GIE’S ME A SAIR HEID
One of the ways in which Scotland is kept away from itself is language.
From day one we are taught that sentences like the title of this article are vulgar. I used that particular sentence because of something I remember very clearly from primary school.
My friend came in late one morning. The teacher asked him where he had been and he replied that he had a ’sair heid’.
He was then ridiculed in front of the class for saying it in this way. It was all quite vicious too.
That little display taught me a lot when I was old enough to think about it properly [we were only 7 at the time].
We are always told that the language of Scots is nothing other than a bastardisation of English, which simply isn’t true.
I have a friend in Ireland who teaches Scots as a language to kids. Yes, you read correctly. That is in Ireland, in Scotland we are still told it is wrong. We are told to mend our pronunciation and speak in the ‘queen’s english’.
F*ck that.
We need a formulation of the Scots language. There are dictionaries and so on but original Scots is probably more different from English than Italian is from Spanish [that is the opinion of two linguists I spoke to] and we need to formulate and teach it.
I know that this could lead to arguments about which dialect is correct and so on. I know that this could lead eventually to the same kind of arguments as the one I have just said about Scots/English but it needs to be done for our independence. Very much the same thing happened in Ireland when they were trying to formulate Irish for teaching in schools and it hasn’t done them any harm.
We need to do it.
“Language is memory and metaphor.”
Storm Jamieson
But what does it mean?
“My friend came in late one morning. The teacher asked him where he had been and he replied that he had a ’sair heid’.
He was then ridiculed in front of the class for saying it in this way. It was all quite vicious too.”
I have many similar memories. In primary school we were told that our mother tongue was the language of the gutter – imagine telling children that?
Scot’s has no orthography. It’s like my online name -scunnert. Many Scots think it should be spelt scunnered. In fact in old Scots it would have been spelt “scunnerit” as “it” was the Scottish equivalent of the English “ed” ending. And yes I have had conversations with students of the Scots language who have pointed out the divisive potential of developing an orthography for the language. But like you see it as necessary never-the-less.
Good post, Michael.
Two things need to happen. The Scottish Govt needs to get involved to:
1) Create a Scottish Academy (a l’Acadamie Francaise) to standardise the spelling. Govt involvement also gives the language status.
2) Sponsor the creation of a body of literature in the language.
The model we need to use is what Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire did c.1230 in Sicily – an area covering most of Southern Italy at the time – to raise the Italian vernacular up to the status of a language. The historian T.C Van Cleve saw this as:
“The beginning of a literary tradition which revealed its full potentialities in the poetry of Dante and Petrarch when they perfected the volgare as the true medium for poetic expression in their native land.”
The ’scuola Siciliana’ that Frederick formed also happened to invent a new literary form called a sonnet.
in other words, it’s been done before.
Scotland would then have the rich linguistic heritage of two languages – Scots and Gaelic.
The trick is not to favour one over the other, but to teach the kids both, plus English as the international lingua franca.
If the Swiss, Norwegians, and Dutch can manage three languages, so can we.
I am very interested in scotland in general for a weird reason.
I’m sicilian and my last name is Barone.
On my father’s side, everybody is really fair,blue eyes and so on :unusual thing for sicilians.
At first we all thought because of the Norman invasion we had, but then,my cousin,who lives in canada,searched the origin of our last name and he discovered that our last name had originated in scotland!
The paper stated that,the baron title first originated in Scotland in the 17th century.But my cousin decided to look exactly for an ancestor with the same name of my grandfather’s:john.
It came out that there are proofs of a scottish john baron going to naples then moving to Palermo in 1840,he had the title of” barone del grano”;
I don’t remember if it was the same one or another :john baron found in modica( i know that my small town in the past after it had been destroyed by the saracens was populated by people from modica);of course the last name was italianised into barone and in the past i didn’t understand why these scottish barons had come to sicily and therefore be my ancestors.
When I started preparing my thesis though,which is based on the translation of 19th century letters from english to italian,letters written from the administrators of the Duchy of Bronte to the brother of horatio nelson his heir-having the latter received the duchy of bronte as a gift from king ferdinand of naples for having defeated napoleon in the battle of abukir.
Bronte,next to catania is in sicily;Palermo at the time belonged to the “kingdom of the 2 sicilies” an was the place where the king of naples escaped when the french entered in naples after the french revolution,in 1794.
I studied that Nelson protected the king and queen going to palermo with them and had english and irish men after him.palermo,messina,taormina were inhabited by british both of noble and humble origin.
There.So maybe of the king’s men who stayed in Sicily,someone was scottish(one of nelson’s ships was guided by a certain keith (whose last name i don’t recall) was scottish.
Later on the feudal rights were destroyed in Sicily and I guess whoever it was lost its power and lost all his land and became a simple pesant.
my father, or m aunt, recalls my grandfather being very scared at the visit by one of the king’s supervisors reclaming the fee-which was to be payed in nature to the king that is with corn.my great grandfather on the other hand -and i’m talking before 1896, was a distinguished man who went hunting,so probably he was the last surviver of an upper class.
Another interesting thing is that in the family stem there is a golden corn field with a blue sky with white flowers….however,i never could have come up to this conclusion if it weren’t for my thesis,i always liked history because my father inspired me,i guess he was obsessed too with his origins,obsession that he trasmitted to me,it’s amazing who far people can go for survival,the interest of what we found relies in the fact that the origin of the country(if it’s true)-SCotland is totally different culturally(alas!) and far away from the one we live in now-sicily.
i probably would be better off as a scottish citizen than a sicilian one ,because it looks like that feudalism after all hasn’t been abolished,only that we are on the other side now.
i was right:it means “gives me a headache”,right? i thought it meant “it makes me sad”,but i went close
boy i love this stuff…
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Language should be decided on a national level, through referendum.
In terms of commerce, English would make more sense.
Aye and that includes a’tongues, dinna nae myne Doric!