men destined for the priesthood, or later for public service, though some noblemen were also taught to read and write. These grammar schools were often attached to religious foundations, many of which, in turn, had scriptoria, rooms where important manuscripts were composed and copied. A number of great abbeys and monasteries had been established in lowland Scotland in the twelfth century by David I; these promoted Latin and, later, vernacular literacy in Scotland. By the late fourteenth century, private charters and literary works were being composed in vernacular Scots, as well as in Latin. The reasons for this shift in the language of record and leisure are various, among them being a demand for direct access to the law, without necessarily having to overcome the barrier of knowing Latin to gain that access. With an increase in general literacy in Scots as well as Latin, a limited readership was created for works of literature as well as legal and religious texts. The earliest surviving substantial literary text in Scots, John Barbour’s Brus, dates from the late fourteenth century, though the earliest surviving manuscripts of this poem are of a later date. Then, in 1424, the Acts of the Parliament of Scotland began to be recorded in Scots. Even so, Latin remained a strong influence on vernacular literacy. To take two examples of writers who mediated both vernacular and Latin literacy, the late ­fifteenth-­century poet Robert Henryson, mentioned in Chapter 1, is associated with the grammar school attached to Dunfermline Abbey; he is also assumed to have had legal duties as a notary public, making authorised copies of legal documents. His vernacular poetry in Scots may in part have had a pedagogical function in promoting vernacular literacy alongside Latin; certainly the prologue to his Morall Fabillis of Aesop the Phrygian stresses the necessity of combining education with pleasure. Secondly, in prefatory material to his later vernacular translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, another poet, Bishop Gavin Douglas, expressed the hope that the Scots version would be of benefit to the masteris of grammar sculys, ‘masters of grammar schools’, when they introduced the Latin author and his work to the children in their charge. The court and the great families of Scotland also provided focal points for the collection, transmission and preservation of literary works in Scots, as Sally Mapstone (2007) has argued. She points to the interconnections between the court, nobility and a widening lay readership, male and female, throughout the

18

Spelling Scots

sixteenth century in Scotland. One of the outcomes of noble patronage is that Older Scots literary texts survive largely in manuscript collections made by a few prominent families, such as the Bannatyne Manuscript (c. 1565–8), and the Maitland Folio (c. 1570) and Quarto (c. 1585). The works they contain may have had an audience beyond the immediate family; while he translated The Aeneid at the request of another nobleman, Sir Henry Sinclair, Gavin Douglas, as noted above, envisaged its use by schoolmasters, and also envisaged it being read aloud to the unlettered. The fact that vernacular literacy was seen, for a long period of time, as secondary to literacy in Latin had a number of consequences. One major consequence was that there was little uniformity in Older Scots spelling, a point made forcefully in Aitken’s (1971) paper on variation and variety in written Middle Scots. While acknowledging a putative ‘standard’ that constrained the degree of variation found in much official writing (e.g. the Acts of the Scottish Parliament) and ‘the major literary texts in prose and verse’ (p. 198), Aitken demonstrates the considerable variation that characterises the production of local clerks, and private letters and accounts. Occasional irregular spellings also slipped into ‘prestige’ texts. Some of the variation in spelling practice may be explained by divergent practices of teachers in the grammar schools: A priori it seems likely that pupils would share at least some of the preferences of their teachers, especially, no doubt, writing-­teachers, so that ‘schools’ of spelling-­tradition would exist, each of these sharing a common ‘dialect’ or ‘style’. (p. 186) In addition, as pronunciation changed over the centuries, writers took different decisions about when and how to adapt available orthographic variants to correspond with the local phonemic system. In other words, the learned principles that mapped the relational units (graphemes) onto particular sounds (phonemes) would have varied from group to group and even from individual to individual; and there were other considerations – such as etymology and morphology. As Aitken (1971) observes: It will further be assumed that individual writers of that language [i.e. Older Scots in its different stages of development] could, if they so chose, and in practice often did, evolve their own spellings or establish spelling habits according to the ‘rules’ of equivalence so constituted. It will however appear that some writers applied these phonemic principles more freely than others; and [. . .] this ‘phonetic’ motivation was by no means the only one which controlled Middle Scots spelling practice. (p. 187) To summarise thus far, then, the development of vernacular literacy in Scots took place in the shadow of literacy in a prestigious, post-­imperial, European lingua franca, Latin. Scots inherited an adapted version of the Roman alphabet, and drew upon, supplemented and adapted its resources to develop spellings to express terms that derived from a diverse word-­stock. Scots vocabulary has its earliest origins in northern Old English and Old Norse. Some Latin words were borrowed in the Old English period, frequently owing to the influence of Christianity. Then, after the Norman Conquest of



The Consonants of Older Scots

19

England, a wave of French expressions was absorbed into Scots, in response to a social shift towards the feudal administrative system that was adopted by the Scottish monarchy, at least in the lowlands. From the Highlands, some Gaelic terms found their way into written Scots, though in everyday life more Gaelic terms probably played a part in the spoken interactions between Gael and lowlander. And added to this mixture, over time, were words that travelled to Scotland with Dutch and other immigrants. Some of these words continued to show traces of their origins in their spellings, for example the Scots term lenvoy, from the French l’envoy, meaning ‘the concluding part, dedication or postscript of a poem’. The Scots form assimilates the French article. Alternatively, other words, like ploid, ‘to drive with blows’, domesticate the spelling of the source term, here French plauder, ‘to cudgel, use roughly’. With this historical context in mind, we now turn to the description of the orthographic system of Older Scots. In our description, we draw substantially on earlier research, particularly Agutter (1987), Kniezsa (1997), Aitken (1971), Aitken and Macafee (2002) and Macafee and Aitken (2002). The present chapter summarises the main linguistic features that later writers in Modern Scots then draw upon when they come to revive the written language as a literary medium. The rest of this chapter charts the Older Scots variants that may act as a baseline of established Scots consonant spellings.

Establishing a Graphemic Inventory for Older Scots Written Scots is basically alphabetic in nature. As outlined in Chapter 1, the sounds of speech (phonemes) are mapped onto a system of written characters, or relational units. The characters are called ‘graphemes’: they can be single characters, like , and , or combinations, such as the digraphs , and . Digraphs are two characters that represent a single sound, like for /θ/, or for long /o:/ and for the French sound /n’/, as it is found in minȝon, from French mignon, ‘minion’. Other ways of visually representing speech are possible. Written Chinese, for example, is ‘logographic’, in that characters represent entire words. This means that Cantonese and Putonghua (Mandarin), two different spoken languages, can share a largely identical writing system. Given the conditions in which Middle English and Older Scots literacy developed, the relationship of alphabetic characters to spoken sounds is complex. Because pronunciation changes over space and time, a direct and stable correspondence of written characters to phonemes is unsustainable. And since the twenty-­ three-­ character Latin alphabet was deployed to express the forty or so sounds of Older Scots, various adaptations and changes were made by different scribes in different places, at different times. As in English, characters from other alphabets were added, and punctuation and other marks were used to resolve ambiguity. For example, the dot that tops originated in order to distinguish this letter from others, like when these were handwritten in a potentially confusing sequence, e.g. . When two or three s were used in a Roman numeral, the last was given a ‘tail’, , which over time developed into a separate character . The apostrophe began being used in France in the sixteenth century to indicate missing vowels; it

20

Spelling Scots

spread to England and, later, to Scotland, where it (increasingly controversially) ­represented missing characters. Given that Older Scots orthography developed in the context of variation and instability, it can be argued that the written system of language should be studied on its own terms, without reference to spoken realisations, which vary considerably (see McIntosh 1956). After all, in most British accents of Present-­ Day English, the spoken form of car lacks the final /r/ that is realised in rhotic accents such as Scots, and the grapheme is used in plural nouns regardless of whether it maps onto an /s/ phoneme, as in cats, or a /z/ phoneme, as in cows. As we have noted, some orthographic features need to be explained with reference to phenomena other than pronunciation; however, a major motivation in alphabetic writing is to represent, however indirectly, the spoken word. Some orthographic variation, though by no means all, can be explained with reference to changes in pronunciation, particularly over time. From a range of prose and poetic texts, from the lexical evidence gathered for the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, and drawing on the extensive scholarship cited earlier in this chapter, the following taxonomy of Older Scots spellings has been devised. Vowels are distinguished from consonants. Phonetically, vowels are those phonemes that are articulated without any obstruction in the mouth: air passes through the vocal tract, which changes shape, aided by tongue and lips, to distinguish between, say, the final sounds in tree and true. Consonants normally involve some obstruction to the passage of air through the vocal tract: it can be caused by the tongue-­tip stopping the airflow at the back of the teeth, as in /t/, or by the tongue-­tip tapping or rapping the little ridge behind the teeth, as in a tapped or rolled /r/. Sometimes the obstruction is further back in the vocal tract, as when the back of the tongue stops the airflow at the velum, in /k/ or /g/, or allows some air to pass through with a fricative sound, as in /x/, the final sound in Scots pronunciations of loch. As well as being articulated differently, vowels and consonants perform different functions in the structure of a syllable. In brief, most syllables have a vowel at their core; sometimes the vowel is all there is in the syllable, as in ah, oh. But one or more consonants can be placed before and/or after a vowel, to give monosyllables like brew, orb, brig. There are constraints on how vowels and consonants are combined and represented: for example, the sequence *grbbew is not possible in either Scots or English (conventionally, an asterisk preceding a word or phrase indicates that it is not well-­formed). There are also obvious exceptions to the account sketched out here: some consonants are known as ‘semi-­vowels’ since they are articulated without any obstruction to the airflow, like other vowels, but they perform the role of consonants in syllables. Semi-­vowels are /w/ and /j/ at the beginning of words like wa, ‘lament’, and ȝelp, ‘yelp’. These are generally classed with consonants. The inventory below largely draws its examples from the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), which is available online as part of the Dictionary of the Scots Language. The inventory includes graphemes, digraphs and trigraphs, that is, single, double and triple letters that functioned as units that correspond to a single phoneme. Thus, in Older Scots, normally corresponded to /k/, to /x/ and to /ʃ/. Common consonant clusters are



21

The Consonants of Older Scots

also recorded in each section: except where noted, these are common sequences of consonants, with no intervening vowel, that are found within a single syllable, thus is an initial consonant cluster in flisk, but, since it crosses syllable and morphemic boundaries, is not usually considered to be a consonant cluster in words such as futman, ‘footman’.

The Older Scots Consonant Graphemes The principal Older Scots consonant graphemes, and their associated digraphs, trigraphs and in one case quadgraph, are shown below in Table 2.1. They are then discussed in alphabetical order, by grapheme. In this, the approach adopted is similar to that of Venezky (1999) for Present-­Day American English.

The letter regularly corresponds to /b/ in words like bag, ‘money bag’, aburde, ‘aboard’, and scab. It is also found in a group of initial and final clusters, commonly initial and final : bramskin, ‘leather apron’, blate, ‘timid’, disturb. It is often doubled, as in babbie, ‘baby’ (see below for a more detailed discussion of doubled consonants). TABLE 2.1:  Older Scots consonant graphs

Grapheme b c d f g ȝ, i h j k l m n p q r s t þ v, u, w x y, i z

Digraph(s)

Trigraph

ch dg

cht

Quadgraph

gh, gn ȝh, ih kn lȝ, ll nȝ, ng ph qu, qw rh sh th, ht wh yh, ih

ile, ill

ilȝe

nye, nȝe

nȝȝe, nȝhe, ngne

quh, qwh sch tht, tch

tsch

22

Spelling Scots

In certain circumstances the was probably not pronounced in Older Scots: (i) In OE some words like lamb and dumb end in an cluster in which both graphemes were pronounced. However, during the OE period, in part because both corresponding phonemes were bilabial, the /b/ was elided in speech, giving later variants in Middle English and Older Scots such as dum(e), dombe and lam(me), lambe. By analogy with these variants, a was sometimes added to words that ended with where there is no etymological justification. For example, the character is not present in the OE word þuma, ‘thumb’. The practice of adding a after a final gives such later Older Scots variants as thoum, thoumb. The Older Scots form of ‘crumb’ is, however, usually crum(m) or crom(m) (from Old English cruma). (ii) Before another bilabial plosive, the /b/ can be assimilated, e.g. the Aberdeen University expression for vice-­ principal, sub-­principall, which has the occasional variant supprincipal. (iii) By the sixteenth century, in Scotland and England, there was a resurgence of the use of etymological spellings for words of Romance origin, such as ‘debt’, which derives from Latin debitum. There are therefore Older Scots variants that omit or include the ‘silent’ character in words such as dett, debt(t), suttiltie, subtiltie, ‘subtlety’, and so on.

In Old English, the forms and were allographs, that is, they were variant forms of the same grapheme. The allograph was seldom used by Anglo-­ Saxon scribes; however, in the Middle English period, it began to be used as a grapheme in its own right, always corresponding to the phoneme /k/ (see below). When the grapheme corresponded to the sound /k/, in the Older Scots period, there was still considerable variation in the use of and , e.g. scollar, skeular, ‘carouser’. The combination had developed between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries in English and Scots, in preference to the earlier (see Scragg 1974: 50n). It is relatively uncommon in English and Scots, appearing only after vowels, as in trick, ‘smart’, in some word-­endings, like heretick, ‘heretic’, and in proper names, like McKendrick. It also normally corresponds to /k/. The grapheme occurred mostly in initial and medial positions, as in caber, ‘a pole or spar’, and bocage, ‘a grove’; it was more rarely used in final positions by itself. When it did appear by itself in final positions, it was often part of the ending , which in the Older Scots period alternated with the more common or , thus music, musik, musick and topic, topick, ‘an external medicine applied locally’. In English, by 1700, the final was normally dropped from endings (Scragg 1974: 80). In clusters, was found initially in , as in clattie, ‘dirty’, and creishie, ‘greasy’; and medially and finally in , as in activity, ‘agility’, pact, ‘pack, bundle’, and sect, ‘group, following’. Old English corresponded regularly to the phoneme /k/; however,



The Consonants of Older Scots

23

e­ specially in words borrowed from French, the grapheme usually corresponded to /s/ when it appeared before , thus certane, ‘certain’, cirurgyen, ‘surgeon’, and cyndire, ‘a small herd of wild swine’. There are exceptions when the word does not derive from French, e.g. cyming/kimmond, ‘a small tub’. The consonant /s/ changed to /ʃ/ in some phonetic contexts, including before a high front vowel, or a sequence of vowels, as in ocean, socialtie, ‘sociality’, and this may already have been the case in Older Scots.

There were two main uses of the digraph in Older Scots. First, the digraph was imported from French orthography to replace when it was palatalised as /tʃ/. The use of this grapheme relates to this phoneme in words of French origin, such as chawmer, chalmer, ‘room’, as well as in words derived from OE, such as chese, ‘choose’. The digraph is found initially, medially and finally in words such as cheitar, ‘cheat’, lecherus, ‘lecherous’, and belch, ‘belly’. In some clusters, such as in words derived from Latin or Greek, the digraph corresponds to /k/, as in chrisme, ‘oil mixed with balm’, patriarch and Christianitie, ‘Christianity’ (in Older Scots, though, ‘Christmas’ is recorded as Crismess and Crystmaesse). Unusually, it also corresponds to /k/ in the word stomach, ‘stomach’, often spelled stomak in Older Scots. The second use of the grapheme in Older Scots was to represent what in Old English had been in the cluster and word-­final : licht, ‘light’, throuch, ‘through’. In these cases the grapheme represents the velar fricative phoneme /x/. This sound is also found in numerous words derived from Gaelic, e.g. colpindach, ‘heifer’, loch, ‘lake’, and trachlit, ‘tired out’. Rarely, the grapheme was inserted in words with no etymological justification, by analogy with other words, thus the early and later forms of ‘delight’: delyt, delicht. A later, anglicised variant of with this potestas was (see below).

This grapheme occurred in initial, medial and final positions in words, representing /d/: dure, ‘door’, bidand, ‘lasting’, sid(e), ‘side’. It was found in initial clusters and in final clusters and . Examples include drokkit, ‘rendered inactive’, dwam, ‘faint, swoon’, bridth/breadth, cald/cauld, ‘cold’, stound, ‘moment’, brerd/breird, ‘surface of the earth’. The grapheme could be doubled medially and finally, e.g. edder, ‘adder’, sledd, ‘sledge’. In final positions the /d/ of /rd/ might have been elided or devoiced, giving variants like upward/upwart, standar/standart/standard. Note that the regular English past tense and participle endings of verbs end in -­ed, pronounced /d/, /t/ or /ɪd/ depending on the phonetic environment, as in raised, raced and roasted. The Older Scots regular verbs usually ended in -­it, usually pronounced /ɪt/ or /t/ as in usit, ‘used’, los(s)it/lost, ‘lost’, and clog(g)it, ‘clogged’ (see Macafee 1992). However, if a text were anglicised, it might be that an -­ed spelling corresponded to an /ɪt/ pronunciation, as suggested by the variants listed in DOST for ­‘counterfeited’: countirfuttit and counterfuted.

24

Spelling Scots

The digraph in English replaced the OE digraph in medial or final position for words pronounced /dʒ/, as in Middle English hegg, ‘hedge’. In Older Scots, it was spelled hege or hedge. Other words with this spelling include eage/edge and wege/wedge. The word brig, ‘bridge’, was pronounced with a /g/, indicating an Old Norse etymology. The digraph was also used as a variant in French borrowings ending in , as in portage/portadge, ‘the act of carrying or transporting goods’. It forms no clusters and is regularly pronounced as /dʒ/.

The grapheme occurred initially, medially and finally in Older Scots: fabill, ‘fable’, hafar, haiffar, ‘owner’, and haf, haiff, ‘have’. The grapheme corresponded to both /f/ and /v/ in Old English, and so spellings like haf, ‘have’, and gif, ‘give’, reflect the OE spellings. When the /v/ was intervocalic, the grapheme alternated with as in giffyn, giwyn, ‘given’, drif, driff, dryue, dryve, etc., ‘drive’, and drivin, drevyne, etc., ‘driven’. When corresponding to /f/, in some cases the grapheme alternated with (see below). Clusters with included initial as in fra, ‘from’, and flekkit, ‘spotted’, and final as in delf, delff, ‘hole’, skarf, ‘blindfold with a scarf’, and loft, lofft, ‘sky’. In disyllabic words and word-­finally, the was often doubled, as in woffin, ‘woven’, and strif(e), striff(e), ‘strife’. Kniezsa (1997: 38) notes that doubling also occurred with clusters, as in affter, ‘after’. Occasionally an initial double was used; for example, we find the forms , and in the sixteenth-­century Bassandyne print of Robert Henryson’s The Preiching of the Swallow, e.g. in the line ‘Excellent ffar all mannis Jugement’ (Smith 2012: 152–3). Initial double normally represents capital .

In Old English, and , ‘yogh’, were allographs, corresponding to four or possibly more fricative and plosive phonemes, as well as the semi-­vowel /j/ (Kniezsa 1997: 39; Venezky 1999: 152). In the Middle English and Older Scots periods, was used to indicate the plosive /g/ sound as in brig, ‘bridge’, and the fricative /ʒ/ or affricate /dʒ/ in French loanwords like corage, ‘courage’, while yogh was used for the semi-­vowel (see below). For the pronunciation in clusters, see the description below of and . The grapheme was used initially, medially and finally in words like gedling, ‘fellow’, congele, ‘freeze’, braig, ‘a large knife’. Some initial occurrences are in forms where the first morpheme has been reduced, e.g. gyne is a variant of adjune, ‘elect to office’, and gynour is a variant of enginour, ‘a (military) engineer’. In medial and final position, was often doubled, as in biggit, ‘built’, and in the variants of ‘bag’, bagg, bagge. The grapheme clusters initially in combinations like and , e.g.



The Consonants of Older Scots

25

glowr, ‘stare with wide-­open eyes’, and grandgorie, ‘syphilitic’. Final clusters include , as in draigle, ‘bedraggle, to go draggingly’. It also occurs in the digraph , which is discussed in greater detail below. The cluster occurs in words like finger where it corresponded to /ŋ/ or /ŋɡ/ (compare strang, ‘strong’, and some pronunciations of the comparative adjective, stranger). In earlier Older Scots, the -­ing morpheme would have indicated a verbal noun rather than a participle, and in speech it would often have corresponded to /ɪn/, which often resulted in the deletion of written , as when folk flocked to Peblis to the Play ‘To heir the singin and the soundis’.

The digraph is, as Venezky (1999: 153) describes it, ‘an interloper in English orthography, the residue of sound change and printer experimentation’. Although some of these sound changes did not affect Scots pronunciation, the printers’ experimentation did, to some degree, affect Scots orthography. The first use of in Middle English was as a replacement for yogh, , which had represented the fricatives written as and in Old English. The preferred replacement for yogh in Older Scots was (see above), but variants abound, thus fecht, feight, ‘fight’, and the many recorded spellings of ‘although’: althoch, althocht, althoche, althogh(e); allthocht, althoicht, althoght; allthouch, althoucht, althought, althowght. Venezky (1999: 153) identifies the printer William Caxton, in the late fifteenth century, as the first Englishman to insert a silent after initial , and this practice crept north and over the border to Scotland. This digraph usually corresponded to /g/, but not always. A century after Caxton, there are a few records cited in DOST of ghesse, ‘guess’, and ghaist in the senses of both ‘ghost’ and ‘guest’, but there is also the sense of ‘joist’ (where ghaist is a variant of gest and would have been pronounced with a /dʒ/). It may be noted that yogh also combined with in a number of spellings (see the descriptions of and ).

The grapheme occurred in clusters with initially in words like gnedschepe, ‘niggardliness’, and gnaw, ‘gnaw’. The cluster corresponded to /g/ + /n/, with the /g/ then being elided in initial position. In addition, the digraph was one of the ways in which the French palatalised consonant /n’/ was represented in French loanwords that originally contained this sound, e.g. malign(e), ‘malign’, and dedeigne, ‘deign’. With /l’/, this was one of the so-­called mouillé consonants (Kniezsa 1988, 1997: 39); see further the discussion of and below.

The character ‘yogh’, , was an ‘open’ variation on that was preferred in Irish and English manuscripts to the ‘closed’ form that was popular on the European continent. Although they were still sometimes alternated as allographs,

26

Spelling Scots

as in the conjunction gif/ȝif, ‘if’, in time, the two forms became largely associated with different sounds, yogh representing the consonant /j/ in words like ȝouth, ‘youth’, and ȝelde, ‘barren, unproductive’, while represented /g/ in words like gate and trig, ‘in good shape’, or /dʒ/ in words like bondage, agent. Yogh can also be used for /dʒ/, as in ȝwly, ‘July’. The original French spelling for initial /dʒ/ was or its allograph , and so we also find the latter used in Julay, ‘July’, and in the words iouglarie, jouglarie, ‘trickery’ (see below). Other allographs of yogh can be seen in variant Older Scots spellings of ‘yesterday’, which include ȝisterday, ȝhisterday, yisterday and yhystyrday, and in variants such as Ihesu, ‘Jesus’. With the coming of printing, yogh was replaced by , or and (see further below).

The grapheme in initial and medial positions corresponds regularly to /h/, as in hach, ‘hatch of a ship’, haddie, diminutive of ‘haddock’, inhird, ‘herdsman of the inner field’. In certain words it was not or was optionally pronounced, as witnessed by variants like honest/onest, habund/abund, ‘overflow’, and proheme/ proaeme, ‘introductory discourse or poem’. The OE and endings are represented in Scots by and , as in thocht, ‘thought’, althoch, ‘although’ (see above). It was not doubled in Older Scots. A number of initial and medial clusters are formed by adding to or to yogh and its derivatives, and occasionally , in words like ghaist, ‘ghost’, ȝhuyk, yhuke, ‘itch’, panȝhell, a less common variant of panȝour, ‘pannier’, malȝhett, ‘a small hammer’, Ihesu, ‘Jesus’. The in these clusters is silent. See also the descriptions for and .

As noted in the introductory section to this chapter, when two or three s were used in a Roman numeral, the last was given a ‘tail’, , and this form over time developed into a separate character, . The distinction between the vowel and the consonant was not fully established until the very end of the Older Scots period, in the late sixteenth century, and was apparently a Scottish innovation. DOST gives the following information under the entry for J: The differentiation of i and j as separate symbols for the vowel and the consonant is apparently first to be found in Scotland in the prints of Robert Waldegrave, the English printer, 1590–, such as the True Reportarie of the Baptisme of Prince Henry (c 1595) and Skene’s Acts (1597). In these, however, the letter j is still fairly infrequent, and the older method of representing consonant ‘j’ with i, I predominates. 17th century printed works mostly follow the same practice or, in some cases, something more exactly corresponding to modern usage.1 As has also been observed above in the discussion of , and were also used as alternatives to yogh, and so there are variant spellings such as ȝwly, july.



The Consonants of Older Scots

27

As noted above in the discussion of , the grapheme was little used in Old English, being reintroduced by Anglo-­Norman scribes as an allograph of and used, as in late Latin, to indicate /k/ pronunciations before the letters (Venezky 1999: 155). It regularly corresponded to /k/ in Older Scots. It appeared initially, medially and finally in Older Scots, in a wider range of environments than in Present-­Day English. Initially, it appeared before as in kaip, ‘cap’, keek, ‘peep’, kittill, ‘ticklish’, korne, ‘corn’, kurtch, ‘kerchief’, and kyle, ‘narrow strait of water’. Before , however, it was a variant of the more common : cap, corn, curtch. In initial position, it appears in the clusters and , e.g. skelp, ‘smack’, skybald, ‘scoundrel’, knappish, ‘snappish, testy’, and knychthade, ‘knighthood’. The /kn/ pronunciation was reduced to /n/ in English around the middle of the seventeenth century; in Scotland, particularly in northern areas, it survived longer, and reports suggest that it may still be heard in some Shetland accents (as reported in Millar 2007: 63). Medially, appears in words like fekill, ‘fickle’. In final position it often appears after the vowel digraphs as in baik, ‘biscuit’, beik, ‘beak’, roik, ‘drizzling rain’, and ruik, ‘rook’. Alternatively, it appears in the sequence ‘vowel + ’, as in the variants bake, beke, roke and ruke, where the silent final letter marked a long preceding vowel (see further below). In such instances, could not be used because the following would suggest an /s/ pronunciation. The grapheme appears in final clusters including , e.g. sylk, ‘silk’, stank, ‘pond, ditch’, airk, ‘grain chest’, and harsk, ‘hard, rough’. In English, the double is avoided; however, it was used medially and occasionally finally in Older Scots, e.g. fikkill, a variant form of fekill (see above), wikkir, ‘wicker’, makk(e), ‘neat, tidy’, and takk, ‘a lease granting tenancy’.

The grapheme normally corresponds to the lateral /l/, and in Older Scots it occurred in initial, medial and final positions in a word, e.g. laddie, ‘young boy’, collik, ‘colic’, and camel, ‘camel’. As a result of a number of sound changes that took place in the Older Scots period, the /l/ was deleted in certain phonetic environments, for example when the cluster /ld/ was simplified, and when a back vowel preceded /l/ and a consonant followed it (Johnston 1997a: 108). The orthographic consequence is that can often be omitted after and before . Consequently, in some variant spellings it was correspondingly omitted: compare hauld, calm, calf, bolk with haud, ‘hold’, cawm, ‘calm’, cauf, ‘calf’, and bok, ‘belch’. Once this had happened, by analogy, a silent for which there was no etymological justification was later added before some consonants, thus culd became a later variant of cuid, couth, etc., ‘could’. The phoneme /l/ was also variably deleted after /u/, causing the vowel to lengthen, thus the variant forms full, fou, fow, ‘full’. The grapheme occurs in a large number of initial and final clusters; for example:

28

Spelling Scots Initial clusters



ples(e), ‘please’ clattie, ‘muddy, dirty’ flyt, ‘scold’ splene, ‘spleen’

blak, ‘black’ glaikit, ‘foolish’ slak, ‘release, slacken’ Final clusters



skelp, ‘smack’ skald, ‘quarreller’ pelf, ‘booty, loot’ holm, ‘low-­lying land’



gilt, ‘money’ ilk, ‘each’ belch, ‘belly’ warld, ‘world’

Rarer clusters also occurred, e.g. in paltz, a form of ‘pulse’ meaning beans or peas, cultivated as food. Double often occurred in word-­final position in disyllabic or polysyllabic words like travaill, ‘hardship’, and constabill, ‘commander of an army under the king’.

Palatalised /l’/ and /n’/ are known as mouillé consonants, which occurred mainly in the original pronunciations of French loanwords, and also in a few Gaelic loanwords, e.g. assailȝe, assaill, ‘attack’ (for discussion of /n’/, see above). As with the other palatalised consonant /n’/, many different spellings were employed to express the sound /l’/, including (Kniezsa 1997: 39). The was printed as or , e.g. assailye and the place-­name Culzean. The digraph eventually became pronounced as /l/, and so we find the variants railȝe, rail(l), ‘to jest or make merry’, and vailȝe, vail(l), etc., ‘to be of use or profit’.

The grapheme corresponded to /m/ in initial, medial and final positions in words, e.g. mune, ‘moon’, semat, ‘undershirt or vest’, and craym, ‘stall for the sale of goods’. It occurred in the initial cluster , as in smutchin, ‘fine powder’, and in the final clusters , as in gymp/jimp, ‘slender, graceful’, realm, ferm(e), ‘farm’, s(c)ism(e), ‘schism’, and rat-­rythm, ‘tedious nonsense’.

The grapheme occurred initially, medially and finally, as well as in a few initial clusters and a number of final clusters in monomorphemic words, as follows: Initial clusters knok, ‘clock’

gnaw, ‘gnaw’



The Consonants of Older Scots

29

The initial velar consonant would originally have been pronounced; later in most accents it would have been elided to /n/. The devoicing of the initial velar consonant in is evident in variant spellings like knaw, ‘gnaw’. Final clusters

wench, wensch, ‘wench’ grund, ‘ground’ bink, ‘bench’ tynt, ‘lost’



laborynth, ‘labyrinth’ malign, ‘act wickedly’ kyln, ‘kiln’ bairn, ‘child’

The grapheme usually corresponds to /n/, but before the velar plosives /k/ and /g/, however they might be represented graphemically, it usually assimilates to the velar nasal /ŋ/, e.g. banket, banquit, ‘banquet’, angir, ‘anger’. An exception to this rule would be unstressed prefixes like un-­in words like ungeving, ‘not giving’. In the final cluster the final consonant is elided, as the variants solemn, sollem, ‘solemn’, demonstrate; however, the variant automney, ‘autumn’, suggests the occasional addition of a final vowel to allow pronunciation of the .

There were many possible spelling variants for the two mouillé consonants, /l’/ (see /lȝ/ above) and /n’/ (see also above). Kniezsa lists for /n’/, with and amongst the more frequent spellings. The in some words precedes the but in some cases it follows. This consonant occurs in final position, as in moigne, ‘monkfish’, or medially, between vowels, as in oignon, ‘onion’. The palatalised consonant /n’/ was later substituted by /n/ or /nj/, or /ŋ/. The grapheme was printed as or , and thus there are variants such as megnie, menȝie, menyie, etc., ‘household, group of dependants’, and variants of proper names such as Mackenyie and Mackenzie. In the latter case, the /z/ is now usually pronounced, owing to the influence of the spelling on pronunciation.

The grapheme

occurred in initial, medial and final positions, e.g. partan, ‘crab’, superne, ‘heavenly’, graip, ‘grope’. In final position, the grapheme was often doubled when a morpheme was then added: ‘Our bishops [. . .] whose infameis are seene and graipped of you all’. The grapheme also occurred in a number of clusters, e.g. initial and final , as in procur, ‘bring about’, pleisure, ‘pleasure’, sparkish, ‘witty, smart’ and skelp, ‘smack’, cairp, ‘talk, converse’, and clasp. Examples of ‘silent

’ are rare expressions like psallerare (a variant of cellarare, ‘cellar man’), pseudoprophet and pnewmaticks. The phoneme would also be assimilated or elided in particular bilabial contexts like the name Campbell, where the /p/ was followed by /b/.

30

Spelling Scots

In Latin and Old English writing, the digraph was used to transliterate the Greek character phi, , which represented /f/. The digraph then fell into disuse, and was favoured. However, the digraph was reintroduced between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries to identify a number of words of Latin, Greek, Hebrew or Arabic (via mediaeval Latin) origin, e.g. phair, ‘a lighthouse’ (from Greek via Latin), and seraphin, ‘seraphim, the highest order of angels’ (from Hebrew via Greek and Latin). These terms were often of a learned or technical character, like nephritick, ‘affecting the kidneys’. The and spellings alternated in forms like fantastik/phantastik (from Greek via Latin), and the spelling was also sometimes used in some expressions like phary, ‘fairy’ (from Old French faerie, but originally deriving from Latin fata, ‘fate’), and golph, ‘deep pool, abyss’, and even in native words like phische, ‘fish’. In the north-­east of Scotland, where historically corresponded to /f/, there are a few examples of the grapheme in words like phip, a regional variant of quhip, ‘whip’: ‘Thatt quhatsumeuir persoun beis [. . .] found to haif spoikin filthie and abhominable langage [. . .] salbe [. . .] convoyit [. . .] to the skameles and thair be phippit.’

This Roman character was used in early Old English in the combination to represent the sound /kw/; however, it was replaced by in later Old English in words like cwene, ‘queen’. Anglo-­ Norman scribes reintroduced the grapheme, and in the north, again became a regular representation of the sound /kw/. It was used initially and medially: quackery, ‘trickery’, conqueist, ‘acquired’. In some borrowings from French, the ending was retained, giving the forms musique, reliquies, etc.; in such cases, the corresponded to a /k/ pronunciation, and so it would be more economical to say that here the is silent. Since interchange, there are a few instances of variant spellings where following corresponds to a vowel, rather than the semi-­ vowel /w/, for example qwth, a variant of couth, ‘could’, and qwneing, a variant of cuning, ‘rabbit’. The grapheme appears in clusters such as , as in squyar, ‘escort’. Considerable ambiguity arose in Older Scots between the use of for the Old English /kw/ and the use of in different combinations – including to correspond to the Old English /hw/. This issue is considered next, in the ­discussion of .

As Kniezsa (1997: 31) observes, the most common means of representing the /hw/ sound in Old English was , a reversal of the earlier form that prevailed up until the beginning of the twelfth century. However, from the end of the thirteenth century, the variant forms appeared



The Consonants of Older Scots

31

in ­ manuscripts written in northern English areas such as Northumberland, Durham and Lancashire. Kniezsa (1997: 38) notes a wide number of digraphs or trigraphs that were used in Early Scots, e.g. in quilk, qwilk, quhilk, qvhilk, qwhilk, qhilk, qhuilk, qhwilk, ‘which’. Kniezsa found that the two forms that dominated early manuscripts were and , the others being fairly rare. The in the trigraph and digraph later became more commonly ; the headword quhyte, ‘white’, in DOST gives a sense of the full range of possible spellings. Thus there was ambiguity between, for example, quite, ‘quite’, and quite, ‘white’. The trigraph and its variants are found only in morpheme-­ initial ­position, e.g. quhaill, ‘whale’, na-­quhare, ‘nowhere’.

The grapheme occurred in initial, medial and final position and represented /r/, which would always have been pronounced, as Scots was and is rhotic. It was sometimes doubled in medial positions before a vowel and in final positions, thus horibille, horribill, ‘causing terror’, and scar, scarr, ‘provoke, scare’. The grapheme occurred in many consonant clusters; for example: Initial clusters






brattill, ‘clatter’ chronik, ‘chronicle’ fram, ‘devise’ prek, ‘prick, spur’ screym, skreym, ‘scream’ sprutlis, ‘spots, freckles’ traist, ‘trust’ wrak, ‘damage’





c radill, kraddill, ‘cradle’ dressar, ‘dresser for dishes’ graith, ‘prepare’ phrentik, ‘deranged’ shrink, schrink, ‘shrink’ strang, ‘strong’ thrang, ‘crammed tightly together’

Final clusters

curb arch caird, ‘card’ warf, ‘wharf’ darg, ‘day’s work’ bark, ‘bark, small ship’ quhirl, ‘whirl’ warld, ‘world’ barm, ‘yeast’ sharn, ‘excrement’ carp, ‘converse’ hors, ‘horse’ harsk, ‘rough’ warsh, warsch, ‘insipid’ hairst, ‘harvest’ quart, ‘quarter of a the place-­name Forth gallon’

As Venezky (1999: 161) observes with respect to English, the digraph was used in initial position for a small number of Greek and Latin loanwords. It represents /r/ and, in Older Scots, varied with , e.g. retor, rhetor, ‘a teacher of

32

Spelling Scots

rhetoric’; reubarb, rhabarb, ‘rhubarb’; and rime, rhime, ‘rhyme’. The grapheme is also found in the proper name of the Thracian monarch King Rhesus.

The grapheme occurred in initial, medial and final positions. It combined with other consonants in a wide variety of initial clusters, and in a smaller number of final clusters: Initial clusters







pseudoprophet, ‘false prophet’ scald, ‘mark, blemish’ schule, ‘school’ sclave, ‘slave’ screid, ‘fragment, shred’ skybald, ‘scoundrel’ skrindge, ‘flinch’ slakkit, ‘loose’ smert, ‘sharp’ snell, ‘keen, bitter’







sperge, ‘asparagus’ sphinges, ‘sphinx’ spley, ‘unfurl (a banner)’ spreth, ‘plunder, pillage’ squissed, ‘crushed, squashed’ start, ‘moment’ strak, ‘rub gently, stroke’ suap, ‘blow’ svit, ‘civett, perfume’ swaill, ‘boggy ground’

Final clusters clesp, ‘clasp’ harsk, ‘hard and rough to kist, ‘chest’ the touch’ werst, ‘most unpleasant’ The grapheme corresponded to several phonemes: in initial position, it usually represented /s/, with the exception of a few words such as sure, a synonym of sikar, siccar, ‘safe, secure’. The initial grapheme in these words was /ʃ/, as variant spellings like shugar, schugger and shoor, shower indicate. The grapheme in medial and final positions varied: between an unstressed and a stressed vowel it corresponded to /z/, as in preserve, ‘preserve’; word-­ finally, it also corresponded to /z/ when following a voiced consonant, as in dryves, ‘drives’, and in the plural morpheme , when the morpheme also followed a voiced consonant, e.g. luggis, ‘lodges’. In many Scots accents, the final consonant also became voiced in words like has, his, is and does. Kniezsa (1997: 38) notes the doubling of generally served to indicate the voiceless fricative in grammatical markers, as in storiss, ‘stories’, in monosyllabic words like horss, ‘horse’, or as an alternative to French in words like perssit, ‘pierced’. Johnston (1997a: 105) observes that ‘one of the most salient features of Older Scots phonology is the presence of /s/ where one would expect /ʃ/ and vice versa. One must distinguish between different groups in this interchange since they seem to occur in different types of word.’ He goes on to identify lexical items with or that correspond to English forms with , e.g. Scottis, ‘Scottish’, and Inglis, ‘English’. The palatalisation of /s/ and /z/, respectively



The Consonants of Older Scots

33

to /ʃ/ and /ʒ/, is evidenced in variants like issue, ishue, ‘issue’, tissue, tisshew, ‘tissue’, and plesour, ‘pleasure’, mesur, ‘measure’, and tresur, ‘treasure’, and this sound change happens in both Scots and English. Johnston (1997a: 105) observes that the more extensive interchange in Scots seems to have begun with initial consonants, e.g. schir, ‘sir’ (from French sieur), and schervice, ‘service’, and then moved to medial and final positions. Where the is silent in Present-­ Day English loanwords from French, as in corps or isle, the Older Scots forms either pronounced the , as in corpis, ‘body’, or they did not consistently represent the , as in ile, ysle, ‘isle’, and iland, ‘island’.

The Old and Middle English trigraph represented /ʃ/; from around 1200 in southern English, the digraph was introduced as a variant for this spelling, and over the next 300 years it slowly became the preferred form in the south. Northern varieties of English and Older Scots were more conservative, and Older Scots generally used the trigraph to represent the sound initially, medially and finally, in words like schaik, ‘shake’, aschoir, ‘ashore’, and flesch, ‘flesh’. However, variants like shaik and fleshe were not uncommon later under English influence. The two most common clusters with were initial , as in schrink, ‘shrink’, and final , as in Ersch, ‘Irish’ or ‘Gaelic’. There was also considerable variation between and in spellings like schancellar, chancellar, ‘chancellor’, and scheik, cheke, ‘cheek’.

The grapheme occurs in initial, medial and final position, and in the following initial and final clusters: Initial clusters

stank, ‘pond, ditch’ stramp, ‘stamp forcibly’

traist, ‘confidence, trust’ twyte, ‘reproach, censure’

Final clusters

relict, ‘relic’ nicht, ‘night’ aft, ‘often’ nought, ‘nothing’ malt, ‘malted grain’ exempt, ‘exempted’ rant, ‘talk foolishly’



precinct, ‘enclosed area’ except, ‘accept’ cairt, ‘playing card’ hairst, ‘harvest’ wast, ‘waste land’ nixt, ‘nearest’

Another, rarer, initial set of variant initial clusters is , found in phtisik, ptisik, ‘wasting disease’. The phonemic correspondences for vary. The main

34

Spelling Scots

correspondence is with /t/, even at times in words like vallet, vallett, ‘servant, valet’, where the grapheme would be silent in Present-­Day English. In medial position in the consonant cluster and in endings, however, the /t/ would often be elided, as is seen in the varants thrissill, thristle, ‘thistle’, and listin, lysn, ‘listen’. In some words, the corresponded to /ʃ/ as in natioun, ‘natioun’, where, etymologically, the replaced an earlier , corresponding to /s/. The Scots variant nacioun indicates the Old French derivation (OF nacion), although and were written very similarly by many scribes and so are often difficult to distinguish. The spelling was reintroduced in the Renaissance period, to indicate the earlier, Latin, etymology of such words (L. natio). The also corresponds to /ʃ/ when followed by an unstressed /ɪ/, as in actioun (OF action) and motioun (Fr. motion). However, alternative pronunciations were possible, as is indicated by variant spellings such as akseoun, mocio(u)n, mosio(u)n. When the /t/ was followed by an unstressed rounded vowel, /u/, this sequence would have been articulated as /tju/; however, the /tj/ was also gradually palatalised, and so the grapheme eventually corresponded to /tʃ/, as in the second syllable of chapture, ‘capital of a column’, and fortoun, ‘fortune’. Palatalisation also took place when /st/ was followed by unstressed /ɪa/ as in celestiall, ­‘heavenly’.

The trigraph and quadgraph were variants that represented the /tʃ/ phoneme, and were used in words like kitchin, kitschin, ‘kitchen’, matche, ‘match’, and watschod, ‘type of fabric’. The Older Scots trigraph and quadgraph corresponding to /tʃ/, appeared before short vowels, and did not appear in clusters.

The digraph was used in very early Old English texts to represent the voiced and unvoiced fricatives /ð/ and /θ/, which were allophones, rather than phonemes – that is, they were not used in Old English to distinguish between different meanings (contrast the initial sounds that are used in Present-­Day English pronunciation to distinguish this’ll and thistle). In the eighth century, two single graphemes – , ‘thorn’, and , ‘eth’ – were substituted for in either value, and did not reappear regularly in texts until Caxton reintroduced it in printing in the late fifteenth century. In Scotland, and in the north of England, the scribal form of was virtually identical to that of and so forms like ye, ‘the’, were common. The forms were also adopted by early Scottish printers, particularly word-­initially. However, was eventually used in all positions (Smith 2012: 27). Smith (2012: 26, 27) also observes occasional variations in the digraph: John Knox habitually reversed it as in words like pleaseht, ‘pleases’, other writers reverse it in words like lenght, ‘length’ (see further below), and Smith finds incidences of it being extended to a trigraph, batht, ‘both’, in the Acts of Parliament before 1500. Smith also notes that the form was also sometimes extended to a digraph , as in yhow, ‘thou’.



The Consonants of Older Scots

35

The digraph occurred in all positions in the word, and in a few clusters. Initially, it occurred in , as in thrang, ‘pressed tightly together’, and word-­ finally, it occurred in , as in strenth, ‘strength’, and , as in firth, ‘sea inlet’. More rarely, it occurred in the initial cluster , as in thwack, ‘vigorous slap’, and in the final clusters or , as in variants twelfth, twelvth; , as in sixth, ‘sixth’; , as in bredth, breidth, ‘breadth’; , as in length, lenght, ‘length’; and , as in depth. Some of these forms are variants and might be considered anglicisations. The variant spelling of the ordinal numerals as twelft and saxt, sext was common, as were the spellings of words like lenth, ‘length’, and strenth, ‘strength’. The Scots pronunciation of the ending of these last words is still commonly /nθ/. The pronunciation of the in many Scottish accents differed – and in some respects still differs – from those in England. As has been observed more generally, the phonemes /ð, θ/ to which the digraph corresponds ‘are not very common sounds in the world, and are often unstable over time’ (Johnston 1997b: 506, citing Lass 1984: 151). The many different variants of faither and fader in Older Scots indicate the frequent change from fricative to plosive. In Older Scots there were probably contrasts such as those between unvoiced breth, ‘breath’, and voiced brethe, ‘breathe’, although the spelling variants (e.g. braith for both) might obscure this. Where English speakers normally voice the final phoneme in with, most Scots accents today have an unvoiced phoneme /wɪθ/, and indeed the final fricative is often elided to produce /wɪ/ or /we/. Again, where in English accents there is a voiceless/voiced contrast between singular and plural forms of words like bath/baths, mouth/mouths, Scottish accents maintain the voiceless fricative in both contexts. A minor sound change resulted in the loss of word-­ final /θ/ in a small number of words, e.g. Older Scots mouth, mow/mou. The Scottish National Dictionary notes under the headword mouth that the reduced form of the word is recorded from around 1470; however, some instances of mow in the sense of ‘grimace’ could be reduced forms of mows, ‘joke, jest’.

Like , the grapheme was a latecomer to the Scots and English alphabets, being only fully established in English in the early nineteenth century (Venezky 1999: 167). Before then, , and also alternated to express both vowel sounds and the consonant phoneme /v/, though tended to be preferred for the consonant in medial position in words. Thus we find the variant forms in Older Scots for ‘evensong’: euinsang, evinsang, ewinsang. After the mid-­fifteenth century, /v/ was often deleted word-­finally or intervocalically, resulting in variant spellings like have, ha, hae, ‘have’, and divil, deil, dele, ‘devil’. The grapheme did not exist in the Roman alphabet. When representing the sound /w/, Old English scribes first used the digraphs or , hence ‘double-­u’. In the eighth century, as noted above, Anglo-­Saxon scribes replaced the digraphs with the single character ‘wynn’, , which became the main s­pelling form used until after the Norman Conquest, when was reintroduced. By the time of the earliest extant Scots manuscripts, wynn had

36

Spelling Scots

already been replaced by . The character corresponded to the semi-­vowel /w/, and appeared in syllable-­initial position in for example wynd, ‘wind’, and bewich, ‘bewitch’. In initial clusters such as , dwalm, ‘fainting fit’, , swink, ‘toil, labour’, , twa, ‘two’, , thwang, ‘thong’, it alternated with a single or , thus swink/suynke, twa/tua and so on. In the cluster the initial grapheme is now a ‘silent letter’, although it was pronounced until the nineteenth century in English, and Murray (1873) attests its survival in all but Insular Scots until the late nineteenth century (Johnston 1997a: 109). In some accents of English and Scots today, there is still secondary lip-­rounding in the articulation of the /r/; readers might compare their own pronunciation of the initial consonant in rak, ‘rack’, and wrak, ‘vengeance, persecution’. The grapheme was either not pronounced, or pronounced as /w/ in words like answer and swerd, ‘sword’.

The English digraph reversed the Old English digraph , as in hwæt, ‘what’. In Older Scots, until the late sixteenth century, the preferred forms were variants of (see above). In the sixteenth century, rapidly increased in frequency. The grapheme corresponds to a fricative /ʍ/ in some Scottish accents, even today, although there is evidence that /w/ is gaining ground (see, for example, Johnston 1997b: 507).

The grapheme was used in Older Scots, as in Old English, in medial and final positions, in words like exinteration, ‘disembowelling’, and lax, ‘salmon’. It would normally have been pronounced as /ks/, or possibly /gz/ if the word stress was on the vowel after . In a few words deriving from French it would have been silent, as in Burdeaux, ‘wine from Bordeaux’. The grapheme tended not to cluster within morphemes, although a few words with exist, e.g. betwixt. It was not doubled.

The grapheme has a complex history. It was used in Old English to represent various vowels, and also had this function in Older Scots (see Chapter 3). As noted above, in Scotland the scribal forms and , ‘thorn’, were often so close as to be identical, and in later Scottish printing the latter character was replaced by . The grapheme was also used as a variant of , and so is found in alternative spellings like ȝet, yet, get, ‘gate’ (see above, under ). In thirteenth-­century England, also began to be used as a consonant grapheme, replacing when it represented a voiced palatal fricative, and this use also came north of the border, to result in the consonantal that in late Older Scots and today represents the semi-­vowel /j/. This consonant usually occurred initially in words like yok, ‘yoke’, and yistirday, ‘yesterday’, and occasionally medially, as in beyon, ‘beyond’, and lawyear, ‘lawyer’. The digraph



The Consonants of Older Scots

37

was often used in variant spellings, e.g. yhok, ‘yoke’, beyhonde, ‘beyond’. There were no clusters with consonantal .

The grapheme was unusual in Older Scots. In Old English, the grapheme corresponded to /ts/ and it only became associated with /z/ in the twelfth century. However, in Older Scots, the phonological distinction between /s/ and /z/ was probably not a pronounced one: Smith (2012: 28) notes that there is rhyming evidence that even in plural nouns like stanis the final was unvoiced, unlike Modern Scots stanes and Present-­Day English stones. A separate grapheme for /z/ was therefore largely unnecessary, and so appeared mainly in loanwords like zepherus, ‘the west wind’ (L. zephyrus). The grapheme can occasionally be found as an alternative to or soft in variants like wisard, wiz(z) ard, ‘wizard’ (from Middle English wys, ‘wise’, + ard), or zinziber, cynoper, sinoper, ‘red earth used as pigment’ (L. cinnabaris). When was used, it was mainly initial or medial. In writing, and were generally indistinguishable, as was written with a tail, and with the arrival of printing, the grapheme was commonly used to represent , ‘yogh’, thus ze, zow, ‘you’, zour, ‘your’.

Doubling of Consonants In Present-­Day English, doubled consonants tend to indicate a short preceding vowel, except in such instances where etymology or other factors obscure this pattern. Thus hoping/hopping and liking/licking show how ‘doubling’ of different kinds, namely and , helps distinguish a longer from a shorter preceding vowel. Older Scots followed this pattern of consonant doubling after short vowels (see Chapter 3). However, consonants in Older Scots were sometimes doubled for other reasons, some of them summarised by Kniezsa (1997: 38). These patterns have been mentioned here and there in the foregoing discussion of individual graphemes, but they are reiterated together here. ●

was doubled if another morpheme was added, e.g. lip, lippis. ● was doubled in word-­final position, particularly in monosyllables, and tended to indicate unvoiced pronunciation, e.g. houss, ‘house’, and haff, ‘have’. Doubling was common for at the end of morphemes as well as words, thus giffand, ‘giving’. Intervocalically, alternated with spellings, thus the form just mentioned varied with givand, ‘giving’. According to Kniezsa, was often doubled before , as in affter, at least in some texts, and doubled was sometimes used in plural or possessive morphemes, e.g. storiss, ‘stories’, and androwss, ‘Andrew’s’. Unlike Present-­Day English, initial doubling was possible, particularly, as noted earlier, in manuscripts to indicate a proper noun, e.g. ffyfe, ‘Fife’. ● was doubled in final position in words of two or more syllables, e.g. heritabill, ‘capable of being inherited’.

38

Spelling Scots

Given the wide degree of spelling variation to be found in Older Scots texts, some of these patterns are more easily verifiable than others. However, this chapter has given and illustrated an inventory of the consonant graphemes generally available in Older Scots, an inventory that formed the basis of the Modern Scots consonantal spelling system. The next chapter considers the Older Scots vowels.

Note 1. See (last accessed 10 February 2015).

3

e Older Scots Vowels

e

If the consonants of Older Scots present us with a relatively uncomplicated orthographic system, the Older Scots vowels are a different matter. The geographical and chronological variations we find among different accents of Scots are largely a matter of differing vowel sounds: vowels change more than consonants do, over space and time. In this chapter, we consider why vowels are generally less stable than consonants, sketch out the major systemic changes in the vowel system over the Older Scots period, and explore how the variable and changing systems of pronunciation mapped onto the Older Scots vowel graphemes. The most thorough discussion of this topic is in Aitken and Macafee (2002), and this chapter largely offers a synopsis of the much more extensive descriptions found there. A briefer account is given in Smith (2012: 29–33). Other relevant studies that have informed the content of this chapter include Aitken (1977), Johnston (1997a), Lass (1999) and Macafee and Aitken (2002).

Vowels and Vowel Systems Consonants and vowels differ in their means of articulation. Consonants, as we saw in Chapter 2, involve some kind of stoppage or obstruction to the airflow in the vocal tract. To reiterate, the lips might come together to stop the airflow completely, before releasing it in /p/ or /b/; or the little membrane towards the back of the palate, known as the velum, might descend to stop the airflow in /k/, or it might let some air through with a ‘fricative’ sound in /x/, the sound that corresponds to the digraph in words like nicht. These obstructions to the airflow allow us to classify consonants according to (i) where the obstruction occurs (lips, teeth, velum, etc.), (ii) how the air finally passes through the vocal tract (plosive, fricative, lateral, etc.) and (iii) whether there is voicing; that is, whether or not the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation. These three factors account for some of the variation in consonant spellings discussed in Chapter 2. For example, the variant spellings of the medial consonant in father, fader suggest that the means of articulation varied from a fricative sound /ð/ in the former to a plosive sound /d/ in the latter. Although the means of articulation might have varied, the place of articulation and the voicing of the medial consonant

40

Spelling Scots

in these words were probably similar or identical. Sometimes the means of articulation and the voicing remained similar but the place of articulation changed: we saw this with the mouillé consonants used in French loanwords, like menȝe, many, ‘company of men’. The in the former variant indicates that the corresponded to a nasal consonant, as in the French, which was articulated with the tongue raised towards the hard palate. The loss of the in variant spellings suggests a nasal articulation closer to the alveolar ridge, behind the teeth, as in modern pronunciation. Finally, there were differences in voicing. The double in verbs like haiff, ‘have’, suggests unvoiced articulation of the consonant; in many Scots accents this consonant was later voiced (though in some cases it was lost or elided, as in hae), and the graphemes came to be used to r­ epresent the voiced ­variants. Consonants, then, can be described and classified with reference to the place where the airflow is obstructed, how the airflow is obstructed, and whether or not there is voicing. The articulation of vowels, however, does not involve obstruction of the airflow through the vocal tract. Rather, the shape of the vocal tract itself is changed during the production of vowels; for example, the front, middle or back of the tongue is raised or lowered, and the lips are rounded or spread. If you pronounce the vowel /ɑ/ as aah and then /i/ as eeh, you should feel your tongue rising to the front part of the vocal space, closer to the roof of the mouth and nearer the teeth. Depending on your accent, the movement will be more or less extreme, but there will be some movement. The very nature of their articulation makes vowels more changeable than consonants from individual to individual and over space and time. However, identifiable systems of vowels characterise different periods of the Older Scots language, and these systems changed in a regular fashion over time. One factor that adds to the complexity of the spelling of vowels is that the graphemes used to represent the Older Scots vowels were established when the pronunciation system was quite different from that of today. In Early Scots (1375–1450), there was a system of long and short vowels; that is, vowels were distinguished from each other by the duration of their articulation as well as by differences in their ‘quality’, or the shape of the vocal tract during their articulation. The vowel system then evolved through a series of changes known as the Great Vowel Shift, which affected both English and Scots, though in different ways, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As its name suggests, the Great Vowel Shift resulted in a systematic series of changes whereby certain long vowels changed in quality and, in some cases, in length. After the Great Vowel Shift, owing to another set of changes that produced the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR), the distinction in vowel length became less salient; that is, vowel duration was no longer used to distinguish words of different meanings. For our purposes, the most obvious outcome of these changes was that by the end of the Middle Scots period (1450–1700) the graphemes that corresponded to the vowels of Older Scots had become less reliable markers of either their quality or their quantity. The following sections trace the major changes in Older Scots orthography, in relation to the vowels, by tracing the major changes in the Early Scots and Middle Scots periods. The purpose of these sections is to explain why the vowel graphemes are what they are, and to indicate how their correspondence to vowel phonemes changed in Older Scots.



41

Older Scots Vowels

The Vowel Chart and Aitken’s Numbering System Since vowels cannot be categorised according to obstruction in the airflow through the vocal tract, another means must be found of classifying them. Conventionally, vowels are classified according to the highest point of the tongue in the vocal tract, with additional information given, where relevant, about lip-­ rounding. Table 3.1 shows the International Phonetic Association’s vowel chart: it can be understood as an abstraction of the vocal tract, with the front of the mouth to the left. The vowel /ɑ/ (aah), therefore, can be seen as an open back vowel, while /i/ (eeh) is a close front vowel. The other vowels are plotted in the vocal space, with further information given about lip-­rounding. For example, if you say /i/ (eeh) and then round your lips, you articulate /y/. The Modern Scots pronunciation of the vowel in oor, depending on the individual accent, is usually somewhere between /y/ and the slightly lower /ø/, as shown in Table 3.1. The vowel chart in Table 3.1 represents monophthongs. Some vowels, however, are articulated as diphthongs, that is, during the articulation of the vowel, the tongue ‘glides’ from one position to another. One example is the vowel in the Modern Scots articulation of tide, /əi/, in some accents, where the highest point of the tongue is raised during articulation from a mid-­central position to a near-­close or close front position. The vowel system, then, in any period, is an inventory of long and short monophthongs, and also possibly some diphthongs, which are used to distinguish between words of different meaning. Because the quality of many long vowels changed during the Older Scots period, it is difficult to characterise individual vowels by phonetic symbol alone. The long vowel /i:/, for example, underwent changes over the centuries. In Early Scots, it was the vowel used in tym, ‘time’, but then, owing to changes in the vowel system, this vowel became a diphthong in Middle Scots, and then a different diphthong in Modern Scots: /tim/ > /teɪm/ > /təim/. Meanwhile, a vowel pronounced differently in Early Scots had become /i:/ by the Middle Scots period, TABLE 3.1:  The IPA vowel chart: monophthongs

i

y

 

Near close Close mid

Central

e

Near open Open





Back

ɯ

u

γ

o



ɔ ɒ

υ ɘ

ø

θ ə

Mid Open mid

Near back

ɒ

Close

Near front

ε







a

 a



a

Front

Vowels at right & left of bullets are rounded & unrounded.

42

Spelling Scots

before the vowel shortened in Modern Scots, e.g. keip, ‘keep’: /ke:p/ > /ki:p/ > / kip/. It will be noticed already that the graphemes we still use are, in fact, closer indications of the earlier pronunciations than the later ones. In order to keep track of the changes in vowel quality and duration over time, Aitken devised a numbering system (see Aitken 1977, Aitken and Macafee 2002). For example, the vowel that changed from /i:/ to /əi/ is Aitken’s Vowel 1; and the vowel that changed from /e:/ to /i/ is Vowel 2. Aitken identified a system of nineteen vowels in all, and though modifications to some details have been suggested (e.g. Smith 2012: 30), his is the system largely adopted in the present volume, and illustrated in some detail in the following sections. Since there were only a limited number of graphemes available to represent these nineteen vowel phonemes, and since the quality of the long vowels changed over time, this chapter is organised in the following way: the vowel phonemes of the Early and Middle Scots periods, before and after the Great Vowel Shift, are separately introduced and discussed, alongside the graphemes normally used to represent the sounds in each period.

Early Scots Vowels (1375–1450) The vowels that changed least over the Older and Modern Scots periods were the short vowels, which Aitken numbered 15–19. These are shown in Table 3.2, alongside the graphemes that corresponded to them: The variant spellings and have a similar explanation (see, for example, Smith 2012: 29), one that has already been touched upon in the discussion of consonants in Chapter 2. Mediaeval scribes wrote the letters as strokes called minims, and so sequences that combined these letters were often difficult to read. Therefore, in the context of , was often preferred to ; for example, compare dissifer, ‘decipher’, and dissymulacioun, ‘dissimulation’. Similarly, in the context of other minims, was sometimes preferred to the interchangeable , which gave rise to the variants somir, sumir, swmir, ‘summer’. Short vowels were often marked by a doubling of the following consonant, e.g. begg, ‘beg’, and crumm, cromm, ‘crumb’ (see Chapter 2). It may be noted that the short open-­mid back vowel /ʌ/ was not part of the Early Scots short vowel system, and so words with the short vowel , like crumm, cromm, would have been pronounced /krum/, rhyming with Modern Scots room. Long vowel duration could be marked in two main ways: (i)

adding an to the following consonant (+Ce), e.g. buke, ‘book’ TABLE 3.2:  Short vowels in Older Scots

Vowel Number

Phoneme

Graphemes

Examples

Vowel 15 Vowel 16 Vowel 17 Vowel 18 Vowel 19

/ɪ/ /ɛ/ /a/ /ɔ/ /u/





tig, tyg, ‘touch, tap’ begg, ‘beg’ crakk, ‘crack’ cok, ‘cock’ crumm, cromm, ‘crumb’



Older Scots Vowels

43

(ii) making the vowel into a digraph by combining it with another vowel, often , e.g. buik, ‘book’, gloir, ‘glory’; or, on occasion, doubling it, e.g. ryim, ‘hoar frost’. As the examples show, the ways of marking a long vowel vary for the same word. The Scots dictionaries record the range of ways of marking long vowels: the entry for buke (n.) in DOST, for example, records a range of variant spellings beyond buke and buik that either do not mark the vowel as long or indicate it as long by using the marker or another digraph: boke, buk, bwk, bwck; bvik, buick, buyk, bwik(e); beuk, bevk, bewk; bouk, bouck, bowyk.

The Great Vowel Shift in Scotland: Middle Scots Long Vowels As noted above, the two main periodic divisions in Older Scots are Early Scots and Middle Scots, with 1450 as the conventional watershed. Over the space of two centuries, both in England and in Scotland, albeit with some differences, the articulation of the long vowels and diphthongs changed. This change is the main reason why later orthography in English and Scots is not closely aligned with pronunciation. Although historians of language refer to the ‘Great Vowel Shift’, Lass (1999: 77) reminds us that the processes involved in what became a systematic set of sound changes were complex: Even though from the macroperspective change might look like linear transition, it is multidimensional: the essential mechanisms are cumulatively weighted variation and diffusion through the lexicon. In other words, although we may conveniently represent the Great Vowel Shift as a chronological set of changes whereby one set of vowels transformed into another, the reality at any point over the two centuries must have been messier. Over several generations of speakers, the long vowels began to be articulated in different ways, first in some words and then, eventually, through most of the vocabulary system. Adoption of the changed pronunciations must have varied from individual to individual and from community to community, and, indeed, there was a marked difference in the outcomes of the Great Vowel Shift north and south of the River Humber. In the north of England and in Scotland, some older vowel sounds were retained; south of the Humber, the changes were more radical. Lass (1999) describes the Great Vowel Shift in considerable detail with respect to the south; Johnston (1997a), Aitken and Macafee (2002: 108–23), and Macafee and Aitken (2002) give an equally detailed account of Older Scots sound changes. Simplifying these accounts somewhat, insofar as the different phases of change are elided, the principal overall outcomes of the GVS can be seen in Table 3.3. The table shows that the patterns of change, north and south, are similar in some respects and different in others. The main similarities are in the treatment of the front vowels; the northern and southern systems differ mainly in the changes to the back vowels. In the north and the south, the close-­mid front vowel /e:/ was raised to /i:/,

44

Spelling Scots TABLE 3.3:  The Great Vowel Shift in (a) the south and (b) Scotland

and the north

GVS in the south

ei

i:

u:

e:

o:

ɛ:

ɔ:

a:

GVS in Scotland and the north i: ou

ei

e:

y:

u: o:

ɛ: a:

and /i:/ was diphthongised to /ei/, which later became /ɘi/ and, in Present-­Day English, /aɪ/. This process seems to have caused a chain reaction, so that the more open vowels were then also gradually raised to occupy those spaces vacated by the closer vowels, and so /ɛ:/ was raised to /e:/ (then merging with /i:/), and /a:/ to /ɛ:/ (then merging with /e:/). The differences are apparent in the treatment of the back vowels. In the south, a similar process of raising and diphthongisation occurred, as /o:/ was raised to /u:/, and /u:/ became /ou/, which became, in Present-­Day English, /ʌu/. The change in the close vowels then initiated a change in the open vowels so that /ɔ:/ became /o:/. However, earlier sound changes prevented a parallel pattern unfolding in the north, which retained much more conservative pronunciations, with /u:/ subsequently shortened to /u/ in words like moose, ‘mouse’, hoose, ‘house’, and so on. The close-­mid vowel /o:/ had already fronted to /y:/, an unrounded close vowel, and this later became close-­mid /ø/. The Middle English phoneme /ɔ:/ had no parallel in pre-­Scots, since the OE/ON front vowel had remained as /a:/ (thus the difference, after the GVS, between today’s realisations of home/hame in English and Scots respectively). As Aitken and Macafee (2002: 109) put it, the lack of back vowels in Early Scots in places where there was movement south of the border meant that: There was thus ample space for minor movements of the points of articulation of the Sc back vowels, without setting up any ‘push-­chain’ overall shift in the back vowel system. Table 3.3, then, shows the outcomes of the Great Vowel Shift until around 1450. Changes between Older and Modern Scots are considered in Chapter 4; and, of course, southern English pronunciation changed further too. Tables 3.4 and 3.5 below indicate in more detail the shifts in the long vowel phonemes between the Early Scots and Middle Scots periods. Again, the tables represent a simplification of a complex series of processes, which Aitken and Macafee (2002) cover in much more exhaustive detail. The long monophthong vowels of Early Scots (pre-­ GVS) are shown in Table 3.4, alongside the Middle Scots vowels (post-­GVS) they developed into,



Older Scots Vowels

45

with Aitken’s numbering, and the main Older Scots graphemes that corresponded to each vowel. The symbol # indicates a word-­final position. Where the examples of words that contain the graphemes are not glossed, they are variant spellings of the foregoing word. The long vowels are marked by digraphs, , which, as Kniezsa (1997) has shown, were originally used in Middle English to represent the new diphthongs that had resulted from the changes to the open vowels as a consequence of the Great Vowel Shift. In Middle Scots, these digraphs came to be used mainly to indicate long vowels (see Macafee and Aitken 2002, in particular the section ‘The Origins of OSc Orthography’). There are several points to note about the vowels shown in Table 3.4. First, the notation follows Smith (2012: 30) in giving a broader notation for Vowel 5 in Early Scots than Aitken does. However, the table retains Aitken’s notation for Vowel 7, a close /y:/ where Smith suggests a lower /ø:/, on the basis of the distribution of /ø/ in Present-­Day Scots pronunciations. It is impossible to be exact about the vowel used in Early Scots; indeed, given the instability of vowel sounds, it is likely that there was variation in articulation, which is the reason why the broader transcription is preferred for Vowel 5. Aitken and Macafee (2002: 87) acknowledge that ‘the principal realisations of vowels 5, 18 and 19 are specially open to speculation’. Looking at Tables 3.2, 3.4 and 3.5 from the perspective of the graphemes, it is clear that certain graphemes and digraphs corresponded to different sounds in Early Scots. The most obvious example, perhaps, is Vowels 2 and 3, which in Early Scots largely shared a set of corresponding graphemes. The evidence for different graphemic-­phonemic correspondences comes from the painstaking scrutiny of rhymes (for references, see Aitken and Macafee 2002). As the DSL entry for nede, ‘need’, (Vowel 2) notes, in Early Scots nede rhymed with words like bede, ‘prayer’, dede, deid, ‘deed’, drede, ‘dread’, med, ‘reward’, seide, ‘seed’, spede, ‘speed’, and wede, ‘garment’, but in later verse (e.g. by the poets Maitland and Montgomery) it also rhymed with words containing Vowel 3, e.g. dede, deid (‘dead’), fede, feid n., procede, remede and leede n. (‘lead’). The fact that the words did not rhyme in Early Scots suggests different vowel articulations in this period. Similarly, Vowel 7 shares one set of graphemes with Vowel 5 (so gloir and goid would have had different vowel correspondences), and another with Vowel 6 (souk and foul would also have been pronounced differently, despite the shared graphemes). Why did the changes shown in Table 3.4 take place? The reasons for the Great Vowel Shift remain enigmatic, but scholars have suggested a number of factors. First, given the relatively unstable nature of vowels compared to consonants, as noted above, there may be a greater tendency for variation and shift over time. However, the availability of variant pronunciations of vowel sounds clearly also served as linguistic markers of different communities and groups within communities. As the structure of society changed in Scotland and England over the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, different social groups may well have asserted their particular identities by adopting or avoiding certain innovative vowel sounds. Some vowel sounds will have become associated with prestige groups, resulting in their eventual imitation, or near-­imitation, by other socially aspiring groups. Other vowel sounds – perhaps conservative ones – might have been eventually associated with lower prestige groups, and so they would have been avoided

46

Spelling Scots TABLE 3.4:  Long monophthongs in Early and Middle Scots

Vowel Number Phoneme: Phoneme: Graphemes Examples Early Scots Middle Scots Vowel 1

/i:/

/e:i/

Vowel 2

/e:/

/i:/

Vowel 3

/ɛ:/

/i:/ or

Vowel 4

/a:/

/e:/ /e:/

Vowel 5

/ɔ:/

/o:/

Vowel 6

/u:/

/u/

Vowel 7

/y:/

/ø:/





























tide, ‘time, occasion’ tyde tyd tyid laday, ‘lady’ lady bede, ‘prayer’ bede neid, ‘need’ neyd nead se(e), ‘sea’ sey sie sevin, ‘seven’ brede, ‘bread’ heid, ‘head’ heyd head stan, ‘stone’ stane stain stayn sten stean ga, ‘go’ gay gae glore, ‘give glory’ glor gloir gloyr to, ‘to’ too souk, ‘suck’ sowk schow, ‘shove’ fully, ‘completely’ ol(e), ‘oil’ wull, ‘wool’ gode, ‘good’ goid boyt, ‘cask for wine’



47

Older Scots Vowels TABLE 3.4: (continued)

Vowel Number Phoneme: Phoneme: Graphemes Examples Early Scots Middle Scots













blome, ‘blossom’ sone, ‘soon’ wod, ‘mad’ fule, ‘fool, foolish’ fwle fuil fuyl fwil fwyl foul fowl fool do, ‘do’ doe doo dou dow du(e) dw

by socially aspiring groups (see Millar 2012: 43–5). These patterns of change, imitation, adoption and avoidance would have been complicated by factors of class, nationality, gender and so on – and contemporary evidence is difficult to find. However, some literary evidence survives of linguistic attitudes in mediaeval and early modern England and Scotland. In England, a well-­known literary representation of northern English forms of speech by a southerner is Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale. In a discussion of Chaucer’s construction of northern Middle English, Epstein (2008: 112) argues: It seems that many Middle English speakers habitually conceived their language differences along a North-­South axis, turning observed pluralities into generalized dualities. Inevitably, these dualities cast one element as normative and dominant and the other as variant and subordinate. Much later, in late sixteenth-­century Scotland, James VI indicated a keen understanding of linguistic propriety when advising his courtiers in his Reulis and Cautelis to be Observit and Eschewit in Scottis Poesie (see Smith 2012: 249): Gif zour purpose be of landwart effairis, To vse corruptit, and vplandis wordis. If your purpose be [to write] of country matters, to use corrupt and rustic terms. Later still, in London in the early seventeenth century, a language commentator called Alexander Gil poured scorn on innovative pronunciations by a group of

48

Spelling Scots

upwardly mobile speakers he called Mopsae (Smith 2007: 133–4). These speakers were clearly diffusing innovative GVS vowel sounds, which Gil, like many later writers on language variety and change, found to be offensive to the ear. From Chaucer via James VI to Gil, then, we can find a number of contemporary observers who bear witness to features of language variety and innovation acting as markers of social prestige and stigma in the Middle English and Older Scots periods. These complex dynamics and their role in the construction of social identity may help us to understand the reasons behind these shifts in the ­articulation of long vowels in the development of Scots and English. As well as short and long monophthongs, there were two sets of Early Scots diphthongs, which were produced while the tongue was moving, or ‘gliding’, during articulation. Generally, the tongue moved towards either an /i/ articulation or an /u/ articulation, giving the sets of diphthongs shown in Table 3.5. As with the short and long monophthongs, two or more written characters could correspond to one phoneme, thus the digraph corresponded to Early Scots Vowel 9 or 10, and to Vowel 13 or 14. Given that vowel length could be indicated by an i-­digraph, then could in fact correspond to Vowel 5, 7, 9 or 10; that is, the sounds in gloir, goid, join and poison would have had ­different qualities in Early Scots. Table 3.5, then, shows the evolution of the Early Scots diphthongs in the Middle Scots period. Since these vowels were not generally affected by the GVS, the changes are not as marked as they are with the long monophthongs. Some diphthongs (Vowels 9 and 10) remained fairly consistent, while others show raising in their front element (Vowels 8 and 11). In the case of Vowel 11, this raising resulted in its becoming a monophthong, which also happened in the case of Vowel 12. In the case of Vowels 12 and 13, the elision of /l/ in the articulation of /al/ and /ol/ resulted in the merging of these sounds with /ɑ/ and /ou/ respectively in Middle Scots, prompting the variant spellings of hald, haud, ‘hold’, and gold, gowd, ‘gold’. The variants of Vowel 14 are discussed at length in Aitken and Macafee (2002: 36–9): effectively, several Early Scots vowels that were previously separate were merged, and then the resulting vowel split again, giving the diphthong and triphthong variants shown in the table. The result is that for some poets, in certain periods, blew and dew were perfect rhymes; at other times, for other poets, they were not.

Later Developments: The Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR) The various changes to the long vowels that happened as a result of the Great Vowel Shift meant that the oppositions between short vowels and long vowels that historically had been used to differentiate meanings no longer held true. For example, after the GVS, the difference between bad, ‘unwell’, and bade, ‘abiding, delay’, was expressed via the quality of the vowel, and not through its duration. Once the function of vowel duration had been obscured by the GVS, it was possible for Scots speakers to reduce the longer monophthongs, and also the first element in the Vowel 1 diphthong /e:i/. This shortening of the long vowels occurred, but only in specific phonetic environments; the specification of these contexts is known as the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR), or Aitken’s Law.



49

Older Scots Vowels TABLE 3.5:  Early and Middle Scots diphthongs

Vowel Number

Phoneme: Early Scots

Phoneme: Graphemes Examples Middle Scots

Vowel 8

/ai/

/ɛi/

Vowel 8a

/ai#/

/ɛi#/

Vowel 9

/oi/

/oɪ/

Vowel 10

/ui/

/ui/

Vowel 11

/ei#/

/i:#/

Vowel 12

/au/

/ɑ:/

Vowel 12a

/al/

/ɑ:/

Vowel 13

/ou/

/ou/



























graith, ‘equipment’ grayth grathe paen, ‘pain’ pein peyn pen pean cuntray, ‘country’ cuntrey join, ‘join’ joyn poisoun, ‘poison’ poyson piusson spuilȝe, ‘spoliation, theft’ spwilȝe pwynt, ‘point’ pint pynt piynt drey, ‘endure’ dre dree drie lauch, ‘laugh’ lawch law, ‘hill’ la ald, ‘old’ all, ‘all’ hauld, ‘hold’ saut, ‘salt’ sawt haw, ‘hall’ a, ‘all’ gouk, ‘cuckoo’ gowk golk schow, ‘show’

50

Spelling Scots TABLE 3.5: (continued)

Vowel Number

Phoneme: Early Scots

Phoneme: Graphemes Examples Middle Scots

Vowel 13a

/ol/

/ou/



Vowel 14

/iu/

/iu/







Vowel 14bii /ɛou/

/iu̞u/

gold, ‘gold’ gould boll, ‘a measure of weight’ creuell, ‘cruel’ crewel buke, ‘buke’ blew, ‘blue’ blue deuty, ‘duty’ dewty bouté, ‘beauty’ dew, ‘worthy’ plow, ‘plough’

Although Aitken himself credited Murray (1873) with formulating this process, his own detailed exploration of its consequences has, for many scholars, indelibly associated it with his name (see Aitken 1981: 156, n.1; Aitken and Macafee 2002: 169, n.42). The main characteristic of the SVLR is that long vowels were shortened except in phonetic environments that were conducive to longer articulations. These SVLR-­long environments were: • before /r/ • before the voiced fricatives /v, z, ʒ, ð/ • before word-­boundaries (#) or pauses. We can therefore distinguish between SVLR-­short and SVLR-­long environments, as in the examples in Table 3.6. In addition to the examples in the table, the SVLR accounts for the difference, in Scots, between the pronunciation of the diphthongised Vowel 1 in long environments, like tie /a:i/, and in short environments, like tide /əi/, /ʌi/ or /ɛi/. Note that the past tense inflection of tied also retains the long vowel; this is a general feature of inflected verbs whose stems end in a vowel – compare short deed with long dee’d, ‘died’ (see Aitken and Macafee 2002: 125–9 for a more detailed description of further consequences of and minor exceptions to the SVLR). The SVLR accounts for differences in articulation amongst the dialects of Scots: there were occasions when allophones of SVLR-­short vowels split from their SVLR-­long counterparts. This process can be shown with reference to Vowel 7, where the long articulation /ø:/ was shortened to /ø/. Two things then happened in some Scots dialects. First, the long /ø:/ was unrounded to give /e:/ in SVLR-­long environments, e.g. puir, use, /pe:r, je:z/. Second, in SVLR-­short environments /ø/ was unrounded to give /ɪ/ or /ɛ̈/, hence the different p­ ronunciations



51

Older Scots Vowels TABLE 3.6:  Examples of post-­GVS vowels in SVLR-­long and

SVLR-­short environments

Vowel Number

Post-­GVS Realisations

SVLR-­long

SVLR-­short

2

/i:, i/

4

/e:, e/

6

/u:, u/

7

/ø:, ø/

feir, ‘companion’ preve, ‘test, prove’ dree, ‘endure’ cair, ‘care’ knave, ‘boy, servant’ prais, ‘praise’ allow, ‘praise’ dow, ‘dove’ dour, ‘stern, sullen’ burde, ‘board’ bro, ‘broth’ muve, ‘move’

sele, ‘happiness’ beit, ‘beat, strike’ leif, ‘leaf’ stane, ‘stone’ baith, ‘both’ blait, ‘timid, shy’ thoum, ‘thumb’ doun, ‘down’ soupill, ‘supple’ cruke, ‘hook, crook’ blude, ‘blood’ truith, ‘truth’

today of words like abune and boots as /ʌbøn, ʌbɪn/ and /bøts, bɪts/. This process has had an impact on later spelling variants, e.g. abune, abin, ‘above’. Aitken and Macafee (2002: 129–30) discuss possible dates for the SVLR. Grant and Dixon (1921: §151, cited in Aitken and Macafee 2002: 129) point out that Robert Burns’s rhyme of ane and abune, /jɪn, ʌbɪn/ (Vowels 15 and shortened Vowel 7), indicates that the rule was established in Ayrshire by the eighteenth century, and its prevalence throughout present-­day Scotland and Northern Ireland suggests an earlier rather than a later date for its occurrence. Aitken and Macafee conclude that evidence from Shetland suggests that the rule was established there – and probably elsewhere in Scotland – by the late sixteenth century.

Older Scots Vowel Graphemes: A Summary The foregoing sections offer a sketch of the complex history of the Older Scottish vowels, a history that necessarily had an impact on the way the vowels were represented orthographically in the Older Scots period. Tables 3.1 to 3.6 above focus on the development of the different vowels, short and long. Another way of representing this information is in Tables 3.7a to 3.7e below, which focus instead on the main graphemes and digraphs used to reflect the Early Scots vowels (short, long and diphthongs), with their vowel numbers. For each set of graphemes, we can see the corresponding vowel phonemes, with long vowels and diphthongs shown before and after the GVS, and in SVLR-­short and SVLR-­long contexts. Tables 3.7a to 3.7e indicate some of the challenges to the modern student and scholar of Older Scots when faced with a written passage and wishing to reconstruct an approximation of the sound of it. The variant spellings, like , are one problem; another is the fact that a single grapheme or digraph ­corresponded to a sometimes wide set of phonemes, altered by time, phonetic environment and dialect. The main factor to bear in mind when looking at a text

52

Spelling Scots

is its date of composition: consider whether it was composed before or after 1450, bearing in mind the quotation from Lass, above, that cautions us that linguistic change is both messy and patchy, and does not happen everywhere overnight. Furthermore, given the fact that the earliest surviving manuscripts and prints of some early texts date from some time after their actual composition, there may be blurring of the linguistic features associated with the period of composition. To take one example, Smith (2012: 144, 146–7) produces diplomatic versions of different editions of the opening of John Barbour’s Brus. This epic romance, which is the foundation of literature in Scots, was composed in 1375; however, no contemporary manuscript of this poem survives. The two earliest extant manuscripts were both copied from lost versions by the scribe John Ramsay: one that dates from 1487 now resides in St John’s College, Cambridge; another, transcribed in 1489, is in the National Library of Scotland. These fifteenth-­century manuscripts date from the Middle Scots period, after the Great Vowel Shift, but, given the date of the poem’s composition, they may retain features of Early Scots. Later editions changed the orthography, as a comparison of some lines of Ramsay’s text with the 1616 edition, printed by Andro Hart, demonstrates. (Italics in the manuscript version indicate that a ­contraction has been expanded, e.g. yt has been expanded to yat.) The Edinburgh Manuscript (Ramsay) Andro Hart’s edition Storys. to red ar delitabill Stories to read are delectable Suppos yat yai be nocht bot fabill/ Supose they noght co[n]tain but fable yan suld storys yat suthfast wer Then sould Stories y[at] soothfast wer, And yai war said on gud maner If they be spoken in good maner, Hawe doubill plesance in heryng Haue double pleasure in hearing: ye first plesance is ye carping The first is their pleasant carping. And ye toyir ye suthfastnes The other is, the soothfastness, Yat schawis ye thing rycht as it wes That shawes the thing right as it wes, And suth thyngis yat ar likand And soothfast things that are likand, Tyll mannys heryng are plesand To mens hearing are pleasand: These ten lines serve to illustrate some of the orthographic features noted so far in Chapters 2 and 3. Ramsay uses the consonant grapheme , which in scribal handwriting was often indistinguishable from thorn, , in the words yat, yai, yan, ye and toyir, but he also uses the digraph , in suthfast, suthfastnes and thing(is). Hart prints these words with the digraph throughout. The manuscript and print versions have consonantal in hawe, haue; Ramsay uses the trigraph in schawis where Hart prints in shawes. The contracted forms for the velar fricative in Ramsay’s manuscript have been expanded to in nocht, rycht; Hart prints these with : noght, right. The vowels, as ever, present more of a challenge. Doubled consonants in Ramsay’s fabill, suppos, mannys indicate that the preceding vowel is short: /ɪ, u, a/. If Ramsay has copied forms that correspond to pre-­GVS pronunciations, then vowel digraphs represent long vowels or diphthongs in yai /ðai/, said /sɛ:d/, doubill /du:bɪl/ and schawis /ʃauɪz/. By the time Hart came to pronounce these



53

Older Scots Vowels TABLE 3.7A:  Older Scots vowel graphemes: and digraphs

beginning with

Older Scots Graphemes





, ,





Older Scots Short Vowels

/a/

Older Scots Long Vowels and Diphthongs Pre-­GVS /a:/ /ɛ:/ /a:/ /ɛ:/ /au/ /al/ /ai/ /a:/ /ɛ:/ /a:/ /ɛ:/ /ai/ /al/ /a:/ /ɛ:/ /ai/ /au/ /al/ /au/ /al/ /au/ /al/ /a:/ /ɛ:/ /i:/ /ai/ /a:/ /ɛ:/

Post-­GVS SVLR-­long

SVLR-­short

/e:/

/e/

/e:/

/e/

/ɑ:/

/ɑ/

/ɛi/ /e:/

/ɛi/ /e/

/e:/

/e/

/ɛi/ /ɑ:/ /e:/

/ɛi/ /ɑ/ /e/

/ɛi/ /ɑ:/

/ɛi/ /ɑ/

/ɑ:/

/ɑ/

/ɑ:/

/ɑ/

/e:/

/e/

/e:i/ /ɛi/ /e:/

/ei/ /ɛi/ /e/

words, they would have been more like they /ðɛi/, said /sed/, double /dubl/ and shawes /ʃɑ:z/. The graphemic variants shown above suggest an almost bewildering set of possibilities for spelling Older Scots vowels, but attention to the changes in vowel quality over the Older Scots period, and an understanding of the fact that, for example, the graphemes were substitutable, can help reduce, to some extent at least, any sense of confusion. Even so, many readers feel nonplussed when consulting a dictionary of Older Scots to see the many possible variant spellings given for an apparently simple term. For example, DOST gives the following possible spellings for ‘through’ in Older Scots:

54

Spelling Scots TABLE 3.7B:  Older Scots vowel graphemes: and digraphs

beginning with

Older Scots Graphemes

Older Scots Short Vowels

/ɛ/

Older Scots Long Vowels and Diphthongs Pre-­GVS /a:/ /e:/ /ɛ:/ /ai/ ei#/ > /e:#/ /e:/ /ɛ:/ /a:/ /e:/ /ɛ:/ /ai/ /e:/ /ɛ:/ ei#/ > /e:#/ /e:/ /ɛ:/ /ai/ /e:/ /ɛ:/ /ai#/ /ei#/ > /e:#/ /iu/ /ɛou/





,

,

Post-­GVS SVLR-­long

SVLR-­short

/e:/ /i:/

/e/ /i/

/ɛi/ /i:#/ /i:/

/ɛi/ /i#/ /i/

/e:/ /i:/

/e/ /i/

/ɛi/ /i:/

/ɛi/ /i/

/i:#/ /i:/

/i#/ /i/

/ɛi/ /i:/

/ɛi/ /i/

/ɛi#/ /i:#/ /iu/ /iu̞u/

/ɛi#/ /i#/ /iu/ /iu̞u/

TABLE 3.7C:  Older Scots vowel graphemes: and digraphs

beginning with

Older Scots Graphemes

,

, ,

Older Scots Short Vowels

/ɪ/

Older Scots Long Vowels and Diphthongs Pre-­GVS /i:/ /ui/ /e:#/ /ɛ:#/ ei#/ > /e:#/ /ui/ /i:/ /i:/

Post-­GVS SVLR-­long

SVLR-­short

/e:i/ /ui/ /i:#/

/ei/ /ui/ /i#/

/ui/ /e:i/ /e:i/

/ui/ /ei/ /ei/



55

Older Scots Vowels TABLE 3.7D:  Older Scots vowel graphemes: and digraphs

beginning with

Older Scots Graphemes

,

Older Scots Short Vowels

/o/















/u/

/u/

/u/

Older Scots Long Vowels and Diphthongs Pre-­GVS

Post-­GVS SVLR-­long

SVLR-­short

/o:/ /o:/ /ø:/ /o:/ /ø:/ /o:/ /ø:/ /oɪ/ /ui/ /u/

/o/ /o/ /ø, i, e, ɪ/ /o/ /ø, i, e, ɪ/ /o/ /ø, i, e, ɪ/ /oɪ/ /ui/ /u/

/ɔ:/ /ɔ:/ /y:/ /ɔ:/ /y:/ /ɔ:/ /y:/ /oi/ /ui/ /u:/ /ul/ /ou/ /ol/ /ol/

/ou/

/ou/

/ou/

/ou/

/y:/

/ø:/

/ø, i, e, ɪ/

/y:/ /y:/ /ɔ:/ /y:/ /u:/ /ul/ /ou/ /ol/ /ɛou/ /y:/ /ou/ /ol/ /u:/ /ul/ /y:/ /ou/ /ol/ /ɛou/ /u:/ /ul/ /y:/ /ou/ /ol/ /ɛou/

/ø:/ /ø:/ /o:/ /ø:/ /u/

/ø, i, e, ɪ/ /ø, i, e, ɪ/ /o/ /ø, i, e, ɪ/ /u/

/ou/

/ou/

/iu̞u/ /ø:/ /ou/

/iu̞u/ /ø, i, e, ɪ/ /ou/

/u/

/u/

/ø:/ /ou/

/ø, i, e, ɪ/ /ou/

/iu̞u/ /u/

/iu̞u/ /u/

/ø:/ /ou/

/ø, i, e, ɪ/ /ou/

/iu̞u/

/iu̞u/

56

Spelling Scots TABLE 3.7E:  Older Scots vowel graphemes:

and -­digraphs

Older Scots Graphemes

Older Scots Short Vowels

Older Scots Long Vowels and Diphthongs Pre-­GVS

/u/ , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

/y:/ /iu/ /y:/ /y:/ /ui/ /u:/ /ul/ /u:/ /ul/

Post-­GVS SVLR-­long

SVLR-­short

/ø:/ /iu/ /ø:/ /ø:/ /ui/ /u/

/ø, i, e, ɪ/ /iu/ /ø, i, e, ɪ/ /ø, i, e, ɪ/ /ui/ /u/

/u/

/u/

thro(u)ch, through(e, throw(e, thorow(e, throuche, throwch(e, throwgh(e, thro(u)cht, throwcht, throught, threwch, thrwch, throuthe, thruch(t, thrugh(t, thruth(t, throche, throgh(e, throiche, throicht, throchge, thro(u)g, throu, throue, threu, threw, thru, thrw, thro, troch(t, trouch, trew, troithe, trhow, thorowch, ­thorycht, thorrow, thoro, thurrow. Granted that this is a relatively extreme instance of spelling variation, it might reasonably be asked whether one variant, say thro, were more common than another, such as thorycht. This question leads us to the issue of whether Older Scots spelling was becoming standardised.

Variation, Variety and Standardisation in Older Scots Aitken (1971: 177) argued that, certainly by the Middle Scots period ­(1450–1700), there was ‘a somewhat loosely defined standard of spelling which was generally followed by those writers with some pretensions to literacy’. He goes on to show just how ‘loosely defined’ the ‘standard’ was, with free variation of Older Scots consonant and vowel graphemes evident both across and within texts. Very few words indeed had only a single spelling, and individual writers were not consistent in how they spelled particular words in the same document, though they seem to have had preferences. To illustrate this, Aitken cites Sir Gilbert Hay, who in one of his works prefers mare (221 occurrences) to mair (two occurrences), ‘more’, though he also prefers maiste (sixty-­six occurrences) to maste (one occurrence), ‘most’. A characteristic of Middle Scots that Aitken also notes is that the orthographic variation found in Older Scots was not, so far as we can tell, geographically motivated. No matter what the geographical provenance, certain major spelling variants are evident in texts of similar kinds. As the Older Scots period progressed, new variants entered the system – e.g. alongside , and alongside



Older Scots Vowels

57

– but the older variants were not wholly displaced. Moreover, while documents of the period might fall into broad patterns of consistency with respect to their selections from the full range of possible spelling options, there are in most texts at least some examples of unusual spellings. While asserting his impression that a proto-­standard set of spellings existed alongside a set of ‘irregular’ or ‘sub-­standard’ spellings, used by certain writers in certain texts, Aitken (1971: 193) acknowledged that a more systematic survey of frequencies and distributions would be necessary to confirm which variants were in fact preferred by the majority of writers of the period: As yet we have little enough information on the detailed incidence of such [orthographic] variants even in literary texts. Besides these, we need also detailed studies of the distributions of some of the variants of this kind over limited chronological periods, based at least partly on the localised and holograph writings. Until all of this is done we have no means of knowing what the detailed distributional patterns were and how these correlate, if at all, with chronological, regional, stylistic or personal factors. In the four and a half decades since these words were written, some detailed studies of the distribution of orthographic forms have been carried out (e.g. Devitt 1989). The most extensive work has been by Anneli Meurman-­Solin, using the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, which she designed to analyse patterns of variation and change in early Scottish prose. Working with what is now considered a relatively small corpus, which in its original form amounted to some 600,000 words, Meurman-­Solin (1993) pioneered a range of diagnostic analyses that included a consideration of Scots orthography and morphology. The orthographic element of her studies focused on features such as versus spellings, and the occurrence of ‘i-­digraphs’, that is, digraphs ending in , such as , and their distribution in texts, in relation to alternative spellings, over the Older Scots period. While she stressed the provisional nature of her findings, and the issues raised by the fact that not all of the texts included in her corpus were taken from holograph versions of the texts, Meurman-­Solin (1993: 236–45) demonstrated the value of corpus studies in addressing the challenge expressed by Aitken in the passage cited directly above. Among her main claims are that certain variants are genre-­specific and chronologically restricted; for example, the trigraph in words like witht, ‘with’, and truetht, ‘truth’, occur in burgh records, religious instruction, official letters and pamphlets in the period 1500–1700, but not in trials or in pre-­1500 texts. She summarises her early findings on orthographic variation thus (Meurman-­Solin 1993: 242): [. . .] even if many authors or scribes are not consistent in their choice of variants, the fact that they choose one more often than any of the other possible variants is also significant. High-­frequency items [. . .] are evidence of the position of texts on a scale of variation between conservatively Scottish and highly anglicised. Moreover, if their occurrence correlates with the mode of communication, the age, sex or rank of the author, the text type, etc. these items can be shown to function as markers which can be used to diagnose any text representing the language variety studied.

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‘Loosely defined’ standard spellings notwithstanding, the orthographic variation in Older Scots is so pervasive, and the difficulty of compiling a robust corpus of contemporary manuscripts and prints is so considerable, that Meurman-­Solin’s pioneering corpus-­based studies are yet to be extended, enhanced and confirmed or challenged by future research in this area. Meurman-­Solin’s later work in this area has focused on the interaction between genre, syntax and pragmatics in the Older and Modern Scots periods, as has the research of her collaborators and successors in corpus-­informed studies (e.g. Meurman-­Solin 2007 and Dossena 2004, 2013a and 2013b discuss a genre-­specific corpus of nineteenth-­century Scottish correspondence; see also the articles in Anderson 2013). As we shall see, the insights afforded by the corpus-­based studies of Older Scots orthography have limited applicability to the changed circumstances of Modern Scots literary composition; however, some of the techniques of corpus-­based analysis pioneered by Meurman-­Solin (1993) have inspired and to some extent influenced the methodology that informs later chapters of this book.

4

e The Development of Modern Scots Orthography

e

Towards Modern Scots The later Older Scots period is marked by a language shift that saw a drastic reduction in the domains in which Scots was written. The corresponding shift towards the norms of written standard English was probably not always the result of a conscious choice on the part of Scottish writers. It is unlikely that many of those few who were literate during the Older Scots period actually thought of themselves as writing ‘Scots’ as such – it is more likely that, if they considered the issue at all, they would have considered themselves literate in the vernacular, or non-­Latin, language they spoke, in the same way as a literate Englishman might also write in the vernacular tongue. In the Older Scots period few writings survive in which authors made explicit a distinction between English and Scots; the late mediaeval and Renaissance ‘makars’, like Henryson, Dunbar and Lyndsay, all referred to their written language as ‘Inglis’, and described it as being one with the literary language employed by Chaucer. Only later in the fifteenth century did observers and writers begin to distinguish between English and Scots as ‘languages’; Gavin Douglas famously did so in the prologue to Book I of his translation of the Aeneid in 1513, and, much later in the century, in 1584, James VI referred in the Preface to his Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie to English as being ‘lykest to our language’, that is, English is the language most similar to, but not identical to, Scots (see McClure 1981). By the time James VI was writing, however, in the late sixteenth century, social and political events had begun to exert a strong anglicising pressure on written Scots. The Reformation had swept across Europe, fuelled by the new technology of printing, which allowed ideological disputation in the vernacular languages to spread in a manner that was unprecedented in European history. Printed matter in English began to flood into Scotland in the sixteenth century, and the Scots pamphlets and books produced by Scottish printers now took their place amongst material dominated by southern norms. The printed editions of work by Scottish reformers like John Knox also adopted English forms that he was less inclined to use in his manuscript writings (see Smith 2010, 2012: 106–11, 198–211); possibly this code-­switching was the result of printers’ decisions, but equally

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possibly, with his fellow Scots reformers, like James Melville, Knox may have been concerned to reach a wider anglophone audience in his written work. With the establishment of the reformed kirk in Scotland in 1560, the anglicised written Scots of the reformers may also have begun to accrue a certain form of gravitas, or authority. This authority could only have been reinforced by the absence of a Bible in Scots; the vernacular translations in circulation in Scotland in the late sixteenth century were all in English. The accession of James VI to the throne of the United Kingdom in 1603 saw much of his court – a number of whose members were active in writing poetry and prose in Scots – relocated to England. Within a single generation, there was a marked shift towards the adoption of English forms in Scottish literary texts, even for instance by William Drummond of Hawthornden, a gentleman poet who remained in Scotland. As the seventeenth century progressed, most literary and non-­literary texts began to be composed in English. Kniezsa (1997: 46) observes: The results of text analyses corroborate Bald’s (1927) conclusion that anglicisation increases in the sixteenth century so that, by the end of the seventeenth century, Scots seems to have fallen practically into disuse in all official writing. Despite the decline in the use of Scots in official contexts, there are instances of Scots being used in some conservative contexts, such as some domestic letters (see Meurman-­Solin 2007) and some formulaic legal texts. In Chapter 1, we noted some conservative Scots features appearing in the Records of the Parliaments of Scotland of 1689. Durie (2012: xi) also notes the use of Scots, rather than the more usual Latin, in a ‘retour’ or record of inheritable estate, published on 6 October 1654: ALEXANDER, BRUCE, heir of Hendrie Bruce son to Sir Robert Bruce of Clakmanan knight, his father, – in ane annuelrent of 200m. furth of the barroney and lands of Clackmanan; – ane uther annuelrent of 200m. furth of the said lands. As literacy gradually widened, the use of Scots in domestic correspondence, perhaps paradoxically, also grew rarer. Görlach (1999: 149–50) observes that while domestic letters provide evidence of informal linguistic features, [Private letters] rarely include dialect [. . .] Writing is so much connected with the school and standard language that composing a letter in dialect is a breach of sociolinguistic convention. The Englishness of the language of much Scottish personal correspondence can be seen in the following extract from a letter written by James Wauchope to his friend in 1785, when Wauchope was around twenty years of age: At present I ride into Edinr, every Morning to attend the Greek & Mathematics, & will do, for a month to come I suppose, altho’ it is not very agreable leaving the country to be in town all day, yet if it will make me understand them any better I shall forget the inconvenience. – You mention in your last Miſs Graham of Gartmore, indeed she is very pretty, but I don’t think she is the only



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pretty Woman altho’ I dare not say so to Ruſsell, whom I dined with yesterday; we had a very fine ride together being Saturday.1 When Scots is used in correspondence after 1700, it is usually a matter of self-­ conscious performance, as in one of Robert Burns’s letters to William Nicol (see Smith 2007) and in the later series of letters exchanged between Robert Louis Stevenson and his friend Charles Baxter (Dossena 2002, 2004, 2013b). Otherwise, except in cases where the writer had limited schooling and only distant acquaintance with the educational norms (as in emigrant letters; see Montgomery 2013), correspondence in the later Older Scots period and ­throughout the Modern Scots period tends to be in English. Although surviving examples of written, formal and informal Scots are relatively scarce in the later seventeenth century, the language, of course, was still widely spoken, and it remained the medium of performance in oral culture, such as songs and folktales. There was, then, a substantial foundation for the revival of written Scots in the literary domain in the eighteenth century.

The Eighteenth-­Century ‘Vernacular Revival’ The conditions leading to the eighteenth-­century ‘vernacular revival’ in literary Scots are well-­known, and they were previewed briefly in Chapter 1 of the present volume. At the end of the seventeenth century, the last Stuart king, James VII and II, had been displaced in the process of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 by his daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange. Mary was supported by Protestant parliamentarians, whose concerns over the king’s Catholicism had been intensified by the birth of a male heir, James Edward Stuart, in 1685. In Scotland, there was an uprising of support for James, led by John Graham of Claverhouse, popularly known as ‘Bonnie Dundee’. Though Graham led the supporters of the deposed king to victory at the Battle of Killiecrankie in 1689, he died in the same engagement, and consequently this, the first of several Jacobite rebellions, was unsuccessful. Support for the Stuart dynasty, however, marked Scottish-­English relations over the next century – though the sectarian politics underlying the claims to the throne meant that the Jacobites had supporters and enemies in both nations. The failure of the project to establish a Scottish colony in Darien in the late seventeenth century plunged many Scots into debt, and it is likely that the climate of financial instability influenced a group of Scottish parliamentarians to negotiate a Treaty of Union with England in 1706. The Treaty held out the promise to Scottish investors of compensation for their debts in relation to the Darien scheme; in return, the Scottish parliament would disband and Scottish lawmakers would join their English counterparts in a new Parliament of Great Britain in London. The English parliamentarians, for their part, wished to ensure that both Scotland and England remained united under a single, Protestant monarch. For the Treaty of Union to be ratified, two separate Acts of Union had to be passed by both the English and Scottish parliaments. The Scottish Act of Union was duly passed in 1707, and parliamentary union was secured against a background of popular protest; on the day the Act was passed in Scotland, martial law

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was declared to contain civil unrest. An impact of the renewed sense of aggrieved national sentiment in the early eighteenth century, then, was the turn towards an explicitly Scottish means of expressing cultural identity. Writers and editors increasingly began composing and publishing and republishing work in Scots. Many of the newly composed works were originally intended for oral performance, and they then appeared in print in different forms: broadsides, pamphlets, published books of poetry and song. The orthographic conventions used in the vernacular revival in poetry and song set the stage for the use of Scots in the later cultural turn towards fiction and the novel in the nineteenth century.

The Conditions of Literacy in the Eighteenth Century If a sustainable literature in Scots was to develop, then there had to be a literate readership. The literate classes in the Older Scots period had been, in the main, clerics and civil servants – the university-­trained administrators who sustained the apparatuses of church and state. The Scottish parliament survived the Union of the Crowns in 1603 but was subsumed into the Westminster parliament in 1707. However, a distinct Scottish legal system was maintained, with the Court of Session remaining the supreme civil court in Scotland. University-­trained lawyers, then, became an influential group in the cultural life of Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and beyond. As the economic basis of Scottish society moved from feudalism to capitalism, there was pressure on merchants and traders, and other members of the small but rising middle classes, to acquire sufficient literacy to read the laws that applied to their businesses, to keep records and so to engage effectively in trade and commerce. Pressure on all classes to acquire some measure of literacy was also exerted by the reformed kirk, which established parish schools and expected all Scottish subjects to have a personal acquaintance with the vernacular Bible, which after 1611 gradually became synonymous with the King James Bible, or Authorised Version, which, of course, was an English, not a Scots, translation. It was long assumed that the Protestants’ expectation that the Scottish population should gain direct access to God’s word by being competent to read the Bible resulted in high rates of literacy amongst the general Scottish population; however, this view has largely been exposed as a myth (see Houston 1985). Houston observes that the quality of education in parish schools varied, and they were often supplemented by ‘adventure schools’ or simply by schoolteachers who were hired directly by groups of parents. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, children from poorer homes could expect a brief and irregular acquaintance with formal education of any kind. The skill of reading was preferred to the rarer skill of writing, and it is difficult to gauge the degree of competence acquired by many of those taught to read. Overall, Houston’s detailed historical study of the diffusion of literacy in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Scotland suggests a patchy and gradual shift towards a potential audience with the proficiency and time available to read literature of any kind, in English or Scots. As Houston (1985: 107) puts it: Linguistically distinct regions were more illiterate than places where the dominant language prevailed. Women were generally less literate than men, rural



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people less than urban, the lower socio-­economic groups less than the wealthier and more exalted. In Scotland and England the main improvements during the period 1650 to 1770 were among the middling groups in society. In this respect Britain was similar to northern France where most of the substantial improvements in literacy over the eighteenth century occurred among the middle classes. The labouring population did not catch up until the nineteenth century. A growing readership for English and Scots, for the bulk of the eighteenth century, then, was to be found in the elite groups of landowners and professionals, and the ‘middling classes’ that enjoyed enough wealth and leisure to indulge a reading habit. The ‘middling classes’, however, grew in size and prosperity over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There is some evidence, too, that social aspiration acted as a driver towards literacy. Houston (1985: 158–9) produces some evidence of social stigma attached to illiteracy even amongst the labouring population, but stresses that the development of literacy was first and foremost driven by practical needs rather than educational reforms or cultural aspiration. The religious and practical pressures on developing basic literacy in reading amongst segments, at least, of the Scottish population would have been directed primarily towards acquiring the norms of standard English, which by the eighteenth century was increasingly codified in grammar books, and its spelling largely fixed by Samuel Johnson’s influential Dictionary of the English Language (1755). While there would have been consciousness of the difference between local speech and the written norms, few literate Scots would have had access to the few surviving manuscripts and printed publications of the Older Scots period. When literature in Modern Scots began to be written and read more widely, therefore, the orthographic practices were a hybrid form, partly harking back to the Older Scots period and partly adapted from the norms of standard English. These practices were developed and the forms disseminated through a number of literary outlets, primarily broadsides, books, journals and newspapers. These publications, with some brief illustrative examples of the literary Scots they contained, are discussed below.

Broadsides From around the middle of the seventeenth century, there had been an expansion in the use made of broadsides, that is, single pages of printed matter, which originally contained public notices or official proclamations to be posted on walls. The uses made of these broadsides gradually expanded, so that, over the next two and a half centuries, the broadside was used to circulate ballads, stories, political and religious views, topical events such as criminal trials, and performance pieces such as the real or imagined speeches made upon the scaffold by condemned prisoners. Often the broadsides were composed in English, as in the following celebratory poem on the marriage of Charles Hope of Hopetoun to Henrietta Johnston, published in broadside form in 1699: IN Autumn when Seges decores the Fields, And Phæbus all plentiful Desires yeelds. These Creatures who did formerly bewail

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Spelling Scots Their hard Estate, sing now in Annandale, There’s Hope that Heavens will crown the year with good And Hoptoun blest with all manner of Food. Whilst Sun and Moon endure, so that there may Never be Want of Hope that Grace, decay. For ’tis by Hope, That Love and Charity Are still upheld, without it both do dye. May Hoptoun flourish still with Lady Hen-­ Rietta, and have a Stock of good Children, That thro’ all Ages, there may never fail The Memory of Hope and Annandale.2

Although the anonymous poet’s ambition is to honour the marriage between a gentleman and a lady, and the style is appropriately elevated, it is not a particularly polished piece, as the rhyme between ‘children’ and the first syllable of ‘Hen/rietta’ indicates. Even so, the only real trace of a Scotticism is the ­conservative form of the word decores, ‘adorns’, in the first line. A very different kind of broadside production dates from 1700; in this more scurrilous, anti-­Jacobite piece, a consistent form of Scots is used in suggestive doggerel that mocks the Prince of Wales, probably the exiled James II of Scotland, who seems to be encouraged to engage in various obscene acts. An extract reads: Poo her hinder End awaw Mon. Caust your Black Sawt int’ her Wem, Sir. Caust a Cogle intull her Wem. Tak the Lunt from your Bonnit. Stop it in her Moo. Grip your Lang Wond. Lug him owte. Hod him up, Sir.3

pull, away cast, salt, womb/belly cast, potful, belly take, match, bonnet mouth long wand/rod pull, out hold

Though the extract is short, it shows a range of orthographic practices, including the adoption of in contexts where there is vocalisation of a final lateral or fricative after Aitken’s Vowel 6: poo, ‘pull’, moo, ‘mouth’. The orthographic realisation of Vowel 6 as is now a variant of ; no diphthongisation is intended. There is an alternation between and for Vowel 12a, sawt, ‘salt’, hod, ‘hold’, again before a vocalised lateral consonant. The spelling caust, ‘cast’, suggests a merging of Vowel 4 with Vowel 12; in most areas this happened only in labial environments (see Aitken and Macafee 2002: 122–3). However, there is no indication of such a merger in the normal Modern Scots reflex of Vowel 4 /e/ in wame, ‘stomach’, represented here by wem. The spelling of wond suggests anglicisation: the Scots pronunciation of this lexical item would have been /wand/, with Vowel 17 after /w/, as in Scots pronunciations of watter, ‘water’. The suggests an attempt to indicate an anglicised pronunciation, with Vowel 18 /ɔ/ or Vowel 12 /ɑ/, depending on the regional variety. Note also Modern Scots short Vowel 19 rather than 15 before /l/ in intull, ‘into’, and



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the use of to indicate the unstressed vowel in the second syllable of bonnit, ‘bonnet’. This example, brief though it is, suggests a number of tendencies, one of which is that later Scots writers drew on a diverse set of inherited orthographic practices, deriving from both Older Scots and standard English, when representing Modern Scots, and that these practices were not necessarily consistent with one mode of pronouncing Scots. Rather, they were designed to give a visual sense of Scots, as well as some indication of how it might be articulated. This hybridity of orthographic practice is further discussed below. Even so, broadsides such as this, which draw upon Scots forms, are evidence of reciprocal commerce between orality and literacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Oral ballads and tales began to be recorded and disseminated in print, but equally squibs such as this, and other broadside material, may well have been composed for spoken performance in small groups. As Houston (1985: 199–200) reminds us: Illiteracy was not a total state. Nor did orality and literacy form separate cultural compartments. There were certainly practices which would help to bridge the gap between any distinctly ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ mental world which might have existed. One was the convention of reading aloud and thus sharing what was read. Alexander Somerville used to read to his fellow workers in the fields of Berwickshire Merse when he was only fourteen, and later averred that this was more entertaining and sociable than reading alone. In fact his own interest in reading had itself been inspired by tale-­telling. The person who introduced him to Burns could read, but preferred to recite aloud from memory when in company. The use of Scots in broadsides, particularly those featuring poems or songs, increased as literacy rates increased in the eighteenth century and as written Modern Scots became established as a viable literary medium. Broadsides were largely ephemeral, popular, cheap and – as we have seen – sometimes scurrilous productions. The status of literary Scots was elevated by its reappearance as a medium of expression in the more expensive and less transient medium of printed books.

Books Among the pivotal figures in the promotion of Modern Scots as a vehicle for a broader range of literary expression were the editors and printers James Watson (?1664–1722), who selected and published his three-­part Choice collection of comic and serious Scots poems in 1706, 1709 and 1711, and the Jacobite Thomas Ruddiman (1674–1757), who republished Gavin Douglas’s sixteenth-­century translation of Virgil’s Æneid (Eneados) in 1710, with a glossary to help his readers to understand the by now archaic vocabulary. Their archival and antiquarian activism influenced Allan Ramsay (1686–1758) in editing his anthologies of Scottish poetry, The Tea-­Table Miscellany and The Ever Green (1724–7). Ramsay also gathered his original poems into a collection, first published in book form in 1721, four years before the publication of his successful play The Gentle

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Shepherd. Some but by no means all of this material was in Scots. Indeed, with the exception of Ruddiman’s republication of Douglas’s Eneados, the miscellanies and anthologies largely mixed texts in English with those in Scots. Davis (2011: 68) comments on Watson’s strategy as a nationalist literary editor, and in particular the breaking of his prefatory promise to present poems in Broad Scots: Some poems are in ‘our own Native Scots Dialect,’ but many are written in standard English. The consequences of this unfulfilled promise are significant, however, as the selections Watson includes emphasize the heterogeneity of languages in Scotland. Wood reads Watson’s inclusion of sixteenth-­century English poems by Scottish writers as evidence of how ‘far the Anglicization of the written language had gone before James and his courtiers ever crossed the Border’ (Wood, 1: xxv). She suggests that Watson’s work further separates Scots from English, associating Scots with vigorous and bawdy poems and ‘homely proverbs,’ and English with ‘poems of gentility’ (Wood, 1: xxvii). But it is important that Watson includes both languages without privileging either. Indeed, his Collection calls into question what exactly constitutes ‘our own Native Scots Dialect.’ The extent of Watson’s presentation of material in native Scots can be seen in the following passage from one of the more ‘Scottish’ pieces included, Semple of Beltrees’ ‘The Blythsome Wedding’: Fy, let us all to the Briddel, for there will be Lilting there; For Jockie’s to be Married to Maggie, the Laſs with the Gauden-­hair. And there will be Lang-­kail and Pottage, and Bannocks of Barley-­Meal, And there will be good Salt-­herring, to reliſh a Kog of good Ale. Fy, let us all to the Briddel, for there will be Lilting there; For Jockie’s to be Married to Maggie, the Laſs with the Gauden-­hair. And there will be Sandie the Sutor, and Willie with the meikle mow And there will be Tom the Ploutter, and Andrew the Tinkler I trow. And there will be bow legged Robbie, with thumbless Katie’s Good-­man; And there will be blue cheeked Dallie, and Lawrie the Laird of the Land. Representations of Aitken’s Vowel 4 can be seen in the words kail, ‘cabbage’, and Laird, ‘lord’; Vowel 13a can be seen with the vocalised lateral consonant in gauden, ‘golden’. Where the author of the anonymous broadside discussed above has moo, ‘mouth’, Watson here has mow, rhyming with trow, ‘believe’: these



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spelling variants would all be pronounced with Vowel 6, /u/, in Modern Scots. The Scottish National Dictionary has trew, troo, tru(e) and tro(e) as variant spellings for trow, the grapheme being an archaic English form. For Vowel 2 in the common word meikle, ‘big’, Watson has the Older Scots ; however, for Vowel 7 in the expression good-­man, ‘husband’, he uses the spelling, as in standard English. Depending on the region, this vowel in Modern Scots would have had a variety of pronunciations: /ɪ, ø, e/. The use of initial in kog, ‘wooden vessel’, is a variant of (cf. the euphemistic use of coggle in the broadside). While Scots is evidently present, it is relatively thin, and opportunities to make the text ‘more Scottish’, for example by changing salt to saut or sawt (as in the broadside), are passed over. If Watson’s anthology thus ‘calls into question’ the nature of literary Scots, the next three centuries of literary production in Scotland will be a constant negotiation of its character. While documents in Scots are hard to come by in the later seventeenth century, from the eighteenth century onwards there is an exponential growth in the variety of literary forms in which Scots is used. The most notable success in the field of poetry and song was, of course, Robert Burns, whose ‘Kilmarnock Edition’, although it first appeared in a limited print run of just over 600 copies in 1786, elevated him to the status of celebrity. A preliminary comparison of the spelling practices in Ramsay’s Poems and Burns’s ‘Kilmarnock Edition’ is given in Corbett (2013). Burns later contributed greatly to the eighteenth-­century fashion for collecting, recording and often reworking songs and ballads that had hitherto only been transmitted orally. Burns contributed songs to the printed collections A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice (George Thomson) and The Scots Musical Museum (James Johnson). In drawing on oral and song culture, Burns was followed by James Hogg, a poet, song collector and novelist, and – most spectacularly – Sir Walter Scott, who also collected ballads and was a highly regarded poet in his own right until, in 1814, he anonymously published Waverley, a novel with a substantial Scots element. Anthologies of poetry of course continued to be published in book form, notably The Harp of Renfrewshire, edited by the poet and journalist William Motherwell in 1819, and The Harp of Caledonia, edited by John Struthers in 1821, right up to contemporary anthologies like The Smoky Smirr o Rain, edited by Matthew Fitt and James Robertson in 2003. However, the phenomenal critical and commercial success of the series of ‘Waverley novels’ that followed Scott’s best-­seller of 1814 opened a space for literary Scots in fiction as well as in poetry and song. These spaces were occupied over the next two centuries by writers as diverse as John Galt, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Alexander, James Bridie, J. M. Barrie, ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil Munro, James Robertson, Matthew Fitt and many others who are now less celebrated. One notable feature of the rise of Scots in fiction was the popularity of regional novels like William Alexander’s story of north-­eastern farm life, Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk (1873). Alexander follows the principle established by Walter Scott of composing the narrative passages of the novel largely in English, and reserving Scots mainly for the dialogue between rural or older characters. Within those constraints, though, Alexander’s Scots is dense and regionally distinctive, as can

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be seen in the following excerpt in which the main character, Johnny, or ‘Jock’, is entreated to drink a pint of ale by his well-­meaning friend: The jug was hardly half emptied. ‘But it’s terrible coorse,’ pleaded Jock, with a piteous and imploring look. ‘Coorse! awa’ wi’ ye, min. Gweed, clean saut water. Ye sud gae at it hardier, an’ ye wud never think aboot the taste o’ ’t. Come noo!’ Jock made another and not much more successful attempt. ‘Hoot, min, dinna spull the gweed, clean, halesome water — skowff’t oot!’ ‘Weel, but aw canna — it’ll gar me spew,’ said Jock, in a tone approaching the ‘greetin.’ ‘An’ altho’, fat maitter?’ argued his more experienced friend; ‘that’ll help to redd your stamack, at ony rate. Lat me see ye tak’ jist ae ither gweed waucht o’ ’t, and syne we’se be deein for a day till we see. But min’ ye it’s nae jeesty to tak’ owre little — speeshally to begin wi’.’ There are some features of the orthography that link this passage to the others already discussed. Aitken’s Vowel 12a is represented by saut (compare sawt in the broadside and salt in Watson’s Collection) and Vowel 4 is represented by in maitter, halesome, gae. Like in the broadside, Alexander opts to use the English digraph for coorse, ‘disagreeable, coarse’ (Vowel 6). What distinguishes this novel, however, is its use of identifiably northern forms, such as gweed, ‘good’, in which Vowel 7 is unrounded to /ɡwid/ (compare jeesty, a diminutive reflex of juist, ‘just, proper’), and the use of to represent /f/ in words like fat, ‘what’. The proximity of Alexander’s regional variety of literary Scots to other forms of Modern Scots orthography will be explored in more detail in Chapter 8. The popularity of Scots in fiction has never waned. Late in the ­nineteenth century the fashion for fiction in Scots was still visible enough to be satirised, in 1895, in a Punch magazine cartoon that showed a publisher rejecting a collection of short stories that was not ‘written in any unintelligible Scotch dialect’ (Nash 2007: 51). Nor was the success of novelistic Scots confined to the United Kingdom. In the American magazine Life on 14 January 1897, there is a further satire on J. M. Barrie, then known mainly for his kailyard novels on small-­town Scottish life, who was touring the east coast of the United States. Lampooning him as ‘Donald MacSlushey’, the Life correspondent suggests the craze for Scots had swept New York and Boston. ‘MacSlushey’ is presented as addressing an audience at Boston’s Music Hall on ‘The All-­Round Superiority of Scotland’: ‘Her [i.e. Scotland’s] language, if you can call it such, is the harshest that ever shattered the tympanum of man. Yet why, why, altho’ America, for instance is swamped beneath a tidal wave of Scotch – of Scotch authors, Scotch literature and dialect – why is it, I ask, that we never tire of it?’ At this point a voice from the rear of the hall answered: ‘But we do.’ The tastes, and indeed the forms of Scots that found their way between the covers of books, changed, but, opportunities for satire notwithstanding, throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-­first centuries literary Scots in its different



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forms has been a staple feature, without the orthography of Scots ever having been completely standardised.

Magazines and Journals Around the mid-­seventeenth century, printers begin to produce magazines and journals, containing poetry and then fiction with a significant Scots content. The Weekly Magazine, published by Walter Ruddiman, Thomas’s nephew, from 1768, avoided the stamp duty imposed on newspapers by the expedient of including poetry, including that of Robert Fergusson. Fergusson’s poetry in Scots made the transition from magazine to book form in 1773, just before his untimely death, and the book was later to influence the poetry of Burns. Ruddiman’s magazine venture heralds the later expansion of the periodical press, with the relauched Edinburgh Review and its later rival Blackwood’s Magazine ­dominating cultural debates in the nineteenth century. Although earlier incarnations of the Edinburgh Review were published in 1755–6 and 1773–6 (as the Edinburgh Magazine and Review), it was not until its relaunch in 1802 that it achieved and sustained its position as one of the foremost publications of its time. Published by Constable until 1929, it appeared quarterly, and quickly developed as a vocal supporter of the Whig party, a strongly Protestant political grouping that supported trade and political reform while opposing absolute monarchy and, broadly, the vested interests of the hereditary aristocracy. The opposition to the Whigs were the Tories, who found an erratic but brilliant mouthpiece in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, founded in 1817, initially edited by its founder, William Blackwood, but written largely by John Wilson (‘Christopher North’). Both the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine provided regular outlets for Scottish verse and prose by writers such as Sir Walter Scott, John Galt, James Hogg and John Wilson himself. Hogg and Wilson (in the parodic guises of ‘The Shepherd’ and ‘Christopher North’) appear in the Noctes Ambrosianae, a set of seventy-­one densely allusive dialogues and sketches published in Blackwood’s Magazine between 1822 and 1835 and later republished in book form. They are a rich source of literary Scots prose that achieved a wide circulation. In the following brief extract, the Shepherd and his crony, Tickler, discuss an article that appeared in Blackwood’s: Shepherd. Wha wrote yon article in the Magazine on Captain Cleeas and Jymnastics? Tickler. Jymnastics! — James, — if you love me — G hard. The other is the Cockney pronunciation. Shepherd. Weel, then, GGGhhymnastics! Wull that do? Tickler. I wrote the article. Shepherd. That’s a damned lee. It was naebody else but Mr North himsel. But what for didna he describe some o’ the fates o’ the laddies at the Edinburgh Military Academy, on the Saturday afore their vacanse? I never saw the match o’ yon! Tickler. What tricks did the imps perform? Shepherd. They werena tricks — they were fates. First, ane after anither took

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hand o’ a transverse bar o’ wud aboon their heads, and raised their chins ower’t by the power o’ their arms, wi’ a’ the ease and elegance in the warld. Every muscle, frae wrist to elbow, was seen doin its wark, aneath the arms o’ their flannel jackets. Then ane after anither mounted like so many squirrels up to anither transverse bar — (transverse means cross.) Tickler. Thank ye, James, — you are a glossarial Index. Part of the humour of this extract has Tickler, on the grounds of its Greek etymology, erroneously insisting on a hard initial /ɡ/ pronunciation for ‘gymnastics’, while disparaging the Shepherd’s /dʒ/ pronunciation, not as ‘Scots’ but as ‘Cockney’. Elsewhere the Shepherd’s speech is clearly marked as Scots. Wilson adopts the digraph to indicate Aitken’s Vowel 1 in the Shepherd’s conservative pronunciation of lee, ‘lie’, and the spelling is again used to represent Vowel 7 in aboon, ‘above’. The alternative development of Vowel 3 (Early Scots /ɛ:/) to give Modern Scots /i/ or /e/ allows the pun on fates, ‘feats’, and the short Vowel 17 is represented by the in warld, ‘world’, and wark, ‘work’. Again we see an alternation in the short Vowels 15 and 19: anither, ‘another’, and wull, ‘will’. Vowel 19 also crops up in the representation of wud, ‘wood’. These alternations are the result of different sets of sound changes: Johnston (1997a: 79) observes that begins to alternate with and before /l/ in the fifteenth century, which accounts for and some other variants. The spelling wud suggests the regular pronunciation of Vowel 19; elsewhere there are variants with Vowel 15, , from the fifteenth century on (Aitken and Macafee 2002: 98). Although not quite so dense as the dialogue in Alexander’s fiction, the Scots used in the Noctes must have posed a challenge to many of Wilson’s contemporary readers; however, by the second decade of the nineteenth century, there was clearly an audience sufficiently literate to rise to the challenge of reading his self-­referentially comic sketches on a regular basis.

Newspapers Broadsides, books and magazines were the main sources of written Scots until newspapers became cheap enough and regular enough to be accessible to a mass market on a weekly or daily basis (see Donaldson 1986, Harris 2007). The earlier newspapers shared some types of literary content with the magazines, sometimes in order to avoid stamp duty, a tax on newspapers that at its height amounted to fourpence per copy. Once stamp duty was finally repealed in 1855, many poets and writers of short and serialised fiction in Scots found a popular market, particularly in weekly newspapers. Among the writers who were particularly successful in Scots was W. D. Latto, whose ‘Tammas Bodkin’ stories were first published in the People’s Journal in the 1860s. Some of the most popular of these tales reappeared, sometimes in more diluted Scots, in book form.4 One of the distinctive features of this genre of literary Scots was that it was not confined to the dialogue; often a first-­person narrator shared his or her stories or point of view with a reader, who was also assumed to be primarily a Scots speaker, as in this excerpt from the book version of Tammas Bodkin: Swatches o’ Hodden-­Grey (1894).



The Development of Modern Scots Orthography

71

Noo, although history is silent on the subject, it’s no an unwarrantable stretch o’ imagination to conclude that a son or grandson o’ the Bodkin aboove mentioned crossed ower to ‘Caledonia stern an’ wild,’ as his forbears had dune to Ireland, an’ for a like purpose. Settlin’ himsel’ doon i’ the East Neuk o’ Fife, he there foondit the aunchent an’ honourable family o’ the Bodkins o’ Buttonhole, whaurof I, wi’ reverence be it spoken, am at the present day head-­bummer!   But after a’, what does it signifee what or wha your forbears were, gin sae be yer ain character an’ conduck ’ill thole creetical inspection? It’s self-­ evident that my ancestors, an’ every ither body’s ancestors, male an’ female, maun hae sprung frae the Garden o’ Eden. At a later date even they maun hae been borne on Noah’s beuks under some name or ither; under what parteek’lar name is a maitter o’ nae moment whatsomever. The question o’ supreme importance is not what were yer forbears? but, what are ye yersel’? As a certain poet remarks, — ‘Worth makes the man, the want of it the fellow, And all the rest is leather and prunella.’ The excerpt here presents to the reader some orthographic strategies comparable to those found in the passages discussed earlier. Here, we see the use of the digraph for Aitken’s Vowel 6, in noo, ‘now’, doon, ‘down’, and foondit, ‘founded’. Vowel 7 is represented by in dune, ‘done’. We can compare Latto’s decision with Watson’s to use to represent Vowel 7 in good-­man, ‘husband’, in the poem quoted above. Like Wilson, Latto uses to represent a conservative pronunciation of the final vowel in signifee, ‘signify’ (Vowel 1; compare lee, ‘lie’, above), and the same vowel is found in other French borrowings, such as creetical, ‘critical’, and parteek’lar, ‘particular’. In the latter word, the voiceless velar consonant is again represented by a /k/ (compare kog earlier) and an apostrophe indicates an elided vowel. The digraph crops up in neuk, ‘corner’, and beuks, ‘books’, suggesting that for Latto, like most Scots, Vowel 7 became /ju/ or /jʌ/ before an unvoiced velar consonant. The spelling in aunchent, ‘ancient’, is a regular Vowel 12 spelling, pronounced either /ɑ/ or /ɔ/. The same digraph is found in maun and whaurof; originally Vowel 4 in Older Scots man and quhar, after the labial consonant, this vowel merged with Vowel 12. Like William Alexander, Latto uses to indicate Vowel 4, when it was not followed by a labial consonant, as in maitter, ‘matter’, and nae, ‘no’. It is interesting to note that Latto does not take the opportunity to change the standard English spelling of head to indicate a Scottish pronunciation of Vowel 3, which by the time of Modern Scots had been raised to /i/ and was often spelled heid. The final two lines of poetry, quoted by Latto from Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’, remind us of the dangers of too closely identifying graphemic representations with particular phonemes. In the quotation, fellow rhymes with prunella, a dark silk fabric. The rhyme depends on the pronunciation fella, and perhaps the allusion is a gentle rebuke to those who might seek too regular a correspondence between spelling and sound. As noted in Chapter 1, sound-­ spelling c­orrespondence is only part of what an orthographic system does. Spellings also indicate the etymology of some words, and preserve the visual identity of certain morphemes that might be pronounced differently in different

72

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p­ honemic e­ nvironments (see Venezky 1999: 8–11). However, in the Modern Scots period, the mapping function of Scots orthography does become more salient as the wider readership of texts in Scots cannot necessarily be expected to be familiar with the local pronunciations being represented. Modern Scots writers have often therefore found themselves in the paradoxical position of drawing upon English orthographic resources to represent the sounds of Scots to a wide r­ eadership.

Mapping Modern Scots Orthography Kniezsa (1997: 40) suggests a set of diagnostic markers that in combination indicate the ‘Scottishness’ of an Older Scots text. In this section, we adapt her table to propose a provisional index of orthographic ‘Scottishness’ for Modern Scots. As Corbett (2013: 83–4) cautions, the notion of an empirical and objective orthographic index of ‘Scottishness’ is a problematical concept. A passage or an entire text might be marked as ‘Scottish’ not by the consistent use of a particular orthographic set of conventions but by the use of a single lexical item, like toom, ‘empty’, or decores, ‘adorns’. However, it is clear that the consistent use of a distinctive orthography is one way of marking a text as ‘Scottish’, and, furthermore, if a writer wishes to make a text accessible to a broader audience, he or she may choose mainly to use words that are cognate with English, but to spell them in accordance with the conventions of Scots. An examination of the passages by Wilson and Latto, in particular, suggest that their readability relies in part on their relative lexical thinness, with respect to a distinctively Scots vocabulary. The passage by Alexander is much denser in this respect. The table below (Table 4.1) indicates a provisional set of diagnostic markers for Modern Scots. It also suggests the hybridity of the orthographic system. It assumes that the Modern Scots authors of the eighteenth century onwards had some access to Older Scots spellings; certainly the antiquarians and editors like Thomas Ruddiman, James Watson and Allan Ramsay knew of earlier manuscript collections of texts in Older Scots, and updated them for a modern audience in their republications and anthologies. Some spelling conventions, then, are ­indicated as an ‘Older Scots residue’. The adaptation of standard English orthography to represent Scottish pronunciations causes a more delicate problem. As we have seen, the adoption of the digraph to represent Aitken’s Vowel 7 (in words like good, moon, soon as opposed to, say, gude/guid, mune/muin, sune/suin or their alternatives) can be considered an instance of anglicisation. However, the adoption of the same digraph to indicate Vowel 6 in words like doon, ‘down’, moo, ‘mouth’, or oor, ‘hour’, might be considered ‘Innovative Scots’. As noted above, what might be considered ‘Innovative Scots’ might often be an adaptation of standard English orthography to represent a local Scots pronunciation to a wider readership. Table 4.1 indicates those features that are largely associated with the Modern Scots period and so can be considered ‘Innovative Scots’ orthographical features. The table also indicates standard English forms, since Modern Scots writers also drew upon those as spelling variants. As the table indicates, most graphemes and digraphs that indicate Modern Scots belong to the category of vowels; only a few



The Development of Modern Scots Orthography

73

TABLE 4.1:  Modern Scots vowels: diagnostic variants Aitken’s Vowel Number

Modern Scots Phoneme(s)

 1

aˑe (SVLR long) iCe ǝi (SVLR short) yCe, y# i eCe ie#

 2

Older Scots Residue

Innovative Scots

Standard Illustrative English Variants

ee

iCe y# eCe ee y# ea

 3

i e

eCe ei

 4

e

aCe ai+rC ay#

eCe a+rC ey#

 5

o

oCe oa

 6

u

o, oCe oi oo# ou, ow

oo

ow u oo

 6a

ʌl

ul(l)

u’, oo’

ull, ool

 7

ø: (SVLR-­long) ø (SVLR-­short) e i ɪ

uCe, eu, ui oCe, oi

oo, ee, ai, i

oo, u

 8

ai, ei

o, ow

 8a  9

eǝ e(:) ǝi# oe

ay#, ey# oi, oy

ay# oi, oy

10

ǝi (ɛi, ʌi)

y, yCe

11 12

i# ɑ: (a:) ɔ:

Merged with vowel 2 au au+nasal

12a

al

al, au

iCe

a’

oi

aCe aw a+nasal ol al

tyme, time why grene, green here bludie, bloody hede, heid, heed, head dede, deid, deed, dead dreid, dreed, dread stane, stone cairt, card/cart airm, arm thay, they hoip, hope gloming, gloaming throte, throat doun, doon, down allou, alloo, allow soupill, supple swoun, swoon pu’, poo’, pull wu’, woo’, wool cruke, crook gude, guid, good abune, abuin, abinn, aboon butes, buits, bitts, boots truith, trooth, truth pure, puir, pair, peer, poor ain, own baith, both wey, way noise boy pynt, point jyne, join vice, voice sauf, safe hauk, hawk chaumer, chamber daunger, danger auld, old hald, hauld, ha’d, hold saumon, salmon saut, sa’t, salt

74

Spelling Scots TABLE 4.1: (continued)

Aitken’s Vowel Number

Modern Scots Phoneme(s)

Older Scots Residue

Innovative Scots

13

ʌu

ow

14a

iu (ɪu) (j)u:

eu, ew

o o’ ou, oo

14b 15

(j)ʌu ɪ (ɛ̈:)

ew i

eau i, ei

16

ɛ

e

i, a

17

a (ɑ)

a

aCe oCe,oo e,ea

18

o (ɔ)

o

au ou a

19

ʌ /i/ in Modern Scots), but in some cases it is lowered to Vowel 15 (/ɪ/ in Modern Scots). The former has been chosen here. Vowel

Wordlist variants

English equivalent

Vowel 1

appeteet bedeen chiel, chield cleemat cleemax dee deece dyvour feenal feend generaleeze hee, heich hielan, heelan intyre inveet lee leebrary meeser obleege preceese preevat receet sacrifeece seelent serpenteezin teegger tyraneeze veece vreet ainybody, onybody babby bailie bairnie bardy bluidie, bluidy bodie bogy bonie, bonnie, bonny bookie cadie canty

appetite quickly fellow climate climax die dice debtor final find generalise high highland entire invite lie library miser oblige precise private recite sacrifice silent serpentising tiger tyrannise vice write anybody baby baillie child bard bloody person tobacco lovely book caddy cheerful

Final unstressed vowel:



Wordlists Used in Cluster Analyses 

Final unstressed vowel:

Vowel 2

cheelie county crackie cuddie drappie drowsie duddie fuilzie gadie grippie gullie hastie kelpie leddy mannie moodie naebody oorie pawkie randie reekie, reikie smiddie, smiddy soddy steddy stumpie tappytoorie toddy tweedie uncannie unchancie weanie weerie wifie wordie abreid beek beenge beild breeks breist cleik creel deeth dreich dreid ee

fellow county stool mare drop drowsy clothes filth gaudy miserly gull hasty water demon lady man moody nobody dismal cunning randy smoky smithy soda steady stumpy peaked glass of spirits tweedy uncanny ill-­omened child weary wifey worthy open bask cringe shelter trousers breast lively wicker basket death dismal dread eye

149

150 Vowel 2

Vowel 3

Spelling Scots eild fleetch freen, friendly gleids grein jee jeely jeesty keek leet leid screich screid, skreed sheil, shiel speer speil spreid, spreed steep steeve streek threed treid weell weet bleeze breenge breid cleed creish, creeshy deid, deidly heeld heid, hede insteid neibor, neibour neif, neive, neivefu’ peet pinheid pleesant pleesure rede, reid skeigh speer, speir sweir theets wede weirin

age flatter friend, friendly hot coals green displace, displaced jelly laughing matter peek list tongue screech written matter hut ask spell spread step steep stretch thread tread well wet blaze rush bread clothe grease, greasy dead, deadly held head instead neighbour fist, fistful peat pinhead pleasant pleasure red polishing wheel ask reluctant plough-­ropes dress wearing

Vowel 6

Wordlists Used in Cluster Analyses  aboot clood cloot, clootie croose croud croun doot, dootfu’, dootless drouth flooer fouth goot hereaboot lood, loodly misdoot mooth, mootin oot ootby ootgang ootlive ootshine ootsoar ootstare ootward ootwith ploom pooder, poother pooer pootry prooder shooder souter stoot thoom, thoomb troot withoot

about cloud cloth smug crowd crown doubt, doubtful, doubtless thirst flower plenty gout hereabout loud, loudly misdoubt mouth, mouthing out outby exit outlive outshine outsoar outstare outward outwith plum powder power poultry prouder shoulder cobbler stout thumb trout without

151

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Purves, D. (1979), ‘Scots orthography’, Scottish Literary Journal, Supplement 9, 62–76. Purves, D. (1997), The Way Forward for the Scots Language, Peterhead: Scottish Centre for Economic and Social Research. Purves, D. (2002), A Scots Grammar: Scots Grammar and Usage, 2nd edn, Edinburgh: Saltire Society. Ramsay, A. (1721), Poems, Edinburgh: Thomas Ruddiman. Rennie, S. (2012a), Jamieson’s Dictionary of Scots: The Story of the First Historical Dictionary of the Scots Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rennie, S. (2012b), ‘Jamieson and the nineteenth century’, in Macleod and McClure (eds), 60–84. Richardson, M. (1980), ‘Henry V, the English chancery, and chancery English’, Speculum, 55 (4), 726–50. Robertson, J. (2013), ‘Pittin the word(s) oot: The Itchy Coo experience of publishing in Scots in the twenty-­first century’, in Kirk and Macleod (eds), 103–24. Robertson, J. L. (1886), Horace in Homespun, Edinburgh: William Paterson. Robinson, P. (1997), Ulster-­Scots: A Grammar of the Traditional Written and Spoken Language, Belfast: The Ullans Press. Salmon, V. (1999), ‘Orthography and punctuation’, in R. Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language Vol. 3: 1476–1776, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 13–55. Samuels, M. L. (1968), ‘Some applications of Middle English dialectology’, in R. Lass (ed.), Approaches to Historical Linguistics: An Anthology, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 411–15. Schlagal, B. (2002), ‘Classroom spelling instruction: History, research, and practice’, Literacy Research and Instruction, 42 (1), 44–57. Scots Language Society (1985), ‘Spelling recommendations’, Lallans, 24, 18–19. Scots Language Society and the Scots Language Resource Centre (1996), Spellin Collogue, Perth: Scots Language Resource Centre. Scragg, D. G. (1974), A History of English Spelling, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sebba, M. (2007), Spelling and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, J. J. (2007), Sound Change and the History of English, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, J. J. (2010), ‘Scots and English in the letters of John Knox’, in K. McGinley and N. Royan (eds), The Apparelling of Truth: Literature and Literary Culture in the Reign of James VI: A Festschrift for Roderick J. Lyall, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Smith, J. J. (2012), Older Scots: A Linguistic Reader, Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society. Stevenson, R. L. (1887), Underwoods, London: Chatto and Windus. Stirling, A. (1994), ‘On a standardised spelling for Scots’, Scottish Language, 13, 88–93.

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Tolkien, J. R. R. (1934), ‘Chaucer as a philologist: The Reeve’s Tale’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 33 (1), 1–70. Upward, C., and G. Davidson (2011), The History of English Spelling, Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell. Venezky, R. L. (1967), ‘English orthography: Its graphical structure and its relation to sound’, Reading Research Quarterly, 2 (3), 75–105. Venezky, R. L. (1970), The Structure of English Orthography, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Venezky, R. L. (1999), The American Way of Spelling: The Structure and Origins of American English Orthography, New York and London: Guilford Press. Walker, J. (1791), A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson and T. Cadell. Wells, R. A. (1973), Dictionaries and the Authoritarian Tradition: Study in English Usage and Lexicography, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Wilson, J. (1915), Lowland Scotch, as Spoken in the Lower Strathearn District of Perthshire, London: Oxford University Press. Wilson, J. (1923), The Dialect of Robert Burns as Spoken in Central Ayrshire, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, J. (1926), The Dialects of Central Scotland, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, H. H. (ed.) (1977 and 1991), James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems, 2 vols, Aberdeen: Scottish Text Society.

Index

e

Abercrombie, D., 2 Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, 7, 17–18, 34 Agutter, A., 1, 19 Aitken, A. J., 1, 4, 8, 11, 14, 18–19, 39, 41, 43–5, 48, 50–1, 56–7, 70, 74, 83, 85, 143 Aitken’s Law see Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR) Aitken’s Vowel Numbering System, 41–57, 64–5, 66–8, 70–2, 93, 95, 105, 109–10, 112–26, 148–51 Alexander, W., 14, 67–8, 70–2, 105, 127–38 Allan, A., 91 allograph, 2–3, 5, 22, 24, 25–6, 27 allophone, 34, 50 Anderson, W., 58, 144 apostrophe, 19–20, 90 Arnott, P., 141 Association for Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS), 93 Bald, M. A., 60 Bannatyne Manuscript, 18 Barbour, J., 17, 52–3 Barke, J., 94 Barrie, J. M., 67, 68 basal speller, 144 Bassandyne, T., 8–10, 24 Baxter, C., 61 Beal, J., 76, 80 Bell, J. J., 14, 127–38 binary occurrence, 106 Blackhall, S., 141, 145 Blackwood, W., 69 Boucekinne, R., 77–8 Broons, The, 90

Brown, G. D., 105, 127–38 Burns, R., 5, 12, 14, 51, 61, 65, 67, 69, 82, 84, 93–5, 111–26 Caxton, W., 25, 34 Chancery English, 77 Chancery Standard, 77 Chaucer, W., 47–8, 59 Cheke, J., 9 code noise, 6 Collier, J., 140 Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing 1700–1945 (CMSW), 2, 14, 75, 78, 104–5, 116, 127 Craigie, W., 85 Croix, D., 77–8 Crystal, D., 1, 143 Dareau, M. G., 84–5 Darien scheme, 61 David, I., 16 Davidson, G., 1, 13 Davis, L., 66 De Luca, C., 141 Defoe, D., 143 developmental word study, 144 Devitt, A., 57 diachronic, 4 diatopic, 4 Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), 2, 20, 25–6, 31, 43, 53–4, 80–1, 85–6 Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL), 2, 4, 5, 20, 45, 79, 85–6 Dixon, J. M., 51 Donaldson, W., 70 Dossena, M., 58, 61, 81 Douglas, G., 17–18, 59, 65–6, 83–5

160

Spelling Scots

Douglas, S., 76–7, 81–3 Drummond of Hawthornden, W., 60 Dunbar, W., 59 Durie, B., 60 Eagle, A., 1, 91–3 Ellis, A., 82 Elphinston, J., 81–2 English Dialect Dictionary, 85 Epstein, R., 47 Essential Scots Dictionary, 86, 95, 142 Eustace, S., 82 eye dialect, 6 Fergusson, R., 14, 69, 111–26 figura, 2 Fitt, M., 67, 90–1 frequency, 99, 106, 132 Galt, J., 67, 69, 87 Gamerschlag, K., 87 Gardner, A., 116 Gibbon, L. G., 67 Gil, A., 47–8 Glorious Revolution, 61 Görlach, M., 60 Graham of Claverhouse, J., 61 Grant, W., 51 graphotactics, 3 Great Vowel Shift (GVS), 7–8, 40, 42–56 Grieve, C. M. see MacDiarmid, H. Grieve, D., 89 Haliburton, H., 89, 90, 111–26 Harris, B., 70 Hart, A., 52–3 Hart, J., 9 Hay, G., 56 Hay, J. M., 105, 127–38 Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots, 57 Henryson, R., 8–10, 13, 17, 24, 59 Herbert, W. N., 141 Herrero Valeiro, M., 140 Hickey, R., 76 Hogg, J., 14, 67, 69–70, 105, 111–38 Hoover, D., 101 Hope of Hopetoun, C., 63–4 Horobin, S., 77, 83 Houston, R., 62–3, 65 Hoyer, A., 90 Hutcheson, F., 16 incidental spelling acquisition, 144–5 Itchy Coo, 90–1, 145

Jaffe, A., 139 James VI, 47, 59–60 James VII & II, 61, 64 Jamieson, J., 84–5 Johnson, J., 67 Johnson, S., 63, 77, 83–4, 86 Johnston, H., 63–4 Johnston, P., 16, 27, 32–3, 35–6, 39, 43 Johnstone, R., 141 Jones, C., 1, 14, 76–81 Kanani, D., 141 Kay, C., 83 Kirk, J. M., 141 Kniesza, V., 1, 13, 19, 24–5, 28–32, 37, 45, 60, 72 Knox, J., 34, 59–60 Krapp, G. P., 6 Lallans, 89–90 Lallans Society see Scots Language Society Lass, R., 35, 39, 43, 52 Latto, W. D., 70–2, 140 Law, J., 95, 142, 144 Leonard, T., 6, 90 litera, 2 Lochhead, L., 141 Lorimer, W., 93 Lovie, R., 91, 93 Lyndsay, D., 59 Macafee, C., 1, 4, 14, 19, 23, 39, 42, 44–5, 48, 50–1, 64, 70, 90 McArthur, T., 93–5 Macaulay, R. K. S., 6 McClure, J. D., 7, 59, 76, 78, 81, 83–4, 91–2, 94–5, 115, 124 MacDiarmid, H., 14, 67, 89–90, 112–26 McGugan, I., 141–2 McIntosh, A., 20 Mackay, M. A., 83 Mackie, A., 91–3 McLennan, R., 145 MacLeod, I., 83 McPake, J., 141 MacQueen, L. E. C., 11 Maitland, R., 45 Maitland Folio, 18 Maitland Quarto, 18 Makars Club, 91 Mapstone, S., 17–18 markers, 4 maximalist spelling reform, 93–5, 142 Melville, J., 60

Index Meurman-Solin, A., 57–8, 60 Miethaner, U., 140 Millar, R. M., 4, 27, 47 Milne, C., 144 minim, 19, 42 minimalist spelling reform, 93–5, 142 Montgomery, A., 45 Montgomery, M., 61 Mopsae, 48 morphology, 4–5, 18 Motherwell, W., 67 Mulcaster, R., 7, 9, 83 multivariate analysis, 103–4, 108 Munro, N., 67 Murray, J. A. H., 36, 50, 78, 82–3, 85 Nash, A., 68 Nicol, W., 61 nomen, 2 Norman Conquest, 17, 35 Oor Wullie, 90 palaeotype, 82–3 Peeters, D., 77–8 Perry, W., 77–82 Philp, G., 91, 93 phoneme, 3, 18–19, 23 Pope, A., 71 potestas, 2, 23 principle components analysis (PCA), 103–5, 107, 132, 135, 138 printing, 5–6, 9, 25, 37, 59, 87–8 Purves, D., 91–3 Ramsay, A., 14, 65–7, 72, 83–4, 86–7, 111–26 Ramsay, J., 52–3 RapidMiner, 105–7 raw occurrence, 99 Records of the Parliaments of Scotland, 10–11, 60 Reformation, 10, 59–60 relational units, 7–8, 18–19 Rennie, S., 83–4 reverse spellings, 4 Richardson, C., 84 Richardson, M., 77 Robertson, J., 67, 90–1, 141 Robertson, J. L. see Haliburton, H. Robinson, P., 91–3 Roman alphabet, 16, 18–19, 35, 82, 146 Ruddiman, T., 65–6, 69, 72, 83–4 Ruddiman, W., 69 runes, 5, 16

161

Salmon, V., 1, 9, 143 Samuels, M. L., 77 Schlagal, B., 144–5 Scot, A., 81 Scots Language Centre, 95, 142, 144 Scots Language Resource Centre see Scots Language Centre Scots Language Society, 90–1, 93, 95, 142, 144 Scots School Dictionary see Essential Scots Dictionary Scott, W., 67, 69, 87 Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech, 75, 144 Scottish Dialects Committee, 85 Scottish National Dictionary (SND), 2, 35, 67, 80–1, 85–7 Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR), 40, 48–51 Scragg, D., 1, 7, 9, 11, 13, 22 Sebba, M., 139–40 semi-vowel, 20 Semple of Beltrees, R., 66–7 Shakespeare, W., 9–11 Sheridan, T., 76–7 Sinclair, H., 18 Skene, J., 26, 84–5 Smith, J. J., 1, 4–5, 8–9, 14, 24, 34, 37, 39, 42, 45, 47–8, 52–3, 59–60 Spellin Collogue, 95, 142 Stevenson, R. L., 14, 61, 67, 87–90, 93, 105, 127–38 Stirling, A., 91, 93 Stoker, B., 140 Struthers, J., 67 Stuart, J. E., 61 Style Sheet, 90, 93 Sunday Post, The, 90 syllable, 20–1 term frequency, 106 term frequency-inverted document frequency (TF-IDF), 106, 121, 130, 135 term occurrence, 106 Thom, W., 13, 111–26 Thomson, G., 67 Treaty of Union, 11–12, 14, 61–2, 140 Trench, R. C., 64 Twain, M., 140 Union of the Crowns, 10, 60, 62 Upward, C., 1, 13 Venezky, R. L., 1–4, 7, 13, 21, 24–5, 27, 31, 35, 172

162 Waldegrave, R., 26 Walker, J., 80–1 Watson, J., 65–8, 71–2 Wauchope, J., 60–1 Weber, H., 87 Wells, R. A., 84 Wikipedia in Scots, 142

Spelling Scots William of Orange, 61 Wilson, James, 82 Wilson, John, 14, 69–72, 105, 127–38 Wilson, R., 141 Wright, J., 85 Young, D., 93