Re: Literary phonetic alphabet

John Atkinson wrote:
Iain (in sci.lang):
You mean that by using English spelling by default, but
re-spelling those uniquely Scottish pronunciations, one is making a
gesture that identifies Scots as English, as opposed to "The Scots
Language"?

No, Iain, I don't think that was their intention. I think the
"literary Scots" enthusiasts were, and are, extremely keen to have
people treat Scots as a separate language. However, they have all
been educated in standard written English -- and for most of them
Scottish English is their first language, and Scots only their second
-- and that's the reason they tend to use ordinary English spellings,
especially for those words that are hardly ever used by the (mostly
rural) speakers of "pure" Scots.

I don't think that's really the heart of the problem. The fact is that
Scots and English have the same origin, so quite naturally their
vocabulary is much the same; but English underwent the GVS, whereas
Scots's vowels have evolved in their own way, and the result is that
many words which are spelled the same are pronounced quite differently -
whereas others have a historically justified different spelling. The
result is that Scots looks like english with a couple of different words
- but try and apply the same reasoning to french, what do you get? The
essential difference between Scots and french is that most people don't
expect french words to be pronouced the same as english (cf. point).
--
António Marques
.

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