Interesting side note. I am not sure how much credit I give it, but some linguists are starting to think that "Scots" is not a dialect of English. That they both branched off of the original Old German trunk language at about the same point in time. The reason given is the marked vocabulary differences. Too many words are totally different they think to be accounted for by local additions and mutations. Anyone heard any recent information on this? R -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Norman Tulloch Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 1:55 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ORCADIA] BERE =BYGG Royce Perry wrote: > I thought translating Burns to "English",,especially modern English was akin > to treason? Perhaps even a hanging offence. Most admit it takes a bit of > close reading to get at the meaning though. > R Well, the translation certainly is a pretty lukewarm, wishy-washy, dishwatery kind of thing, but even Scots need to have some of Burns's language translated. Of course, too, Burns was writing in the dialect of a particular part of Scotland; I don't think his contemporaries from, say, Orkney or Aberdeenshire would have found his writing easy to understand - and for Gaelic speakers it might as well have been in Chinese. The translation's a poor thing but there's no shame in having to make use of it! Norman T. ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

I believe that the "dialect vs. language" issue depends more on politics than on purely linguistic factors. F.ex. Swedish consists of dialects that have a different background like English&Scots. Whether it should be recognized to be dialects of the same language or different languages doesn't necessarily rely upon the historical origin. By the political factor I mean that one dialect is recognized like the dominating one, the language of the ruling class, while people who talk other dialects/small languages are supposed to obey and use it in official corresponding, press etc. In other words, if you allow each part of Sweden grow their own dialect and use it instead of "Queen's Swedish" the situation will probably result in similar level of differentiation like between Scots and English. BTW, are there any places on the web where Orcadian dialect (of Scots) is used? Andrei 2007/9/4, Royce Perry <[email protected]>: > > Interesting side note. I am not sure how much credit I give it, but some > linguists are starting to think that "Scots" is not a dialect of English. > That they both branched off of the original Old German trunk language at > about the same point in time. The reason given is the marked vocabulary > differences. Too many words are totally different they think to be > accounted for by local additions and mutations. Anyone heard any recent > information on this? > R > > >