On Wed, 2011-09-28 at 13:53 +0100, Harry Burt wrote:
On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 1:45 PM, HJ Mitchell hjmitchell@ymail.com wrote:
The same could be said of Welsh, or Latin, or a handful of other languages with a dedicated Wikipedia. I'm on the fence as to the usefulness of these projects, but I thought I'd just point out that there are a few of them. ;)
Harry (HJ Mitchell)
Oh, sure. But Scots is the most marginal case of the lot, I think, which is why I was reminded of it by the original post.
I'm going to chime in here onHarry's post, as-opposed to getting further down the rabbit hole on this discussion.
I live in Edinburgh. I am surrounded by people who speak Scots. They don't even know they do so. If you mention Scots as a language to them, they *might* think of the poetry of Rabbie Burns. If they're smart, they may say they speak a Scottish dialect of English.
Personally, I would say the difference between Scots and British English is more than the difference between Brit.Eng and U.S.Eng, but less than the difference back to Shakespearean English.
I'd go as far as saying you can only call it a distinct language if you're one of the people south of the border who demanded subtitles for Rab C. Nesbitt.
Whether or not the sco language code is justified, is a point I'll defer to linguists on. As I say, Burns is the best-known example of it, and I've no passion to glorify the poetic musings of an ex-tax collector.
Brian McNeil.