Критика Оксфордского словаря за подмену шотландского языка английским

THE Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has delegitimised the Scots language by adding several new “Scottish” words. While English and Scots are sister languages characterised by mutual intelligibility, they are still very much separate languages with their own grammar, syntax and words. But decades of cultural oppression persist and Scots remains reduced to either slang, or, in this case, an offshoot of English. One of the recently added Scots words is “scaffie”, meaning “raggedy”. But writing as a Scots language author who spent nine years living in England, I never once heard an English-only speaker say scaffie (also spelled as scaffy). The other recent additions to the English dictionary – including “loup” and “gowp” – are even worse. READ MORE: Bòrd na Gàidhlig invites Reform for talks after attack on Gaelic language Fiona McPherson, the Scottish executive editor at the OED, said: “It’s always special when I get to work on Scottish words, and those included in this update of the OED are evocative and familiar. “While new to the OED, [others] have long established histories. Loup and gowp are found as early as the 16th and 18th centuries respectively, meaning ‘of the heart, blood: to beat or pulse rapidly or strongly’. The later sense of ‘to throb or ache with a pulsating pain’ has also been included.” There are many things wrong with this statement. The most glaring being that the dictionary’s Scottish executive editor chose to describe these words as Scottish and not examples of the Scots language – a year on from Scots receiving legal recognition and protection for the first time in history with the Scottish Languages Act. This emphasises how far we still have to go when it comes to having Scots recognised as a leid. Especially as it has legal recognition by Unesco since 2009 and the European Charter for Minority Languages since 2001. According to the OED, for a word to be included, its development needs to be researched using sources including “newspaper archives, online forums, academic studies, magazines, law tracts, recipe books, or social media for published evidence of the word”. But if the new additions are anything to go by, the Scots origins of these words have been ignored and/or reduced. While languages mix and evolve over time and a lot of words are “loaned” from one leid to another, their origins need to be acknowledged and respected, especially by an institution with as much linguistic respect as the OED. This is not the first time that this has happened. Last year, another set of “Scottish” words were added to the dictionary, including “shoggly”, which is a word that, once again, in the almost decade I lived in England, I never once heard an English-only speaker use. To make matters worse, the new additions appear to have set a standard for a long-running linguistic debate in Aberdeenshire with the inclusion of the word “rowie”. This savoury north-east food has long been the subject of debate amongst locals about whether it should be called a “rowie” or a “buttery”. Standardising a Scots word like this, or at least attempting to, is a decision that should not be made by an English dictionary, especially as the “ie” suffix is so commonly used in Scots words to replace the English “y” sound. READ MORE: Watch Scots campaigner in moving tribute to 'multinational Scotland' The problem can be best summed up by the word jobbie. It is listed as meaning an object by the OED – and faeces. But as every Scot knows, it universally means poo north of the Border. However, this is not common knowledge among English speakers. I was told anecdotally that an English woman was once tricked into requesting a “battered jobby” from a Scottish chippy after being told that it meant “sausage”. The English dictionary needs to acknowledge the Scots words it has included as Scots words – not simply Scottish ones. And in a lot of cases, it does not need to attempt to claim Scots words as its own, especially when they are not commonly used in English vocabularies. Scots is an extensive language in its own right and it deserves as much legitimacy and respect as any other leid, such as French and Latin, which, in my experience, are almost always acknowledged as languages when loan words such as “cliché” are included by English dictionaries.